However, sometimes it gets much more complex. It can very well happen that I insert a trigger to “must go do dishes once X is done”, but then I think “Hmm, maybe I should go do dishes” at some point in the future when I’m in-between activities, and X happens to be done, but (and this is the gut-kicking bastard):
Thinking that I should do the dishes is not properly linked to checking whether X is done, and thus I don’t see the process that tells me that X is done so I should do the dishes!
And therefore what happens afterwards, instead of realizing that X is done me getting up to do dishes, is me thinking “yeah I should, but meh, this is more interesting”. And X has never crossed my mind during this entire internal exchange. And now I’m back to tabsploding / foruming / gaming. And then three hours later I realize that all of this happened when I finally think of X. Oops.
So yes. “Trying to remember” is an active-only process for me. Something must trigger it. The thoughts and triggers do not happen easily and automatically at the right and proper times. Once the whole process is there and [Insert favorite motivational hack] is actually in my steam-of-consciousness, then this whole “motivation” thing becomes completely different and much easier to solve.
Unfortunately, I do not yet have access to technology of sufficient sophistication to externalize and fully automate this process. I’ve dreamed of it for years though.
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.)
Am I correct in ascertaining that your issue is less making the right decisions, and more trying to remember to consciously make decisions at all?
In some sense, yes.
However, sometimes it gets much more complex. It can very well happen that I insert a trigger to “must go do dishes once X is done”, but then I think “Hmm, maybe I should go do dishes” at some point in the future when I’m in-between activities, and X happens to be done, but (and this is the gut-kicking bastard):
Thinking that I should do the dishes is not properly linked to checking whether X is done, and thus I don’t see the process that tells me that X is done so I should do the dishes!
And therefore what happens afterwards, instead of realizing that X is done me getting up to do dishes, is me thinking “yeah I should, but meh, this is more interesting”. And X has never crossed my mind during this entire internal exchange. And now I’m back to tabsploding / foruming / gaming. And then three hours later I realize that all of this happened when I finally think of X. Oops.
So yes. “Trying to remember” is an active-only process for me. Something must trigger it. The thoughts and triggers do not happen easily and automatically at the right and proper times. Once the whole process is there and [Insert favorite motivational hack] is actually in my steam-of-consciousness, then this whole “motivation” thing becomes completely different and much easier to solve.
Unfortunately, I do not yet have access to technology of sufficient sophistication to externalize and fully automate this process. I’ve dreamed of it for years though.
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.)