The section on why notecards and todo lists have never worked for him (and for me) was particularly salient:
"The problem with "systems" is that they are authorities. They have to be. If you decide "I'll prioritize things with a stack of notecards" then you are telling yourself the following:
"The notecards replace my own brain. Everything that I do must be on a notecard. If it isn't on a notecard, it can't be done. If I want it done, it has to be on a notecard."
The problem is that when you have a crisis (a day full of emergencies) that forces you to break from this system you will lose all respect for its authority. Your brain will learn that it doesn't have to respect the notecards, that they aren't in charge, and this sense of freedom is addictive and will persist. Most ADHD sufferers have left a trail of systems - notecards, whiteboards, lists, post-its, apps, alarms - that worked great for [a month, a week, three days] but are now dead to them, scorched earth we can't return to."
Definitely right. Sometimes I look at notes I made for myself, telling myself what to do, and then ultimately rebel against my past self because I don't want to do what I'm telling myself to do.
Systems are better when they're an augmentation of your memory that you can appreciate. For example, I always put events in my google calendar so I can remember when they are and catch overlaps early.
I've had a bad relationship with todo lists. They get stale really quickly. If I look at a todo list that's a few days old, I might think, "Why should I do that now? Why should I factor the work in this way? Just so I can say I'm done with this item?" In practice, the way I factor a task changes constantly. So now the way I do todo lists is more like an aid to my memory. When I have time to do stuff (which is rare) I'll write down the things that are most important at that exact moment. Sometimes I'll skim through todo lists from previous days to jog my memory, but I won't copy over everything. I'll arrange the things into an itinerary for the day and see how many of them I can get done. Usually it's not all of them. And that's OK.
Past me thanks you, kindly. "Now" me says "Screw past me, and you for being a sympathizer. I know I said I'd go to bed on time but I need to watch 10 episodes of Game of Thrones right now!"
Before mindfulness became a category in the app store, I read a Kurt Vonnegut book where he passed on advice given to him by his uncle.
> "But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
> So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is."
I think your ability to navigate the ego can be trained.
For me, todo lists and prioritization systems are like mental health yo-yo dieting; I've tried them all, 4 times over and nothing ever sticks.
This section spoke to me in the same way, as each time I a new system up (or an old one back up) it works until I have to deal with an emergency day, where even the act of updating the list goes out the window. And then, the next day it's "hey, I made it through yesterday, I don't need that system today." and then it's done... until my emergency is "holy hell, I have no clue what's on my plate for the day/week/month, I need to fix that." where I'll pick up my go to old system (kanban style Trello board) and repeat the cycle anew.
I've been coming up and using various GTD systems for a better part of the last two decades. I'd be slipping in and out of different setups, tools, solutions, systems... Some would stick for years, the others I'd abandon pretty quickly.
All of them worked for me to a degree, and were very helpful in keeping me organised and efficient, but never did I find a perfect setup that I'd be perfectly comfortable and happy with.
I guess the most useful thing I learned from all these years and years of trying to get a system in place and trying to get organised is to be perfectly comfortable with changing the systems as I go along. Keep experimenting. Keep what works for you, discard what doesn't.
For a long time I've been using a combination of a Trello based implementation of a GTD-gone-wild kind of a todo list (with the centerpiece being week-by-week daily todos) and an Evernote based journal that I kept surprisingly consistently almost every day for years.
A few months ago, I got in one of those overwhelmingly busy crises, which made me drop the journal. Rather than daily, I'd do it occasionally. To an extent it was a relief, and I rationalised the hiatus by thinking in terms of the benefit from the valuable extra time that I could spend on other work, but I quickly realised that I lost an important information repository I could comfortably and consistently rely on.
And then I stumbled upon Roam Research (RR). The experience was so great that I started keeping a daily journal again. Went from 'nah, I'm not writing shit' mode to an almost obsessive 'gotta record everything' in an instant. And I'm actually enjoying it.
I've ditched Evernote (I still have all my old data there), and I did not think twice, cause I got used to evolving my system without looking back if I find something that i feel works better.
At the moment I'm still using Trello for tasks, but the todos are so easy and natural to do in RR that I'm increasingly using it for my tasks, and finding that I am having to open Trello less and less.
RR is so powerful and flexible and natural and easy, that I am genuinely excited about a prospect of evolving my next system on it. I have a sense this one will stick for a while.
There's a very helpful article on Medium, written by a guy that's quite serious about getting the most out of RR. I'll try to find it and link it below.
I think it's something that's a person by person fix; much like the 100's of methods of task management there could probably 100's of methods of task management for folks with ADHD. For me, I've been playing around with implementing a deadman's switch on my Trello board using Butler, and it's been an interesting experiment. Essentially I have a task that has to be 'completed' each morning before 10am, if I don't I'll get an email that it's overdue, if I do complete it Butler will set a new due date for the next work day @ 10am.
It's been one of my better attempts at trying to circumvent the 'scorched earth' leaving of the task management process.
You can use this to your advantage to create peace of mind as I found out.
The mechanism you describe is what is the basis for the "Getting things done" framework. You learn your brain to "trust" the "authority" so it can let go of all loose ends that keep your brain busy (like stuff it needs to remember, like appointment, paying a bill, fixing something in the house, etc). But if you are able to trick your brain in not checking in with the authority (as GTD dictates) you are left with a lot of spare room in your brain to think creative, at least thats my theory.
I have ADD, and I can speak to the GTD framework being an extremely useful tool. In my case I use Trello to run what I call my "Digital Brain".
I use a typical kanban wip system (Backlog, Today, Blocked, Done) to organize pretty much all task-related things in my life and it works extremely well. Once I know its on the trello board, I know I don't have to worry about keeping it in my head anymore, and that gives me a lot more space to relax and not worry things are being missed/forgotten.
This is key. I don't care if I miss a few weeks because of being lazy. I know my life/future/path/journey is ready to start again when I get tired of being disorganized.
I have used the note system (with google calendar) and it worked for me in meeting deadlines(most of) and being objectively more productive. I am currently a graduate student and it has helped me to maintain good grades and complete assignments.
The trick is not to let the notes and calendar act like a "master". I usually view it as a friend who suggests things to do in a given time frame. The friend(calendar with notes) and I are symbiotic, our interests are linked.
Changing the view from an "authoritative master" to a "benevolent friend" would help. Sometimes I would discard the note and keep binging youtube video/or hackernews. Other times, I would reschedule the work for some other time. But most of the time I am able to get things done on time, without any help.
It does require some discipline, but once you get a hang of it, it becomes easy.
In my personal life, I have a habit in the morning of making a short list of things that need to get done soon on the back of a business card. I don't even really have a solid intention of getting all (or even any) of the tasks done that day. Nonetheless, it often turns out that at the end of the day most of them have been done, or at least significantly advanced.
This is even more effective if it's a weekend, and I'm drinking.
Someone can have this scorched earth effect and yet not have adhd, yes? In particular if they can sometimes return to a system after tidying it up.
I do have a large trail of systems and nothing has worked permanently. However, I’m nowhere near as unfocussed as the author of that article. That one section resonated however.
What if close people hold you accountable? You tell them: “hey, I’ll clean my room by Friday next week or I owe you (or your favourite organization) 20$.”
Eventually you will end up avoiding those close people by essentially any means necessary. You'll think of some excuse to avoid doing it. Sometimes sitting out in the cold street feels better than having to go home and do the task that has to be done. That $20 is eventually going to be lost as is the closeness to that person.
I'll be the first to admit that I maintain it inconsistently, skipping days, weeks, even months. Much as I have with other paper-based planning systems.
But, and this is critical: the bullet-journal method facilitates for me at least returning to the system. That is, if I take a hiatus, I'm not confronted with pages-on-end of blank, unfilled dates as with a pre-printed planner.
I've seen some people suggest omitting the index, and can only say from my experience DON'T DO THAT!!! It's the most critical part of the journal, as it lets you find things. That's what distinguishes the bullet journal from a simple sequential notebook without an index. Everything else -- bullet notation, brief-vs-long notes, spreads, etc., builds off the index IMO.
The flexibility of the system is fantastic as it suits my highly ideosyncratic needs. Sometimes a day needs a dozen pages. Sometimes I really need to make a spread. Sometimes I'll just have a few notes, or none, for days on end. There's no pre-printed form I'm fitting into, I just make what I need (or skip what I don't).
And again: if time goes by and I don't use it, I can re-start.
I've been looking at other systems, some covered in Getting Things Done (which ... took me nine years to read, just sayin'), including the notion of 43 folders, a tickler file. Not yet implemented, but after looking at ring / circular buffers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_buffer), I totally grok the concept.
I've recently started a journal-based research/reading journal based on a similar concept of "BOTI" -- best of the interval -- pages.
Rather than Starting a List and Simply Letting It Grow, the BOTI is either time- or space-constrained. You add to it, and when completed, open a new page, later in the journal.
Individual items on the BOTI aren't
You can also skim the top items from individual BOTI lists and create a next-higher-aggregation BOTI, the best of the best. And so forth. So you might have BOTW, BOTM, BOTY for week, month, and year. Yes, rolling weeks into months is inexact, this is not a precise system.
(Dev-Ops and sysadmin types will recognise this as similar to an RRD aggregation, and the idea borrows from this.)
And "best" can be multiple categories. I'm thinking of books, articles, authors, and ideas, but you might include, say, wines, beers, films, components, devices, or anything else that has a wide range of properties and quality levels that are otherwise hard to track with time.
The handy thing is that at the end of a year, you have a way to easily list out the top items of a year, or decade. Or should the Singularity arrive any time soon[1], centuries and millennia.[2]
I've also been accumulating a collection of index cards related to research interests, now approaching a decade old. That's also proved an interesting journey.
One thing I'll point out is that recordkeeping and planning tools require both time and space. Your journal, your files, your index cards, need a place to live. If you're living a highly disrupted or mobile life, that can be very hard to arrange. I tend to find physical systems far superior to digital ones, for numerous reasons.[3]
And no, I'm not expecting any one system to solve All My Personal Organisational Failings. But there are systems which have been used and evolved over time, there's a certain amount of sheer technique and practice to many of them, and operating within a loose but supportive structure really can help.
________________________________
Notes:
1. I'm not especially convinced it will.
2. Or, rather than travelling through time, you might dig back through past history and identify notable exemplars of whatever classes you're interested in tracking from the past. Or, converting time to space, a BOTP -- best of the place -- tracking faves associated with location. The concept is readily extensible.
3. Distractions (or freedom from), format durability, media stability, and privacy are key among these. But just the psychology of having tangible physical media, as well as the freedom from Someone Else's Notion of How to Arrange Your Brain seems also to matter a lot.
What an incredible yet horrifying article. My first thought is someone should make a Chernobyl-style show based on these events so that it gets national attention.
Edit: apparently there was a movie recently released about it, that I had never heard of until I reached this thread. I still think a TV series is the best way to approach this sort of topic as you have more hours to sink into the details.
I cannot fall asleep unless I have Zero Punctuation playing in the background. On Youtube they have started uploading hours-long compilation videos of his, and there are quite a few comments from other people saying it helps them sleep as well. A strange phenomenon.
When I was a kid, probably from ages 13-18 or so, I always fell asleep to a Harry Potter audiobook. I owned a copy of Half Blood Prince on CD (more accurately on 20 CDs) and I wouldn't bother changing out the disc (at least not that often), it was just some background noise to help me fall asleep.
As a lowly help desk technician perusing this thread, you couldn't be any further from the truth. The software devs never open tickets, everyone else does and its for the most banal problems
I've opened plenty of tickets as a developer, mostly the tickets are IT's garbage software or horrible network setups preventing me from doing my work.
A lot of people who post here don't seem to realize that a lot of companies still have IT departments.. a lot of people here are also developers who don't realize they can easily do things to compromise data, even if they think they know better.
The Pepsi Kendall Jenner ad was largely criticized for being tone-deaf. I wouldn't put it past being a real document based on previous works of Pepsi's marketing department.
This is an honest question I have that's tangentially related to this article (everyone on this forum is a lot smarter than I am so apologies if this is a stupid question):
What is the catalyst for any action/change in regards to reversing these trends? I feel like I've been reading versions of the same article for the last 10 years with negligible change.
The people in power have to start representing the interests of the millennials. This will only happen when people of that generation are in power, or people in power are being influenced by them.
One of the reasons I suspect AOC gets so much attention (apart from her very unabashed personality) is because she represents the Millenial generation, always ridiculed as being "lazy" and "coddled". Finally someone in Power who:
* is a millenial and
* understands millenial priorities
Ironically, the policy proposals that the most outspoken Millenials embrace would actually strengthen programs that help the older generation.
Millennials don’t seem to have a clue what’s in their best interest so I’m going to disagree with you. If there were any solid ideas coming from anybody in terms of helping millennials those ideas would have political traction. To think that only millennials can represent millennial interests is stupid.
We'll have to agree to disagree. Millennial lives and issues are far removed from the current establishment to be completely alien to people in power at present. To be disingenuous enough to believe millennials don't have a clue what's in their best interest is stupid.
Considering a majority of millennials support socialism, but also cannot provide a meaningful definition of the term...
I don't think most have a serious position worth considering. I say this as someone lumped in this demographic whipping boy.
There is plenty to be legitimately angry about too. I just don't trust this generation to come up with solutions that aren't literally "let's try real communism. This time it will work!"
> There is plenty to be legitimately angry about too. I just don't trust this generation to come up with solutions that aren't literally "let's try real communism. This time it will work!"
What makes you feel this generation would go that far? I haven't seen anything that's led me to believe they think this way, in my understanding, they are more aware of and accepting of fundamentally "socialist" concepts such as government assistance and high-taxation. That's a far cry from communism.
What's wrong with that? We're trying 'real capitalism' and that's not working.
Also, there are large and loud political movements pushing for Scandinavian-style democratic socialism which has been successful, it's simply dismissive to act like all millennials don't understand politics and are just trying to be edgy.
> If there were any solid ideas coming from anybody in terms of helping millennials those ideas would have political traction.
The United States government is coming out of a month-long shutdown because the idea with political traction (the big, beautiful wall) was completely unworkable.
Let's not underestimate what flies and doesn't fly in the arena of American political thought.
The rising popularity of socialism and distrust/hatred of capitalism among young people would indicate that they have a very clear idea of what is in their best interest.
That's pretty straightforward in principle. What they need to do is the same as older folk i.e. vote in large numbers for their own financial interest.
Politicians are fairly simple people at heart. If pandering to you will get them (re-)elected then they'll pander to you.
...which is why we need to fix the estate tax. Large inheritances benefit only a few, often to the detriment of others. One could even argue that it doesn't benefit the few much either, because unearned wealth tends to bring its own psychological problems. I know all of the arguments against a robust estate tax, I've heard them literally hundreds of times, but I find them unconvincing. If we want to keep claiming we live in a meritocracy, the effects of an estate tax on ensuring (restoring) equal opportunity are not optional.
You'll forgive my skepticism in thinking that the folks who would be affected by confiscatory estate taxes will simply resort to more complex structures to avoid it--trusts, corporations onshore or off-, etc. Moreover, it isn't a settled matter that high estate taxes are per se "fair." The deceased already paid taxes on all that income, why should the government again get to help itself to what's left over?
I've seen this "double taxation" canard a hundred times already. It's lazy, perhaps even dishonest to the extent that it ignores obvious reality. Fact is, money is generally taxed whenever it moves. Income tax and sales tax are obvious examples. Why should inheritance, which is an essentially similar transfer, be exempt?
> If we want to keep claiming we live in a meritocracy, the effects of an estate tax on ensuring (restoring) equal opportunity are not optional.
As of 2018 a couple can leave >$22 Million without paying any tax on it. That's enough for your children, their children and their children's children (and potentially on and on) to never have to work. Generational wealth like this is how we get and perpetuate "classes".
> What is the catalyst for any action/change in regards to reversing these trends?
My unscientific opinion on this is that these articles will continue to appear as living standards in rich countries continues to fall due to living costs outstripping wage growth, and the outsourcing of more and more work to other countries.
The wealth enjoyed by the rich world in the post-WW2 order has been built up by international cooperative agreements done to maintain peace but also generate income and build markets (Highway Bill, GI Bill, Marshall Plan, EEA trading bloc, GATT/WTO etc).
These days, it feels like we are experiencing the last trickle of dividends from those days. The structure of the economy has been predominantly service-oriented economy for decades now, but now it's about doing more with fewer people.
Realistically, I don't know what kinds of jobs will continue to provide middle-class salaries in the volumes that were available before. If you worked as a customer support rep, you've been offshored. If you worked as a trucker, automation is coming; you won't be fired, but you won't be driving as much and you won't get paid as much.
Thousands of trucker and miners looking to 'retrain' as front-end developers is a pipe dream pushed by politicians since time immemorial. There simply aren't enough jobs in those roles.
The extended government shutdown had me wary for this exact reason. I wonder how many more weeks it could have gone before some very serious change could have happened very quickly.
This can be done indirectly by reducing the work day from 8 hours to 6 hours, those who otherwise need to get up early to commute may have a bit more time to settle down in the evening.
And reducing the productivity of workers by 25% couldn't possibly have any bad effects. /s
In all seriousness, I've seen mentions of studies that suggest going from 8 hours to 6 does _not_ correlate with a 25% decrease in productivity, because most people aren't consistently productive for all 8 hours of a day. I know in my case, there's an extremely strong inverse correlation with productivity and how bored I am with a particular task. I'm sure I'm not alone.
Actually there was an interesting study done to show that most people in the office environment on average do 4 hours of work (actual work) and the rest is breaks, distractions, chit chat, bathroom breaks etc. I have found the 4 hour figure to be much too generous, I’d say on average people work less than 4 hours (maybe closer to 3) the other 5 are a total waste.
When I first started freelancing hourly, it was a sobering feeling to see how little of my time was actually billable for actual work. It takes random screen grabbing software to make you realize that most of the time you are not working. Of course those days have long passed for me but I’m always left to remember just how wasteful office workplaces are and how much time people waste away in their life. More than half of their working life is a total waste. Tell me, how does that make you feel? :)
Just an FYI that the antivirus on my work machine blocked it due to ping sweeping, which I'm guessing is related to the globe. So it's probably harmless but if you don't want to get a call from your IT dept I'd save it for your home machine.
He did briefly touch on how Monsanto was using similar practices in the agriculture business. I think most readers can make the implied connection there.
The author has been kind of a joke on underground hockey twitter (long story) about being the stereotypical self-unaware tech evangelist for some time. Not really surprised to see that it came from him.
The section on why notecards and todo lists have never worked for him (and for me) was particularly salient:
"The problem with "systems" is that they are authorities. They have to be. If you decide "I'll prioritize things with a stack of notecards" then you are telling yourself the following:
"The notecards replace my own brain. Everything that I do must be on a notecard. If it isn't on a notecard, it can't be done. If I want it done, it has to be on a notecard."
The problem is that when you have a crisis (a day full of emergencies) that forces you to break from this system you will lose all respect for its authority. Your brain will learn that it doesn't have to respect the notecards, that they aren't in charge, and this sense of freedom is addictive and will persist. Most ADHD sufferers have left a trail of systems - notecards, whiteboards, lists, post-its, apps, alarms - that worked great for [a month, a week, three days] but are now dead to them, scorched earth we can't return to."