Get Everything Done

What systems, Mark style or otherwise, do you think result in the least amount of time deciding what to do overall (including any planning overhead)?

Sometimes, with lists, you can find yourself sort of looking at the list and taking time to decide what to do, or sometimes, with no list type systems, you can sometimes spend a bit more time racking your brain for "what to do" or maybe "what you're missing".

Mark's comments about how little time and energy was spent deciding what to do in his experiments with Predicting Your Day got me thinking about this.

I think what I'm referring to is the opposite sort of thing. This is more of a FOMO situation in which your intuition is *strongly* pinging with an emotional state saying that what you think you should be doing isn't actually what you should be doing. The trick, of course, is that your intuition can't actually come up with anything. It's just being emotional.

Maybe NL-FVP is where this is most easy to imagine. You write down X, and then you want to do Y more, and then Z. Now you get to see, and you ask if there is anything else you want to do before Z, to which you mind says, YES! but then when you actually try to identify what it is that you want to do, your mind goes completely blank.

But this can happen with just about any system. With a no list system, you can just be sitting there with a strong sense that there's more you want/need to put on your list, but you can't figure out what.

Or with a long list, you might have a set of things you are looking at, say, with simple scanning, but you go round and round the list and you reach an equilibrium in which your intuition is saying both to do something *and* that there's something else you need to do.

With an AF list I have found this to occur less than other systems because of the focusing effect of a closed list and the desire that it creates to move to the next page.

What struck me as potentially desirable about something like Predicting Your Day was the idea that there was very, very little deciding that had to be done up front (you don't prioritize order of execution like you would with an Ivy Lee or some other No List type) and you did it only once a day, whereas the rest of the day was driven very strongly by intuition with essentially zero mechanical operation in the middle of the day. That sense of being able to effortlessly transition from one thing to another without the "racking your brain" decision paralysis seems quite desirable.

IME, even intuition can encounter a sort of decision paralysis. Usually it ends up in my case with being very slow to get through a list because of intuition driving me towards more than one thing at the same time, making it hard to actually commit to doing one thing over the other.

avrum:

My current suspicion is that the intuitive "blockade" is possibly a type of "idealistic procrastination" and manifestation of the paradox of choice. In terms of the big-Five model with the two-aspect distinction, where Conscientiousness is divided into Industriousness and Orderliness, I suspect it might be a sort of manifestation of high orderliness with relatively low industriousness.

I think this lack of commitment/confidence in a choice manifests verbally as, "There's got to be something better," but without being able to actually find something. Of course, this could also be explained in terms of whatever that brain circuitry is that focuses on exploration and curiosity over execution.

One model I've seen for addressing idealistic procrastination is to acknowledge the fantasy, mourn the loss, and then purposefully shoot for clearing a low bar. I think that's all well and good on a "big thing" that you're not taking action on, but it's torture at a low level because of the amount of mental effort required to go through that process, stop yourself, and then actually let yourself make a (theoretically potentially sub-optimal) choice.

My theory with this thread is that one technique for dealing with this might be to simply bypass the initial trigger for rumination and paralysis by using a system that reduces or eliminates the actual amount of "decisions" that you have to make at a given point without feeling oppressive. That seems to suggest somehow a system that pre-chooses just enough to meet some level of commitment but without running afoul of natural scheduling and planning variations that occur. On the other hand, systems that require you to constantly choose between two things all the time could exacerbate such a situation.

Simple Scanning is an example of constantly making unconstrained choice. Predicting your day includes pre-choice with very little but some commitment, while also reducing or eliminating the mechanical choice points throughout the day. But I'm wondering how other systems might compare in terms of that "fast and effortless decisions" metric.

avrum:

I'm curious, if you experience "intuitive choice paralysis", what methods did you use to overcome them? Do you have a favorite system that you like to use?