Get Everything Done

Mark has said before that "resistance does not exist." I think he was playing a little bit of a semantics game, but I'm curious, whether this is still considered to be a true statement?

At any rate, I'm coming from watching these two videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bavdneN9sKg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpINkIx3saI

And in these videos, there is a pretty strong case made for resistance existing, manifesting as procrastination, and for there being at least three different fundamental types of procrastination.

In particular, the idea is that there is some sort of Intent towards action, which can be a certain level of energy towards that action. Then there is some level of resistance to that action, which impedes the intent. If the intent is great enough or resistance low enough, then that thing is actioned. Otherwise, what can be said when someone is "resisting" an action is that the level of resistance to a given intent is great enough that the intent does not manifest as action.

The video on procrastination gives three types: idealistic, avoidance, and operational. Idealistic is procrastination on action because the action is associated with an ideal outcome which is recognized at some level as unlikely, thus causing someone to prefer no action to a partially successful outcome. Avoidance procrastination prevents action on the basis of avoiding undesirable consequences, usually stemming from emotions (some type of Fear). Operational procrastination is when someone fails to take action because a given intent cannot be associated with a specific physical action to take (such as a young child not knowing how to clean their room), usually because the intent is too big to be operationalized by the person who is suffering procrastination.

Mark's Little and Often systems are obviously well suited towards dealing with operational procrastination, as they can help to encourage reducing the tasks into more manageable chunks. Thus, they can tackle issues related to feeling like a task is too big to complete.

I can even see how they might help with idealistic procrastination. By creating pressure to just do something, even if it is only a little, it's implicitly fighting against idealistic procrastination. However, this is more true in systems that create this sort of pressure, such as 5/2 or AF. Systems based on FVP type standing out may not create the same level of pressure to tackle idealistic procrastination without some extra-system analysis of tasks that forces them to be rewritten in some way. This is not necessarily something that is encoded or accounted for in those systems.

Where I feel like there seems to be the biggest issue is with avoidance procrastination or any form of failure to act on intent because of emotions. This is where I'm wondering whether or not the standing out principle might make things worse, and where I think there's a physiological argument to be made that resistance is real.

Assuming that we are dealing with Avoidance procrastination or, perhaps, Idealistic procrastination, then the primary underlying mechanism appears to be some level of intuitive fear that is resisting an intent beyond the intent's capacity to drive action. My understanding of this is that there are fundamental parts of the brain responsible for inhibitory action and parts dealing with fear that work together to strongly impede the executive function of the brain towards a given plan of action if it associates that action with sufficiently strong negative emotion. That is, at its core, resistance.

An important element of this is that this resistance is *not* necessarily something that happens in what we would consider our "conscious" brain. It happens at very fundamental levels that are triggered and then our more conscious side of our brain comes up with justifications and rationales around that avoidance, but the originating source might more properly be associated with the concept of intuition.

The verbal manifestation of such avoidance is exactly the type of phrases that Mark has used before to describe how we might intuitively decide that we don't want to do something: "How about we don't do that task," or, "I don't want to do that," or, "I'm not ready for that."

Now, if the negative emotions or anticipated negative emotions were accurate, and the level of their intensity accurate, and the nature of the danger commensurate with those feelings, or the sense of readiness was always authentic, then judging whether to do an action based on this intuition would be the absolute best thing to do. We certainly don't want to listen to our curiosity that wonders what it would be like to jump off a tall building and feel the wind in our hair. In such a case, our negative emotions are absolutely right and we should resist such curiosity with great strength!

However, the reality is that usually these emotions are *not* true. They represent a sense of danger that is not accurate or commensurate with the real threat, and are usually an unhealthy form of anxiety around a given thing that we have an intent for because it very much represents something that would move us forward. (Sometimes, it might be due to something we think we should do but that we don't really have any belief/value wrapped up in, which is a different thing entirely, and I'll put that under intent instead of resistance here.)

Now, if there was something in Mark's systems that somehow created a constant psychological processing of these emotions that progressively resulted in the handling and "clarifying" of the emotions and ego or, equivalently, that progressively addressed reasons that we weren't "ready" for something, simply as a part of working the system, then we could reasonably say that Mark's systems are designed to address resistance of the avoidance (rather than operational) kind. However, I'm struggling to see where this might be the case at all.

The closest I was able to find was the AF rules which have an explicit "review" of dismissed items, asking why they were dismissed. This analysis would have to include a processing of the emotions around that task.

However, the basic rule of working on what stands out is almost guaranteed to encourage you to work on items that are not going to trigger a strong avoidance sense (by definition). Thus, during the normal day to day operations, none of the intuitive systems will ever encourage you to face these emotional issues. Rather, you'll be encouraged to ignore them and avoid them as much as possible as long as there are other things to do on the list. This means that such items are going to sit longer on the list, and the potential emotional issues surrounding them will have a tendency to go up, usually.

Mark's systems will have the effect of creating a slight increase in the level of intent surrounding a task, because as the task continues to sit on the list you will have a tendency to want to either dismiss it or action it. This raises the level of "intent energy" that you are putting towards that task, but that's simply a way of trying to encourage a sort of "suck it up" approach towards taking action by increasing the intention to high enough levels to overcome the resistance.

On the other hand, Mark rightly points out that you'll work much more efficiently if you reduce resistance to tasks rather than trying to increase the amount of energy towards doing them. However, it seems to me that the "do or die" point with Mark's intuitive systems will tend to create the situation where items sit on the list long enough to create crisis of some sort or another, and then, if intent is still high enough, one will encounter a lot of anxiety because there is a strong intent to do a task, but even higher resistance to it, leading to a situation where you don't want to dismiss but also where you don't want to take action. In this case, you'll eventually be forced to feel lots of negative emotion. But what do you do at that point. The healthy thing would be to understand the underlying reasons for the task sitting there for so long, but by the time you might get to this in the system that might be quite a pain. Additionally, there could be even more resistance built up, requiring even more work to tackle it. This is a bit opposite to the little and often principle.

Mark does point out that you'll want to ask yourself about such tasks at some point, but it seems to me that the systems generally are designed in such a way that they encourage avoidance procrastination rather than reduce it and that even when you do face the reality, it might be easier to simply switch systems or simply grow the list longer.

While it's not conclusive, I do think that the tendency of people to eventually "bog down" in a system as well as for long list systems to get progressively longer lists over time provides at least some evidence that this could be an issue, since these "avoidance" items are likely to represent some of those items that keep the list growing and when you eventually bog down, it's often easier to simply start a new system than to really analyze things.

A system that addressed avoidance procrastination would be one that encouraged users to process the underlying emotional reasons for not doing something early and often, thus progressively reducing resistance to any "avoided" tasks at each consideration until the resistance was sufficiently low to induce action. This would also provide for a better means of dismissal, as it would enable tasks to be dismissed more readily and confidently from the system, since the intent and resistance of the tasks would be addressed more often, leading to more confidence to either do the task or dismiss it as not necessary. I don't know what such a system would look like, but I'm not sure that Mark's current systems address this.

In summary, it seems to me that Mark's intuitive systems are strongly suited to addressing operational procrastination, possibly okay at addressing idealistic procrastination, and possibly maladapted to addressing avoidance procrastination. But maybe I'm missing something? I'd love to hear others thoughts about this and what they think.

In case it gets lost in the big picture above, my point about intuition was that our intuition very often *cannot* be trusted with regards to reality or with what is a "good idea" to do right now, because intuition is very often capable of being strongly driven by maladapted emotional processes from our past experiences that are not accurate. This undermines the concept of standing out unless we have some way of dealing with it.

Mark:

Thanks for highlighting those points. I'm still not sure how they address the main issue I was wondering about, though. Part of my point is that processes that don't explicitly include components to address and work through emotional avoidance issues are likely to be susceptible to breakage because of avoidance procrastination. I'm not convinced that you simply can't design a system to deal with these things (after all, isn't that the point of a lot of the work in psychology?).

Additionally, I agree that practice with your intuition is reinforcing and helpful, but that doesn't mean you're necessarily training your intuition in the right hting. Here's we're talking about tasks that are avoidance procrastinators, meaning that they are already heavy and present in the mind (they have high intent but high resistance), which means repeatedly looking at them is usually just going to increase levels of depression related to the task, *not* reduce resistance to the task (this is documented in psychology, I believe).

Additionally, each time you avoid the task, you're training your intuition and reward circuitry to continue avoiding the task, while encouraging emphasis on those things that are not triggering your avoidance, such as the myriad of things that suppress negative emotions, such as video games, &c.

We're also talking about tasks that you aren't taking action on, even a little. These are tasks that you can't simply bring yourself to do a little of. I agree that if you can manage to expose yourself to the source of your negative emotions a little bit and come out "okay" at the other end, then you *are* training to help overcome certain tasks that are avoidance blocked. I also agree that in this case, some of your work discusses rewriting the task in some other fashion to reframe the problem, perhaps making it a smaller task. But that is a relatively de-emphasized element of your systems in general (a highlighted element of your systems is specifically the fact that along list system like yours doesn't need you to decompose tasks into smaller chunks and you've written about that as well). Thus, we're talking about tasks that trigger strong defense mechanisms that make you not want to do the task.

Such tasks are very often highly important tasks that we are simply scared to do. Just a few that I can think of off the top of my head that I hear from people: * Quit my job * Enroll in PhD program * Ask Lucy out * Get a girlfriend * End friendship with X * Ask for raise * Go to gym * and so on. For many people, these are tasks that trigger very strong negative emotions and they won't take any action on them as written, they won't ever stand out, but they are all things they absolutely can't afford to give up on (in some sense). For some of these people (some real world examples I know personally), it's literally killing them to not take action on these things. These are the things their intuition is telling them very strongly to avoid doing, and also telling them strong that they must do, it's just that there are two parts of their psyche at play.

In many of these cases, I've found the exact opposite to be the case re: your last point. Specifically, the more on top of their life they get, doing lots of busy work, the more they are able to suppress their negative emotions and avoid doing the main thing they should be doing, and the end up actually *more* likely to not do what they need to be doing. They end up thinking the equivalent, "I have time, I'm okay." But they're not.

These are, IMO, the "big questions" of time management, and I'd like to know whether or not the intuitive standing out principle (whether in the form of No List or long lists) can actually deal with this appropriately, as it's one of, IMO, the pillars of resistance and procrastination.

Mark:

Thanks for clarifying your intent regarding freedom in putting things on one's list. I think one of the differences, though, is that your systems generally specifically don't require you to do this work as an explicit part of the system. It's fine to say, "Put them at the right level," but there's nothing that explicitly quantifies what that is, which means that it's up to your internalized competency with self-reflection. But that's exactly the sort of thing that is difficult for many people. I think it's very easy for people to not even realize that they have a task at the wrong level, and not to be able to understand that. The process of working a long list system intuitively is unlikely to result in an external prompt that makes the user ask these questions explicitly.

That's one of the benefits in something like GTD: each step is concrete, externalized, and listed out, so you know whether or not you're "doing things right" or not. In GTD, if you put something on your list that isn't moving, the main question to ask is "are you sure this is a real Next Action?" It's an explicit item that you "do" as a part of running the system. Your systems are much more intuitive and reliant on internal competencies with managing those sorts of questions, since there are no explicit rules in your systems to prompt someone to ask these questions. That's an advantage, but I think it also is a disadvantage if people haven't learned how to develop those skills.

That's a good point about the AF systems. I think actually AF1 includes an instruction to this effect, so I wasn't adequately accounting for the "after dismissal" process in AF, which probably does count as this sort of explicit consideration. It does seem that systems like FVP and Simple Scanning leave this part out of the explicit elements and just leaves it to the intuitive "implicit" parts of the system.