Open Thread, April 1-15, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

I tried Autofocus as a replacement for my current system for getting stuff done, and so far it works a lot better than GTD (though I can't say that I was using GTD properly, for example, I couldn't bring myself to do regular reviews). The main benefit for me was its ability to handle long-term thinking / gestation tasks, mostly due to not treating them as enemies to be crossed off the list as soon as possible. And it requires very little willpower to run.

I just had an extremely simple but promising theory of why work is aversive!

Work is the stuff you tell yourself to do. But sometimes you tell yourself to do it and you don't, because you're too tired, engaged with something else (like playing a computer game), etc. This creates cognitive dissonance, which associates unpleasantness with the thought of work. (In the same way cognitive dissonance causes you to avoid your belief's real weak points, it causes you to avoid work.) Ugh fields accumulate.

The solution? Only tell yourself to work when you're actually... (read more)

0Risto_Saarelma14y

I somehow completely missed this when it was discussed earlier. Looks really interesting. My problem with TODO lists is that they rot into uselessness when I neglect them, and then the batch of weeks-old items makes me not bother with the whole thing. Autofocus seems to be built around the TODO list as a mental scratch space instead of a list of things that actually need to get accomplished at some point, and has garbage collection of uninteresting items built in to the algorithm, so having a spell of low productivity will end up with nothing done and an empty TODO list with a lot of dismissed items in the history instead of nothing done and a depressing list full of items whose context you've forgotten.