Have you tried designing solutions for this problem? Pomodoro and the like are designed to combat akrasia; they’re designed to supplement or retrain willpower. They’re solutions for the wrong problem; your willpower isn’t entering into it. Hypothesis: Pomodoro kind-of sort-of worked for you for a short period of time before inexplicably failing. You might not have even consciously noticed it going off.
If I’m reading you correctly, that hypothesis is entirely correct. Pomodoro is also not the only thing where this has happened. In most cases, I don’t consciously realize what happens until later, usually days or weeks after the fact.
I’ve tried coming up with some solutions to the problem, yes, but so far there’s only three avenues that I’ve tried that had promising results:
Use mental imagination techniques to train habits: imagine arriving in situation or getting feelings X, anchor that situation or feeling to action Y. This works exceptionally well and easily for me, but… Yep. Doing the training is itself something that suffers from this problem. I would need to use it to train using it. Which I can’t, ’caus I’m not good enough at it (I tried). Some bootstrapping would be required for this to be a reliable method, but it’s also in itself a rather expensive and time-consuming exercise (not the same order of magnitude as constant mindfulness, though), so I’d prefer better alternatives.
Spam post-its or other forms of fixed visual / auditory reminders in the appropriate contexts, places and times. Problem is, this becomes like the permanent or fixed-timed chat windows in the programmed Manager example—my brain learns to phase them out or ignore them, something which is made exponentially worse when trying to scale things up to more things.
Externalize and automate using machines and devices. Setting programmatic reminders on my phone using tasker is the best-working variant I’ve found so far, but the app is difficult to handle and crashes often—and every single time it crashes, I lose everything (all presets, all settings, all events, everything—as if I had reinstalled the app completely). I gave up on that after about the fourth time I spent hours configuring it and then lost everything from a single unrelated crash.
I actually suffer from exactly the same issue. (I opted to try to run the Manager app full-time, although I’m not having a lot of luck training myself to actually do it. I figure any wasted brain cycles probably weren’t being used anyways on account that I couldn’t remember to do things that required using them.)
Thus far the only real “hack” I’ve worked out is to constantly change reminder mechanisms. I’m actually fine with highly disruptive alerts—my favorite alarm is also the most annoying—but the people around me tend to hate them.
Hacks aside, routine has been the only thing I’ve found that helps, and helps long-term. And given my work schedule, which can vary from “Trying to find something to do” to “Working eighteen hours days for two weeks straight” with just about everything in the middle, routine has been very hard to establish.
However, I have considerably better luck limiting my routine; waking up at 6 AM every day, and dedicating this time strictly to “Stuff that needs doing”, has worked for me in the past. (Well, up until a marathon work period.)
This may be a stupid question, but I have to ask:
Have you tried designing solutions for this problem? Pomodoro and the like are designed to combat akrasia; they’re designed to supplement or retrain willpower. They’re solutions for the wrong problem; your willpower isn’t entering into it. Hypothesis: Pomodoro kind-of sort-of worked for you for a short period of time before inexplicably failing. You might not have even consciously noticed it going off.
If I’m reading you correctly, that hypothesis is entirely correct. Pomodoro is also not the only thing where this has happened. In most cases, I don’t consciously realize what happens until later, usually days or weeks after the fact.
I’ve tried coming up with some solutions to the problem, yes, but so far there’s only three avenues that I’ve tried that had promising results:
Use mental imagination techniques to train habits: imagine arriving in situation or getting feelings X, anchor that situation or feeling to action Y. This works exceptionally well and easily for me, but… Yep. Doing the training is itself something that suffers from this problem. I would need to use it to train using it. Which I can’t, ’caus I’m not good enough at it (I tried). Some bootstrapping would be required for this to be a reliable method, but it’s also in itself a rather expensive and time-consuming exercise (not the same order of magnitude as constant mindfulness, though), so I’d prefer better alternatives.
Spam post-its or other forms of fixed visual / auditory reminders in the appropriate contexts, places and times. Problem is, this becomes like the permanent or fixed-timed chat windows in the programmed Manager example—my brain learns to phase them out or ignore them, something which is made exponentially worse when trying to scale things up to more things.
Externalize and automate using machines and devices. Setting programmatic reminders on my phone using tasker is the best-working variant I’ve found so far, but the app is difficult to handle and crashes often—and every single time it crashes, I lose everything (all presets, all settings, all events, everything—as if I had reinstalled the app completely). I gave up on that after about the fourth time I spent hours configuring it and then lost everything from a single unrelated crash.
I actually suffer from exactly the same issue. (I opted to try to run the Manager app full-time, although I’m not having a lot of luck training myself to actually do it. I figure any wasted brain cycles probably weren’t being used anyways on account that I couldn’t remember to do things that required using them.)
Thus far the only real “hack” I’ve worked out is to constantly change reminder mechanisms. I’m actually fine with highly disruptive alerts—my favorite alarm is also the most annoying—but the people around me tend to hate them.
Hacks aside, routine has been the only thing I’ve found that helps, and helps long-term. And given my work schedule, which can vary from “Trying to find something to do” to “Working eighteen hours days for two weeks straight” with just about everything in the middle, routine has been very hard to establish.
However, I have considerably better luck limiting my routine; waking up at 6 AM every day, and dedicating this time strictly to “Stuff that needs doing”, has worked for me in the past. (Well, up until a marathon work period.)