Hi, that's very useful! I would be very interested to hear your other tips for "task naming psychology" & other areas :)
On Wednesday, May 9, 2018 at 11:49:29 PM UTC+3, Fletcher Kauffman wrote: > > I, too, have this same problem. I've done a lot of work, personally, on > understanding and parsing it (the resistance). > > What I have discovered is that often, when I have an action on a to-do > list (I do not use Next Actions), the ones that fallow (sit for a long > time, glaring at me in red), are tasks that are, just in their name, > somewhat vague. > > That is, that sometimes, tasks I resisted were actually themselves not > tasks, but desired outcomes. Something like "spend more time with Emily" is > not actually an action-- it is an outcome. > > Furthermore, I found that the key to nearly all of this was *the first > word* of the title. If that first word was a concrete action verb (go, > sit, write, call, open, close, take), then those things would get done. The > kinds of actions that had a lot of resistance to them were things that > "involve more than one step"-- and I did a lot of these: "Figure out", > "Learn about", "Do something about", "Develop", "Work on". Those things > would sit, because they weren't clear what I was supposed to do next. > > I could possibly write a book on the rest of what I observed, but I did > find this bit useful-- as a root cause. > > I'm also working on a solution to this now. > > On Tuesday, March 20, 2018 at 1:40:56 PM UTC-7, John . Smith wrote: >> >> >> Hi Ed >> >> The solution to my MLO problem is... [drum-roll] ...to take drugs! >> >> Sorry but I had to laugh, even though I get your intent was to help. >> OK, joking aside, in truth I do find that meditation does help a lot with >> focus & purpose. But drugs & meditation aside, I do still reserve the right >> to say that MLO would be easier to use is we could find a way to have more >> than one Next Action per Project. I still think the best thing of all would >> be to hand-pick additional individual tasks to flag them to appear on the >> Next Actions list. [Fwiw, GTDNext has this.] >> >> Failing that, if we had a global setting to show the next XX tasks (e.g. >> 3 tasks) for all projects would be extremely welcome. [FWIW, Nirvana has >> this]. >> >> Given that other task managers have these features, maybe I'm not quite >> so bonkers after all? >> >> Or even maybe a field at the Project level for how many tasks to show in >> the Next Actions list. That way for larger projects you could adjust this >> value up and keep smaller projects just showing the next 1 tasks. >> >> Any other takers? >> >> J >> >> >> On Tuesday, March 20, 2018 at 1:26:45 PM UTC, Ed Wallace wrote: >>> >>> John, I get it. I don't think this will get fixed with software. Have >>> you tried adderall? I only ask ask because I totally get what your saying, >>> and it sounds just like me without my ADD meds! >>> >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/1a110c9a-3c0b-4d4d-8f20-26c7a0cc0376%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
