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freyley comments on Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks - Less Wrong
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I was just lamenting this morning how my todo list, a set of tasks for the next few days, was depressing me. When I wrote it, it was a great joy to get all these things out of my head, but now that all I had to do was follow them, it felt mechanical and boring. I could rewrite the list and gain some excitement about a few of the tasks that way, but instead I've been trying to figure out the why of this feeling, and your post gets me right back into it.
I think there's an ideal working state -- perhaps the state of Flow is describing it, or perhaps that's simply some peoples' ideal working state, and there's a more general form of it (I'll use flow for this comment). In this ideal working state, we're constantly encountering problems that are within a known scope. So they're problems -- we don't immediately know how to handle them -- but they're scoped problems, so we know how to figure it out. This is fun, because there are problems, but they're solvable problems.
Dating advice you describe as useful does the opposite of flow -- it creates tasks. Tasks, because they don't require the overcoming of scoped problems, are boring. Taskifying things make them routine, easy, and boring. Taskifying itself can be in flow. Re-taskifying recreates the sense of flow and allows a task to fall within that flow.
What I would want isn't taskified advice, it's the experience that would allow dating to feel flowful.
(I've italicised to try to mark flow as a technical term. Please let me know if I should change the format.)
Hmm. My intuition is that Flow is no more or less than intimate familiarity with a repertoire of tasks/procedures/heuristics used to reliably solve scoped problems. Do you think Flow could be applied to, e.g., piano performance? What about debugging programs? "Flow" as used in wider culture could certainly be applied that way.
The difficulty of communicating/teaching many procedures and heuristics is the problem with trying to taskify dating advice, IMO.
I agree - "flow" happens to masters who have taskified the process and practiced it so many times that it becomes procedural rather than declarative knowledge.
Yes. This can definitely be done with sex/romance, but it seems that many people want everything to work perfectly the first time... Sorry folks.
I've experienced the state called "flow" when playing the piano, so consider this a big. fat, YES.
You are talking about the same thing I'm talking about, right?
Thanks for reminding me about flow. Flow lets you dynamically generate algorithms and solutions, and there is no real substitute for it for solving certain problems.
Yet flow depends on your activity being neither too easy nor too hard. Taskification is still applicable to problems that require flow, just not in the same way. You cannot consciously taskify your entire procedure, but you can do the following:
You can taskify some of the component tasks involved, such that you can flow. For example, you cannot taskify the entire problem of salsa dance, but you can taskify the process of learning the component steps such that you are able to flow. Without having technique at a certain level, flow is impossible. Taskification can get you the necessary technique. Sometimes doing a task in a conscious, clunky, non-spontaneous way will build the skills necessary to do that task from flow on the fly. That's how musicians and dancers typically learn.
Taskify the process of getting into flow, at which point you let the flow take over.
Yeah, I think you're attempting to take over a separate concept (fluency?) with your idea of taskification. You generate tasks when you want to complete something piece-wise, and it may be valuable to break complex things into tasks for explanatory purposes, but fluency isn't based primarily on understanding the tasks as tasks, it's based on experience and, well, fluency.