#staleness

[huffle200]

Pushing Through

Today I felt compelled to enter into this blog a grand entry on what I felt was interesting; the Catholic-Christian influences of The Legend of Zelda. Sadly, as I was writing the words, I kept losing my train of thought. I abandoned the work and deleted it before I started to get into the topic.

Then came the dreaded Blank Page.

There is nothing worse than looking at this white screen…

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[complicegoals]

What to do when you have stale reminders

A user writes:

I have been using Complice for a while and I am at a stage where I am reminded to do a few things that I might not have remembered, but I am not excited to craft my things to do.

I think part of the problem is I have a bunch of stuff coming in from Workflowy, which includes little reminders (wear a belt, which I sometimes forget) and (do not eat after 9pm, which I sometimes ignore)

I am just blathering, but if this is a thing that people go through (and has an article written, I would not mind being pointed to it, or) you can just nod and listen

This is a natural cycle. What you're encountering is a form of staleness. Complice is in general designed to combat staleness, for instance by not allowing you to enter a bunch of tasks that you're not actually going to do today. However, staleness can still show up in a few ways. The dailies and notdones features were ones that I knew would introduce sources of staleness into the system, so I did my best to counter-optimize for that. I think I did a reasonably good job, but it's not perfect yet.

The WorkFlowy integration... needs major work. Having established that, there are two levels to it:

What can you do differently? (since you're asking)

What can Complice do differently? (since most Complice users won't read this article)

What can you do differently?

It sounds to me like you want to fix your belt problem using something other than a reminder in your task list. I wrote an article called How to send perfectly-timed physical messages to your future self which would advocate for a strategy something like "when you take your belt off, put it on top of something that you'll pick up tomorrow after you have your pants on" and then obviously when you go to pick up that something, you'll first need to pick up your belt, at which point you put your belt on.

This is a specific example, but the general principle is that doing your desired behavior automatically is better than doing it by reminder. And if you do have to use a reminder, the best kind is one that leaves no ambiguity about whether or not now is the moment. So for "do not eat after 9pm", maybe what you want is something that will make your phone buzz once at 8:30pm, to remind you that it's your last chance to eat today, and something to make your phone buzz at 9pm, indicating that eating is now over for the day—whether you heeded the warning at 8:30 or not!

Another even-more-general principle is: if something isn't working, stop doing it. If the Complice "do not eat after 9pm" intention isn't reminding you to stop eating after 9pm, then find something else. You might still keep the intention around if you want to track which days you were successful at this, but it's clearly failing as a reminder.

Making sense of staleness

While writing this post, I ended up writing so much under dealing with staleness that I decided to make it its own post: Making sense of a single stale task

The basic gist is that it could be because the thing actually doesn't matter, or it could be because you're conflicted about it. If the thing doesn't matter, don't do it! If you're conflicted, either fix the task until you're not conflicted, or find a way to get back in touch with why the task matters so that rather than forcing yourself to do it (and resisting being forced) you're naturally drawn to it based on your sense of purpose.

What can Complice do differently?

Well, one thing would be if Complice could detect when people might be in situations like yours, and encourage them to reflect a bit like this post is doing.

Another piece is that it's currently hard to stop stale WorkFlowy things that are getting pulled into Complice, from within the Complice UI. My workflow for this looks like "copy the node id from my intentions textbox, open up a WorkFlowy tab, replace the node id in that tab with the one from my intentions, then delete/complete/untag that node." Even though that only takes 10-20 seconds, it's still way too cumbersome.

Regarding reflecting when things go stale, Complice could notice when you have an intention N days in a row and it doesn't get done, and prompt you to think about it a bit more. The notdone propagator currently does this with one-off intentions, but there's still a major issue here with repeating tasks either from the built-in dailies or from WorkFlowy.

[complicegoals]

Making sense of a single stale task

One of the core pieces of the Complice philosophy is to deal with staleness, rather than letting it get mouldy. The term "stale" can be used to refer to a big long list of to-do items that you're probably never going to get to but keep thinking you should, or just one such item.

I wrote an article on 5 Ways to Deal With a Stale Task System. That article is about how to deal with a situation where you have a long list of items and the list as a whole is stale. This is an extremely common situation with a conventional to-do list system, in Todoist, Asana, or any other list app or other GTD system. Probably at any given time, most people have at least one list somewhere of tasks that seemed really important a few months ago but which realistically they're never going to do.

But if you're using a system like Complice that prompts you to recreate your list each day, then you're already doing pretty well on this front. There are, however, still a few ways that things can go stale. Mostly this is going to be from the notdones propagator, the daily intentions system, the top priority feature, or the WorkFlowy integration (or perhaps other integrations that don't exist at the time of writing this).

These sources of staleness are pretty small though, which means that you can look at the item or items individually and ask "what makes sense with this?"

Staleness is a natural part of life: intentions for the future go stale just like food does.

When you notice that some task (or system to cause you to do a single task) from the past has gone lifeless, this can mean a few things:

the thing used to matter, but no longer does

the thing never mattered, and you've been in denial

you've forgotten why the thing matters

some part of you is in conflict about doing the thing

In any case, you want to reflect on this, rather than persisting in this state of staleness and stuckness!

Take a moment to think (in your head, out loud, or in text) about whether the thing matters, and if you feel coherent or conflicted about doing it. Distinguishing between the first two is interesting, but not necessary—the point is, the thing doesn't matter, and so you can ditch it. (And to be clear—it could be "worth doing", but not relative to all of the other actions one could take. Opportunity cost matters.) When something does matter, but we forget, it's often because we're orienting to the words in our list—"do not eat after 9pm"—instead of the referent of those words, ie the actual experience of how you feel when you stick to your desired eating habits. Words don't matter.

...but when it matters...

Of course, sometimes you're acutely in touch with the importance of the thing just by glancing at the words, but also... you don't wanna. Or you always feel like you wanna... tomorra.

(If the task isn’t urgent or absolutely necessary, it can be worth just consciously deciding you aren’t going to bother doing it at the moment, and clearing it from the list of “things I should do”. You’ll bump into it again if it really needs doing!)

In this context, you can think of conflict as falling into two categories: task definition & inner rebel. Task definition conflict means that part of you knows that the way you've defined the task, trying to work on it will be a mistake. I encountered this when I was struggling to get myself to create an email course based on what I know about productivity. I realized that some wise part of me was refusing to work on it because I was on-track to half-ass it, and deep down I knew that (for me) a half-assed email course was worse than no email course. I realized I needed to decide either to make it and make it good, or to stop trying to force myself to do something that was counterproductive.

Other times, it's not about the specific nature of the task. It's about that part of you that absolutely hates being told what to do. The part that will actively resist doing enjoyable things if they feel like obligations. This is the inner rebel. Entire books have and will be written about this, but my brief suggestion is this:

Recognize that your inner rebel isn't your enemy. (In fact, it lends support to the part of you that notices mis-defined tasks too, which protects you from wasting your time!)

Say hi to your inner rebel (this might sound silly but can be surprisingly potent)

In any case, try to shift your focus from the task at hand to the purpose of the task: what difference in the world is that task intended to make? eg. if the task is "clean my room", shift your focus from the act of cleaning to the desired state of your room and how much you would enjoy it, contrasted with the current state of your room.

Another phrase you might try is "I don't need to do this and maybe I don't even want to do this, but if I did want to do this, why would that be? just hypothetically?" Saying this can help circumvent the inner rebel's tendency to reject being told that it should want something.

If the "say hi" thing seems to produce a shift, try asking the inner rebel what it wants. You don't necessarily need to "give it" what it wants, but sometimes it makes a difference just to hear it out. If that doesn't work, or the notion of talking to parts of yourself doesn't make sense for you, you can either ignore this & move on, or read more about it if you're intrigued.

I've written further about the relationship between the inner rebel and inner authoritarian in Building self-trust with Self-Referential Motivation

That's a bunch of philosophical & psychological stuff. If you're looking for a hack, try this: just start. Set a 5 minute timer, or a 25 minute pomodoro, and get started. Regardless of finishing, getting over that initial hurdle can make a huge difference.

Hop in this virtual coworking room for peer support!

[complicegoals]

Not-quite-automatic rollover of not-done tasks

Earlier this year, I made a blog post announcing the release of the most-requested feature in the Complice Product Direction Survey in January: "a system that will help me maintain a daily routine"

Well, in a close second place is "a better [something] to handle tasks left undone". It actually was ahead by the measure of "number one feature request" (23% vs 20%) versus "I would like this at all" (46% vs 52%).

I've been very nervous about adding anything like this, even more so than the dailies feature. Since the very beginning, Complice has been optimized to reduce what I call "staleness": the tendency for a task system to become full of old tasks that are aversive, for a variety of reasons:

you've already done them but forgotten to check them off

they're no longer relevant (e.g. "go see that play this week?")

they're still relevant and valuable but you've been putting them off so long that you just... ugh... don't wanna think about it.

So it's with much deliberation and some trepidation that I announce the NotDone Propagator.

How it Works

When you submit your outcomes, Complice stores a list of the tasks left undone. It keeps the most recent 3 days of NotDones handy, and then when you go to plan your day there's a little button that lets you import those tasks, one by one.

One really important design consideration is to not have old tasks to automatically get rolled over from one day to the next. That is an immediate recipe for staleness. Primarily of the third kind, but it's still a huge issue to have your task list be aversive. So instead of automatically, you push a button next to each task (or you can easily delete it).

And beyond that, you want to be reconsidering each day what it makes sense to do. Something might still be "worth doing" but not really top priority. Sometimes, the reason why we procrastinate is that deep down some part of us knows that the thing we've set out to work on doesn't make sense.

For instance, I had trouble motivating myself to work on an email course at one point this winter. I sat down to ponder why that was, and realized that I was planning to half-ass the course. To make something that was acceptable but not really great. And I noted that I didn't want to make a mediocre course. I either wanted to not do it, or to make a course I could really be proud of. Having articulated this, I then got to decide what I wanted to do.

So!

The NotDone Propagator, in an effect to increase reflection, will interrupt you when you try to propagate a task that you've missed twice or more already. First it says this:

Then if you don't do a task three or more times and try to add it again, it prompts you to take a moment to think about what will actually be different today such that you complete that intention.

Because at that point, the house bet is that you don't complete it. So you need to come up with a new strategy or something. Maybe it consists of doing the task first thing in the morning, or carving out time as soon as you get home from work. Maybe you need a reminder on your phone. Maybe it would work if you commit to just doing a pomodoro towards it. Or just 5 minutes. Or just 1.

But you need to do something different than the past 3 days.

In the future, Complice might even be able to suggest tips like this. At the moment, it just prompts you to reflect on your own.

(If you haven’t already signed up for Complice, click here to get started.)

[limousineservicestrivesk]

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[noxstopxandxxgo]

in need of a good outlet.