Resistance: The Key Time Management Concept
Monday, June 13, 2022 at 10:48 The more I think about it and the more experience I get, the more I realise that the key to good time management is how one handles resistance.
I don’t mean resistance by other people to our brilliant ideas. I mean the resistance we have ourselves to what we know we should be doing. Imagine for a second what it would be like if you had no resistance to any of your work. Wouldn’t you just sail through it, getting everything done when it should be done without any reluctance or struggle to get going or keep going. Everything in your life would be beautifully ordered and you’d be able to look back with pride on your ongoing achievements.
Or would you?
Doesn’t resistance have an important role to play? Without it there would be a danger of taking on far too much, taking on tasks which you are not properly qualified to do or which you haven’t properly researched, and in short behaving like an over-revved engine. Resistance in other words is an important tool provided by nature to prevent us from getting into trouble or danger.
So it’s not a question of abolishing resistance, but of learning to handle it properly.
Years ago I wrote about an interesting phenomenon concerning resistance. I realised that in a list of tasks of varying degrees of resistance, every time you scan the list the resistance to the tasks you haven’t selected decreases. This is actually the basis of those of my systems which use intuitive scanning. You can test this yourself by drawing up a short list of tasks, marking each out of 10 for the amount of resistance you feel to it, doing a scan and then re-marking the remaining tasks before you do the next scan.
Why does this effect happen?
I think it’s because every time you scan the list you do a micro-assessment of each task. On each scan of the task the micro-assessment changes because your brain has been working on it subconsciously between scans. The task actually becomes more approachable with each scan. If this doesn’t happen with a particular task, it’s probably a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it at all.
A problem with many time management systems is that they encourage you to action tasks too early in the process. This has two possible results, one good, one bad.
The bad one is that forcing yourself to do tasks in spite of your resistance to them, has the effect of raising your resistance to screaming point, and you take refuge in valueless displacement activities.
The good one is that forcing yourself to act in spite of your resistance will eventually teach your brain how to handle resistance itself much better. But this is at the cost of properly “softening up” the tasks. You will therefore be spending much more mental energy.
In my next post I’m going to suggest a way of making effective use of the reduction in resistance caused by the scanning process.
Reader Comments (12)
I've been mucking around with index cards, one project per card. During my weekly review/plan, I update each card with a next action, or some other prompt for action. Every morning I scan each index card, and choose up to 4 projects to focus on for the day. I agree that regular scans are helpful.
What I'm not so sure about is whether small, light doses of exposure to resistance through a quick scan through a list is actually more efficient than sitting for a more extended period of time with the resistance on one single item. They both could help to overcome or understand resistance to a given thing, leading either to action or to dismissal, but it's not clear to me that the small doses or the large single dose are more fundamentally efficient in terms of how much mental energy you use in the long run while processing that resistance.
I certainly would agree that forcing yourself to act, especially to a very high resistance topic might be particularly energy intensive and inefficient, but that's probably the least ideal out of the three options I've considered here.
<< What I'm not so sure about is whether small, light doses of exposure to resistance through a quick scan through a list is actually more efficient than sitting for a more extended period of time with the resistance on one single item. >>
1) How do you decide which item to sit with for an extended period of time? Doesn't that involve some form of scanning the list?
2) Isn't sitting with a single high resistant item in itself an action which causes resistance to arise? By which I mean that you are liable to say to yourself "I don't want to have to sit with [Extremely Difficult Task] because that implies that I'm going to do it".
It doesn’t always work, but majority’s in favor.
<<How do you decide which item to sit with for an extended period of time? Doesn't that involve some form of scanning the list?>>
It does usually involve scanning a list, but not nearly so often. And the item is usually chosen as something I consider "high impact" in terms of the value it would bring to my present and future life.
<<Isn't sitting with a single high resistant item in itself an action which causes resistance to arise? By which I mean that you are liable to say to yourself "I don't want to have to sit with [Extremely Difficult Task] because that implies that I'm going to do it".>>
It is possible that I do this and I'm not aware of it, however, at least based on what I can introspect on, my experience tells me, no. Partly, that's because I might not end up doing it. I already have a sales pitch to myself that indicates why this would be valuable to me to do, so I can see the value in it. However, that doesn't mean that I'm going to end up doing it if I sit with it. Instead, sitting with it usually allows me enough time to process it and understand it to a point that I either decide to break it down, do it, or say, no, this *isn't* something I want to do, and there's a good reason for this, and I'm either going to defer this to an intentional time in the future or I'm going to let it go and dismiss it.
Eventually, you *will* get to the high resistance tasks, because if you are reviewing them all the time, then they will eventually break down enough to reach the threshold of action. However, what concerns me is that it would be very likely that you wouldn't be actioning these things nearly enough, especially if these are things that really need to be done much more frequently and with much more regularity than the other 10 things, which can easily be done only sporadically.
That is, if you rely only on scanning a list without having some way to prevent you from taking action on low resistance tasks, but you are also putting anything and everything that you want onto the list, you'll always end up in a situation where you're doing too much low impact stuff and not enough of the high impact stuff that would move you forward and improve your life more. I'm not sure your internal sense of "I'm doing too much trivial stuff" will trigger fast enough for this to be enough to keep you from wasting your day on trivial stuff for, say, 4 to 5 out of 7 days in the week.
Maybe that means what I'm really saying is that I might value a system that helps increase resistance to trivial work *more* than a system that decreases resistance on high impact work, since, maybe, I have more trouble with too little resistance than too much of it?
<< Sitting with a task I wasn’t prepared to do gives me an opportunity to mentally prepare to do it, and this lowers resistance. >>
Yes, I totally agree. But that's not what I was saying. If you have a high resistance task which you really don't want to do (but need to), the tendency is to avoid thinking about it at all. So you might well resist the whole idea of sitting down with it.
In other words sitting down with a task is part of doing it, and you're resisting doing it.
See my answer to Alan above. Sitting down with a task is part of doing it, so one may well be resisting sitting down with it.
You are equating easy, low impact and low resistance as if they were synonyms. There are high impact tasks which are easy, and there are low resistance task which are difficult, and the fact that you are resisting doing something doesn't necessarily mean that it's high impact or even desirable.
The real point of the method which I have been describing is that it reduces resistance to *all* tasks towards zero. If you have little or no resistance to every task then there is no advantage in chosing easy trivial time-wasting tasks over tasks which provide real value.
This has always been my experience with tools like Simple Scanning.
“ I might value a system that helps increase resistance to trivial work *more* than a system that decreases resistance on high impact work, since, maybe, I have more trouble with too little resistance than too much of it?”
There are physical mechanisms to increase resistance particularly used for dealing with bad habits. Put the temptation out of sight, inaccessible without more effort. I apply this principle to balancing work through the list of tasks I make. Let the things you want done more be more visible, and the things needing less attention, less.
Now, this wasn't always the case, and there were still some high-resistance items which didn't move quickly in this system (e.g., reading a difficult textbook)--probably because I didn't work on them very long each time they were selected.
This topic of resistance interests me, for sure. I'm not sure if this is turning into a blog series. I'll add my two cents on one point... I think Mark's distinction between resisting doing something and resisting not doing something is a powerful one. (See: http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2021/1/19/a-new-question-examples.html ) The first kind of resistance slows you down but the second kind of resistance propels you forward and makes you want to finish stuff. My experience with "What am I resisting not doing?" largely paralleled Mark's (http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2021/2/3/continuing-the-experiment.html ). It worked as a stand-alone question but not with a list. (And it seems stressful and cognitively taxing to keep asking yourself a stand-alone question--that's partly why I discontinued it.) I'm not sure if Mark is revisiting this idea. It seemed like a breakthrough when he introduced it.
I was thinking about why this works. As I complete zero resistance tasks the story in my mind about myself changes. Before starting I feel like the tasks are hard and that I lack the motivation or drive to finish them. As I start knocking them out both of these beliefs change. I start feeling like the tasks are easier than I thought and that I’m capable of finishing them.
Technique feels like a keeper.