i am also keen to think through how ai can make my workflows better! i agree that they are not quite there yet for entirely automating parts of task management.
no, I just want them to go away upon completion
seems good, seems eventually possible
The core is I want the system/ tool to be invisible … Touch tasks as close to once as possible … Why are you making a “today” list?
i agree that that many of the best systems require literally zero cognitive overhead. but i’m skeptical that optimal task management should ever literally be zero effort.
touching each task literally only once (to add it) requires you to perfectly predict the future. the world is a complex system and out of your control. this implies that you cannot perfectly anticipate what tasks you will need to do at some point in future. something new and urgent may come up, that displaces things you initially thought you might want to do on some particular day. something may later become irrelevant reality changes and new information comes to light.
now, it does in principle seem possible to automate away the task of touching the tasks to ai. if you had an ai assistant with an incredible amount of context on your life, and could predict actions you might want to take to maintain your tasks with reasonable accuracy, you could build some system that just serves you tasks. i think there are some problems with this vision. firstly, i expect in such a world almost all of the tasks on your stack could just be done AI too. second, i have local preferences. some days i just “don’t feel” like doing some task, and would rather punt it to the next day and do something else instead. AIs could in principle understand this in the limit, but i expect this to take longer than the first AIs capable of serving you reasonable tasks in a reasonable order. third, i personally would feel a bit like a robot here, if i were just executing actions that some system has told me to complete. i would rather be able to exert agency and choose what i do for myself, even if that contradicts the “most optimal” next task.
You seem to enjoy the planning and to get satisfaction from task completion.
thanks for the comment!
i am also keen to think through how ai can make my workflows better! i agree that they are not quite there yet for entirely automating parts of task management.
seems good, seems eventually possible
i agree that that many of the best systems require literally zero cognitive overhead. but i’m skeptical that optimal task management should ever literally be zero effort.
touching each task literally only once (to add it) requires you to perfectly predict the future. the world is a complex system and out of your control. this implies that you cannot perfectly anticipate what tasks you will need to do at some point in future. something new and urgent may come up, that displaces things you initially thought you might want to do on some particular day. something may later become irrelevant reality changes and new information comes to light.
now, it does in principle seem possible to automate away the task of touching the tasks to ai. if you had an ai assistant with an incredible amount of context on your life, and could predict actions you might want to take to maintain your tasks with reasonable accuracy, you could build some system that just serves you tasks. i think there are some problems with this vision. firstly, i expect in such a world almost all of the tasks on your stack could just be done AI too. second, i have local preferences. some days i just “don’t feel” like doing some task, and would rather punt it to the next day and do something else instead. AIs could in principle understand this in the limit, but i expect this to take longer than the first AIs capable of serving you reasonable tasks in a reasonable order. third, i personally would feel a bit like a robot here, if i were just executing actions that some system has told me to complete. i would rather be able to exert agency and choose what i do for myself, even if that contradicts the “most optimal” next task.
agreed, ymmv