Thinking about this was remarkably enlightening!
- I have lots of digital inboxes with lots of items (articles, videos, tabs etc) and I really don’t care about the amount of things in them at all, they are no more of a problem than the library having more books than I can read. It’s nice to realise what the things are that don’t need beeminding!
- There are a few things that could do with regular clean ups - e.g. deleting spam answerphone messages - but they just aren’t important enough to bother beeminding.
- I keep a to do list that gets clogged up with stuff I need to do but don’t do - okay, I’ve found something it would be useful to beemind!
But then I instantly found a load of reasons that would be a bad idea…
- I’m the only person who puts stuff on my to do list, I could just cheat by never writing stuff down
- I can just mark things off, or shift them to the next day rather than doing them.
- There’s no way to automate the beeminding with the software I’m currently using
- I’d have to actually do things
- Maybe it’ll go badly and Beeminder will stop working for me at all
To which my better self responds…
- But I know writing stuff down is a really, really good idea. Stuff makes more sense whens it’s out of my head. I’m not going to forego that just to save myself a beeminder charge.
- Marking things off that don’t actually need doing is fine! Shifting things to the next day is a bit more shady, and might require some clearer rules but let’s wait and see if it’s an actual problem.
- If all goes to plan then counting the items left on the list at the end of the day shouldn’t be very onerous.
- That’s not a bug, is it?
- As ever with Beeminder, if it all gets too much you just pay up (or stick with it a week) and get out of there, and/or start again.
I did spend a little time going down the rabbit hole of “ooh, I need a shiny new to do list app that I can link to Beeminder” but I somehow remembered Gall’s Law before I got too far down. My current app is a long way from perfect, and I’ve taken to putting important work stuff in a different app, but I’m better off trying to get something I already have going to work a little better.
So, now I have a new goal: todoboxzero
how it works: Manual entry of data from my to do app. I found the app will give me a badge on my phone home screen telling me how many of today’s items are left so I don’t need to count them. I discovered you can’t have “pessimistic presumptive” points on an “inbox-fewer” type goal as the system has decided “they don’t make sense”. I think they do, and so does this thread. As suggested in that thread I set up an IFTTT applet to add a big datapoint to my goal automatically each weekday morning so this wouldn’t be a goal I could forget about.
settings: To start with I’ve made the goal completely unchallenging. Over the next few weeks it’s going to step down until it only lets me leave three items on my list each day. I plan to step it right down to zero once I get better at getting to three!
current state: So far - a few days - it’s going well.
- I’ve made myself do awkward annoying things rather than leave them until the next day as I haven’t wanted there to be a batch of awkward annoying things to deal with at once.
- I’ve found myself adding things to my list so that I will go and do them straight away, which means I have a better record of what I’ve done.
- So far I haven’t noticed myself refusing to add an item to the list, if anything I’ve added extra stuff and then done it because I want to show myself that this system will work for me.
- I’ve also been going through tomorrow’s list in the evening and checking it is all stuff that seems doable tomorrow and putting it in a reasonable order to attack it in, and I think that’s being really helpful. I feel like not shifting any items off today’s list except to complete or write them off entirely is probably the most sensible approach. It’s like a mini-akrasia horizon.
changes: I want to make sure the work tasks get back on the main list, and maybe look at that shiny new to do app, but it’s early days and really I want to get the system running for a while before I try and make it do more.