Some people learn about the limits of their control over events by meditating. Even when you stop trying to do anything, your body tries to do things and things change around you and you have the impulse to control things. Repeated exposure to this impulse eventually caused me to start laughing at how silly I was to assume that I was in control.
Maybe something like that could help you. Peace.
I’m annoyed when things don’t work. I’m even more annoyed when something can’t be made to work.
I find the first kind of annoyance much more ephemeral.
Very specifically for me, two parts of Getting Things Done:
I have felt so much lighter for over 15 years because I can safely forget all these things I used to struggle to remember so that they wouldn’t sneak up on me.
Getting things out of my head was easier to build as a habit at the dawn of having a computer in my pocket all day. Even back then, I simply chose to be an asshole for a few months, stopping everything to write things down or to do them on the spot if they truly took only 2 minutes. Especially taking photos of receipts and labeling them when traveling for business.
Setting reminders was similar, but rockier, since calendar apps sometimes have defects. I gradually learned which alarms to trust and learned to use those more often. Even so, Samsung Clock has at least once surprised me by setting my alarm volume to 0, causing me to miss one alarm in the last 10 years.
In both cases, I did nothing special except decide to build the habit and spend the effort to ingrain the habit through repetition over the span of a few months.
A group of people who are tired of your unjust bullshit, who are not going to let you shrug it off or get away with it, and who are not going to stop confronting you with it.
Yes. I find it helpful.
Space Invaders.
I prefer to have one authoritative database of tasks (Todoist) and then I use whatever plain text or Markdown tools are available to me in the moment for short term lists. I have settled on Standard Notes for longer term/reference notes, but I could just as easily use anything with plain text files.
You’ll almost certainly need both paper and electronic solutions, because you’ll remember stuff when you don’t have paper handy. If you can get ideas out of your head quickly, that tends to help more than having the right medium available.
I like using paper for scribbling things down while working on a task, but then my phone and computer for almost everything else. And if I have something on paper that I haven’t finished, I either move it into Todoist or throw it away.
I’m an old index card person, so I love ripping up completed task lists. It feels very therapeutic to me.
“till och från” is a new one for me, so thank you. I would have used “här och där”.
The last formulation makes perfect sense to me. I like to think I could even have written it.
Tusentack för att du tog tid för att förklara lite.
Thank you. What little I can speak or write is very firmly 1980s textbook German.
Unsurprising. I’m still well in the stage where I’m formulating thoughts in English, then translating into Swedish. Very occasionally something pops out spontaneously, fully-formed, and in Swedish.
I’m mostly thrilled to have got “i” right there, because I haven’t quite memorized i/på with time expressions. It will come.
How well does your formulation convey the nuance that I’ve been learning (off and on, often passively), but often not actively studying? The verbs “att studera”/“att plugga” feel more to me like actively working, but of course, my feelings in this regard are more about English “study” than those Swedish words.
Mostly self study from a variety of sources. I lived part time in Stockholm for four years, but it was far easier than I’d expected to speak only English, so although my reading and writing improved, my speaking and listening didn’t. Every time I tried, they switched to English on me. I don’t blame them.
Now I’m a bit stuck: I can’t find much to listen to that’s at my level. I’m past the beginner stuff but can’t keep up with Swedish spoken at full speed.
And thanks to my Swedish, I can read a surprising amount of Danish and Norwegian.
I would call myself proficient in French, passable in Spanish, barely functional in Swedish, and I can get by in German in a very banal emergency. 😉
“Delightful”.
I use copyq for this purpose. It doesn’t do exactly what you’ve asked for, but it solves a very similar underlying problem.
Not always. Sometimes one feels miserable, fears the reactions of others, and still doesn’t do the task. Sometimes we call this “depression”. Not recommended.
In your shoes, I’d want to understand more about what makes me miserable about not finishing things. In fact, I was in those shoes a decade or so ago. I take a much more measured view of that now. If I genuinely want to finish it or need to finish it, I’ll finish it. The rest is noise.
Everyone gets there in their own time. Meantime, you’re welcome, good luck, and peace.
Aha, so that’s something in the way: it might be more work than it’s worth to you. Either the uncertainty interferes with you or the certainty that it demands much more effort than it’s worth interferes with you. Does one of these hit you more than the other?
I’m certainly familiar with both feelings with regards to different projects.
So… Let me address each of those, just in case.
I don’t merely mean “Are you able to?” but also “How would you feel about those outcomes?”
Peace.
I think MIT Open Courseware would be worth exploring.