At least partially it seems like part of the benefit of the system forces you to look at and confront things that you’ve been trying to avoid.
Definitely agree with this.
In my own life and also in my work as a procrastination coach, I’ve found these sorts of methods that through brute force cause you to have to look at things you’re avoiding often have a shelf-life. Eventually, it seems like people’s avoidance mechanisms reassert themselves through meta-avoidance like avoiding using the technique, or avoiding adding certain items to your list.
I’m curious how long you’ve been using this algorithm, and if you’ve encountered any of this meta-avoidance.
My usage of FVP has fluctuated a fair amount over time; I used it a lot in the last year of my PhD, then not much in the year after that, then have since started using it regularly again. I think this is at least partly due to my life in the intervening time being very unstable, which disrupted a lot of my systems.
I don’t think I’ve started avoiding adding items to the list. I do think my usage of FVP may have become gradually less effective at having me do difficult tasks. As using the technique becomes more routine, I become less agent-y while doing it, which leads to that aspect of the technique becoming less effective. In particular, if the same item is on the list day after day, it becomes increasingly easy to skip over it until the rest of the list is empty (which never happens).
I don’t think this decay effect is all that strong so far: I think I’m still substantially better at doing important-but-aversive tasks with FVP than I’d be without it. But I wouldn’t be too surprised if the decay was stronger than I thought, or gets substantially stronger in the future. I do think I could probably “refresh” this aspect of the technique’s effectiveness if I put some effort into it, e.g. by forcing myself to use an explicit verbal question to choose between tasks, or mixing up the phrasing of that question.
Nice, this sounds like a good system.