Curious, to flesh out my understanding of what this is like (apologies if this feels like it’s missing the point and happy to drop this line of inquiry if it’s not useful). I believe that you are having a different experience that most people but I’m not sure what life is like so don’t know what sort of things might be useful
When you go to the bathroom, and you fail to execute the “look at the waterflosser” thing, what do you do instead? Do you look somewhere else?
What happens when you put a sign on the door saying “remember the waterflosser?”
What happens if the waterflosser is right next to whatever it is you most frequently need to do in the bathroom? Do you use the sink regularly?
(My most successfully installed TAP was “put a jar of flosspicks near my toothbrush where they’re easily visible. When I brush my teeth, I will at least pick up a flosspick”)
Do you brush your teeth? (If so, then it seems like somehow somewhere you got a habit of doing that—how did that happen?)
What is “remembering to eat” like? (it seems like you must at least successfully do that most days)
>When you go to the bathroom, and you fail to execute the “look at the waterflosser” thing, what do you do instead? Do you look somewhere else?
I look whichever direction I’m moving. Or I stare blankly while I think of something else. Or I look at the clock, which technically requires turning to look past the waterflosser but did not involve the flosser registering to my attention. Whatever was in line with what I was doing/thinking about before walking in.
>What happens when you put a sign on the door saying “remember the waterflosser?”
Never tried. No longer live there, but I could attempt something like it.
>What happens if the waterflosser is right next to whatever it is you most frequently need to do in the bathroom? Do you use the sink regularly?
It was and I did, and so I usually had my gaze wander to it while I was in the bathroom at some point. Probably 80% of the time. This usually meant that I’d remember to use it if I hadn’t already that day.
>Do you brush your teeth? (If so, then it seems like somehow somewhere you got a habit of doing that—how did that happen?)
Yes. I have a Beeminder goal for it (this is my “anchor” goal that I need to update almost every day, which will ping me with a phone notification if I miss more than a couple days, or more often forget to enter my data for a couple days). Most mornings I remember before I leave the house. I also keep a travel brush in my backpack and another at work, for the mornings when I don’t. (Somewhere between 1/3-1/4 of weekday mornings. Weekends it’s more like 80%.) Evenings I almost always think of it while I’m winding down for the night, probably 90% of the time, unless there is a distraction like a visiting guest. I think I had it as part of a routine when I was a kid, and definitely had an ironclad morning routine during my first internship, during high school, which included a shower and brushing my teeth. Before having this goal I think I remembered to brush my teeth about once every two days.
>What is “remembering to eat” like? (it seems like you must at least successfully do that most days)
You’d think! But no, not really. (If I rated the problems in my life right now by (tractability x impact) this would win.) I generally will not think about eating until my stomach hurts from hunger. Sometimes that passes and I forget about it before I have pulled myself away from whatever mildly interesting activity I’m doing. If that happens, and it doesn’t reoccur, then I will probably not think of it again until I notice my movements and thoughts becoming sluggish from lack of energy. (On one occasion, now years ago and thankfully unrepeated, I continued this for about 48 hours over a Thanksgiving Weekend, consuming only water and half a bag of stale Chex Mix. It was a bad time.) To mitigate this problem I try to keep a lot of extremely low-effort food around—yogurt drinks in the fridge, large cans of cashews on my bedside shelves, and when I noticed myself losing energy, eating some of those and then trying to get up to make something slightly more substantial like a couple PB&Js. Despite this accommodations and willingness to order takeout, I think I’ve averaged about 1.8 meals a day over the last two months of weekends, much of them taken as grazing just enough to keep me not collapsing. Luckily food at Google comes free and pre-cooked into convenient forms that require only walking, no thinking. And I am doing enough attention-intensive activities that I notice much sooner that my function is impaired, so I intervene before I start losing the ability to move or act like a person.
Maybe a next question: are there things you like doing that are moderately complicated?
If you work at Google, I’m guessing you can program. Programming is pretty complicated, and involves a lot of “if I am trying to Do X, I must Do Y” or “if I notice this sort of problem, it means I must do Z”, which I’d normally assume is trigger-action-y.
And at some level, even things like “decide to go to the bathroom → get up and start walking” (walking being pretty complicated).
Basically, if you’re able to hold a job at Google (even as a non-programmer) it seems like you must have some acquired skills. How did you acquire those skills?
I do program, and besides that play lots of strategy board games, occasionally design board games, and (theoretically) also design holidays.
I’d say the subjective experience of programming for me is much more “hmm, where have I seen this before?”, doing a big, fuzzy database lookup through my memories of past code and relevant communications. This is limited mostly by how much of the program design I can hold in my head at once; I’m not sure if that’s the same as other programmers.
(For an example, this morning I was looking at a metrics dashboard which spiked a percentile metric to 100 and then stopped getting any more data. I’d recently made a change to the metric, so I thought of the change, then other discussion related to it, then noticed it looked similar to the pattern the metric had when it was first getting turned on—very jumpy, started at 100% - and that the discussion had included migrating the metric to a different name, and concluded that this was a problem of having very little data coming in and should be fixed by changing the named data source. )
I am pretty curious about why you have some Trigger Action Patterns and not others.
I would classify, “Notice stomach hurts from hunger” → “Think about eating” to be a TAP As well as “Think about eating” → “Get up to get a yogurt” Including all the steps involved between this and actually getting and eating a yogurt
Maybe you’re “holding the intention” to go get something to eat basically the entire time, as you walk toward the yogurt. IF this were happening, I’d expect that (pretty frequently) you’d get up to grab a yogurt and then forget what you were doing and end up doing something else. Does this happen to you?
I agree that I have the hunger pains → thinking about food TAP. This seems like a lizard-brain instinct. I think classifying the series of actions to get the yogurt as a TAP would be misleading, since it suggests it’s much more automatic than reality. My modal response to “thinking about eating” is “disregard it”.
Not nearly as often as it does to my friends with ADD, but sometimes. (I’ve considered the possibility that I have ADD, but no therapist/psychiatrist to date has seriously considered it; my probability mass on that possibility is centered on “this was masked by depression and confused for anxiety”.)
Possibly-relevant wrinkles: I have a tendency to plan a discrete sequence of actions in advance and then execute them all at once. I find it significantly more difficult to go grab food when it involves passing through common areas (i.e. may contain other humans).
Curious, to flesh out my understanding of what this is like (apologies if this feels like it’s missing the point and happy to drop this line of inquiry if it’s not useful). I believe that you are having a different experience that most people but I’m not sure what life is like so don’t know what sort of things might be useful
When you go to the bathroom, and you fail to execute the “look at the waterflosser” thing, what do you do instead? Do you look somewhere else?
What happens when you put a sign on the door saying “remember the waterflosser?”
What happens if the waterflosser is right next to whatever it is you most frequently need to do in the bathroom? Do you use the sink regularly?
(My most successfully installed TAP was “put a jar of flosspicks near my toothbrush where they’re easily visible. When I brush my teeth, I will at least pick up a flosspick”)
Do you brush your teeth? (If so, then it seems like somehow somewhere you got a habit of doing that—how did that happen?)
What is “remembering to eat” like? (it seems like you must at least successfully do that most days)
>When you go to the bathroom, and you fail to execute the “look at the waterflosser” thing, what do you do instead? Do you look somewhere else?
I look whichever direction I’m moving. Or I stare blankly while I think of something else. Or I look at the clock, which technically requires turning to look past the waterflosser but did not involve the flosser registering to my attention. Whatever was in line with what I was doing/thinking about before walking in.
>What happens when you put a sign on the door saying “remember the waterflosser?”
Never tried. No longer live there, but I could attempt something like it.
>What happens if the waterflosser is right next to whatever it is you most frequently need to do in the bathroom? Do you use the sink regularly?
It was and I did, and so I usually had my gaze wander to it while I was in the bathroom at some point. Probably 80% of the time. This usually meant that I’d remember to use it if I hadn’t already that day.
>Do you brush your teeth? (If so, then it seems like somehow somewhere you got a habit of doing that—how did that happen?)
Yes. I have a Beeminder goal for it (this is my “anchor” goal that I need to update almost every day, which will ping me with a phone notification if I miss more than a couple days, or more often forget to enter my data for a couple days). Most mornings I remember before I leave the house. I also keep a travel brush in my backpack and another at work, for the mornings when I don’t. (Somewhere between 1/3-1/4 of weekday mornings. Weekends it’s more like 80%.) Evenings I almost always think of it while I’m winding down for the night, probably 90% of the time, unless there is a distraction like a visiting guest.
I think I had it as part of a routine when I was a kid, and definitely had an ironclad morning routine during my first internship, during high school, which included a shower and brushing my teeth. Before having this goal I think I remembered to brush my teeth about once every two days.
>What is “remembering to eat” like? (it seems like you must at least successfully do that most days)
You’d think! But no, not really. (If I rated the problems in my life right now by (tractability x impact) this would win.) I generally will not think about eating until my stomach hurts from hunger. Sometimes that passes and I forget about it before I have pulled myself away from whatever mildly interesting activity I’m doing. If that happens, and it doesn’t reoccur, then I will probably not think of it again until I notice my movements and thoughts becoming sluggish from lack of energy. (On one occasion, now years ago and thankfully unrepeated, I continued this for about 48 hours over a Thanksgiving Weekend, consuming only water and half a bag of stale Chex Mix. It was a bad time.)
To mitigate this problem I try to keep a lot of extremely low-effort food around—yogurt drinks in the fridge, large cans of cashews on my bedside shelves, and when I noticed myself losing energy, eating some of those and then trying to get up to make something slightly more substantial like a couple PB&Js. Despite this accommodations and willingness to order takeout, I think I’ve averaged about 1.8 meals a day over the last two months of weekends, much of them taken as grazing just enough to keep me not collapsing.
Luckily food at Google comes free and pre-cooked into convenient forms that require only walking, no thinking. And I am doing enough attention-intensive activities that I notice much sooner that my function is impaired, so I intervene before I start losing the ability to move or act like a person.
Thanks, this is interesting/helpful.
Maybe a next question: are there things you like doing that are moderately complicated?
If you work at Google, I’m guessing you can program. Programming is pretty complicated, and involves a lot of “if I am trying to Do X, I must Do Y” or “if I notice this sort of problem, it means I must do Z”, which I’d normally assume is trigger-action-y.
And at some level, even things like “decide to go to the bathroom → get up and start walking” (walking being pretty complicated).
Basically, if you’re able to hold a job at Google (even as a non-programmer) it seems like you must have some acquired skills. How did you acquire those skills?
I do program, and besides that play lots of strategy board games, occasionally design board games, and (theoretically) also design holidays.
I’d say the subjective experience of programming for me is much more “hmm, where have I seen this before?”, doing a big, fuzzy database lookup through my memories of past code and relevant communications. This is limited mostly by how much of the program design I can hold in my head at once; I’m not sure if that’s the same as other programmers.
(For an example, this morning I was looking at a metrics dashboard which spiked a percentile metric to 100 and then stopped getting any more data. I’d recently made a change to the metric, so I thought of the change, then other discussion related to it, then noticed it looked similar to the pattern the metric had when it was first getting turned on—very jumpy, started at 100% - and that the discussion had included migrating the metric to a different name, and concluded that this was a problem of having very little data coming in and should be fixed by changing the named data source. )
Could you say more about designing holidays? That sounds interesting!
I am pretty curious about why you have some Trigger Action Patterns and not others.
I would classify, “Notice stomach hurts from hunger” → “Think about eating” to be a TAP
As well as “Think about eating” → “Get up to get a yogurt”
Including all the steps involved between this and actually getting and eating a yogurt
Maybe you’re “holding the intention” to go get something to eat basically the entire time, as you walk toward the yogurt. IF this were happening, I’d expect that (pretty frequently) you’d get up to grab a yogurt and then forget what you were doing and end up doing something else. Does this happen to you?
I agree that I have the hunger pains → thinking about food TAP. This seems like a lizard-brain instinct. I think classifying the series of actions to get the yogurt as a TAP would be misleading, since it suggests it’s much more automatic than reality. My modal response to “thinking about eating” is “disregard it”.
Not nearly as often as it does to my friends with ADD, but sometimes. (I’ve considered the possibility that I have ADD, but no therapist/psychiatrist to date has seriously considered it; my probability mass on that possibility is centered on “this was masked by depression and confused for anxiety”.)
Possibly-relevant wrinkles: I have a tendency to plan a discrete sequence of actions in advance and then execute them all at once. I find it significantly more difficult to go grab food when it involves passing through common areas (i.e. may contain other humans).