TesTeq
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I've seen many times on youtube how @DavidAllen had been coaching somebody and saying "These list are not mine, they're yours!". Lists can be unmotivating when they grow and they grow when you're a dreamer instead of a GTDer.
Musician needs help
- Thread starter Gogoriviera
- Start date
Gardener
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My puzzlement may be about tying habit formation to motivation--if that's what you're saying. I think part of how I see habits is that they're things that don't require motivation, because you've made them routine.
TesTeq
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Habits don't need motivation since they are automatic. Habit formation needs motivation.
Gardener
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But.
I think that GTD can definitely help with things that need motivation. It sounded a few posts above like you were saying it couldn't. Are you saying that?
TesTeq
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OK. Can a hammer motivate you to build a yacht? For me GTD is a hammer for my brain. I can be more productive using a hammer but this tool cannot motivate me to do anything.
I think GTD helps us understand our motives by encouraging the "why" question at different horizons. I agree with Tes about habits, but I have found that projects and next actions are not very useful to me in building habits. Especially those habits I am not so committed to. I can tell which ones they are because I don't do them. Habit formation seems to be a special case, at least for me.
Gardener
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I can definitely see using GTD to establish habits. One example:
Project: Establish the habit of doing the dishes daily.
- Block off all day Saturday to declutter the counters and finish the entire dish backlog.
- Block off the next Saturday afternoon in case the habit doesn't fully take.
- Prep a stack of kitchen towels to use as extended dish drainers.
- Make Saturday brunch reservation.
- Get everybody's orders for for Saturday night pizza.
(Calendar items for Saturday: Dish Frenzy! Brunch! Dish Frenzy Part II! Order Pizza!)
- Add a reminder to the grocery list: NO kitchen-destruction recipes for at least two weeks!
- Add cereal and milk to the grocery list for two weeks of no-cook breakfasts.
- Add paper plates to the grocery list, for emergency support.
- Add doughnuts to the grocery list for Saturday morning sugar rush.
- Print the Slob Comes Clean "four habits" printable and put it up in the kitchen.
- Download two dozen episodes of the SCC podcast to listen to while doing dishes.
- WAITING FOR Saturday.
- Create a daily 7am phone reminder, starting Sunday, to empty the drainer.
- Create a daily 8pm phone reminder, starting Sunday, to do the dishes.
Project: Establish the habit of doing the dishes daily.
- Block off all day Saturday to declutter the counters and finish the entire dish backlog.
- Block off the next Saturday afternoon in case the habit doesn't fully take.
- Prep a stack of kitchen towels to use as extended dish drainers.
- Make Saturday brunch reservation.
- Get everybody's orders for for Saturday night pizza.
(Calendar items for Saturday: Dish Frenzy! Brunch! Dish Frenzy Part II! Order Pizza!)
- Add a reminder to the grocery list: NO kitchen-destruction recipes for at least two weeks!
- Add cereal and milk to the grocery list for two weeks of no-cook breakfasts.
- Add paper plates to the grocery list, for emergency support.
- Add doughnuts to the grocery list for Saturday morning sugar rush.
- Print the Slob Comes Clean "four habits" printable and put it up in the kitchen.
- Download two dozen episodes of the SCC podcast to listen to while doing dishes.
- WAITING FOR Saturday.
- Create a daily 7am phone reminder, starting Sunday, to empty the drainer.
- Create a daily 8pm phone reminder, starting Sunday, to do the dishes.
Gardener
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...all of which clarifies my belief that habit formation isn't about motivation and will power. It's about making the path to the habit as easy as humanly possible--to make motivation and willpower LESS necessary.
In the dish-habit scenario, there are lots of actions to reduce the risk of a level of "dish overwhelm" that will require a too-high level of motivation. Some are designed to make the initial push (Dish Frenzy!) as easy as possible. Some (paper plates and the second Saturday afternoon) are designed to minimize the damage of habit slips, so that if you slip you aren't right back where you started. And some are planned for a specific period of time, on the theory that after two weeks the habit might be sufficiently well established to tolerate a little more challenge--the chaos after making chicken fried steak, for example.
This is not entirely unlike the way that my father broke his smoking habit, a million years ago.
He got bags and bags of individually wrapped candies, keeping them everywhere, so that he had a substitute habit for his hands and his mouth at those times when he used to sit back and light a cigarette. They were bitter chewy candy--strong licorice, for example--because...OK, not sure, but that bitterness was part of his plan, as was the fact that he could start and finish a candy fairly quickly, and then reach for another one. He drank a ton of coffee to have something hot in his mouth, and when he could't take any more coffee, he drank hot water. And he forbid himself to make any substantial life decisions for several months, because he made those decisions by walking and smoking while he thought about his options.
In the dish-habit scenario, there are lots of actions to reduce the risk of a level of "dish overwhelm" that will require a too-high level of motivation. Some are designed to make the initial push (Dish Frenzy!) as easy as possible. Some (paper plates and the second Saturday afternoon) are designed to minimize the damage of habit slips, so that if you slip you aren't right back where you started. And some are planned for a specific period of time, on the theory that after two weeks the habit might be sufficiently well established to tolerate a little more challenge--the chaos after making chicken fried steak, for example.
This is not entirely unlike the way that my father broke his smoking habit, a million years ago.
He got bags and bags of individually wrapped candies, keeping them everywhere, so that he had a substitute habit for his hands and his mouth at those times when he used to sit back and light a cigarette. They were bitter chewy candy--strong licorice, for example--because...OK, not sure, but that bitterness was part of his plan, as was the fact that he could start and finish a candy fairly quickly, and then reach for another one. He drank a ton of coffee to have something hot in his mouth, and when he could't take any more coffee, he drank hot water. And he forbid himself to make any substantial life decisions for several months, because he made those decisions by walking and smoking while he thought about his options.
Gardener, Gardener, please tell me that this is parody.
Gardener
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Nope! That is, it’s fiction—it’s not a plan I’ve used—but it’s not parody. There are indeed people in the world who struggle with housekeeping.
Is the funny part the idea of having trouble establishing a habit at all, or the idea of having trouble establishing a dishwashing habit?
Peter Van Harmelen
Registered
Completely with @TesTeq I would recommend continuing to read the book and simultaneously working with one of the guides to begin setting up your system. They can be bought for $10 at: https://store.gettingthingsdone.com/setup-guides-s/107.htm
Good luck, from one musician to another
Peter
Peter Van Harmelen
Registered
Hi Kelly,
Notion is an amazing tool. I've been playing around with it for the last half year or so and can see how it can be a great tool for GTD. Because there is no API, integrations are non existent. I'm just wondering how you go about capturing in Notion. I know there is the web clipper, which works great but I'm wondering what you do with email since it is not possible to forward email to Notion?
Peter
TesTeq
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Isn't it better to be honest with oneself, forget the habit formation dream and just define a recurring (weekly) Next Action: "Block off all day Saturday to declutter the counters and finish the entire dish backlog."?
@mcogilvieBut seriously: making a list does not create a habit. You need a cue, a routine and a reward according to Charles Duhigg. Or - for a desirable behavior - you need MAP (Motivation & Ability & Prompt) according to BJ Fogg.
Gardener
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Isn't it better to be honest with oneself, forget the habit formation dream and just define a recurring (weekly) Next Action: "Block off all day Saturday to declutter the counters and finish the entire dish backlog."?
Well...no. We try to form the habit of inbox zero. That seems to be permissible. Why is trying to form the habit of ‘sink zero’ apparently...wrong? Implausible? I’m confused.
I’m seeing some pretty intense resistance to the idea of making a plan to improve one’s practices and habits. I’m confused.
But what’s wrong with using GTD to organize and plan that cue, routine, and reward?
No, neither of those are funny. I know people who struggle with household chores, although I think the most common underlying problems are not associated with planning. What’s unusual is the sheer volume and detail of the planning. I think I would have “wash dishes and wipe countertops“ on my @home list.
Gardener
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But that means you already have the habit. The person in this example would be a person who has struggled, perhaps for years, with kitchen chaos, and has failed. (Edited to add: And is it not clear that pretty much all of it, other than the 7am and 7pm ticklers, is a one-time project?)
“Wash dishes” assumes there’s room between the dish pile in the sink and the faucet. It assumes that there’s counter space to drain the dishes, that isn’t full of dirty dishes. It assumes that there’s free counter space to wipe.
When none of those things are true, some planning is called for.
So it’s clear that I should have started with a more familiar struggle.
This one doesn’t happen to be my struggle, but it’s not all that rare.
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TesTeq
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Nothing is wrong if it works FOR YOU. But there's a ton of research that shows how to form habits. If you hate washing the dishes and you can tolerate a sink full of dirty plates no plan will help. @mcogilvie
Gardener
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I think that the confusion here may be between a person who doesn't want to do the thing, and a person who absolutely wants to do the thing but has executive function issues that mean that they need to give themselves extra support. Support that they could use GTD to plan.
Kelly_Adam
Registered
Hey Peter.
I wouldn't email to Notion even if I could. I found previously emailing to my task manager's inbox overwhelming and messy and wasn't for me. I ended up having emails everywhere and got confused very quickly. Now, since only recently overhauling my email process. I manually add the task into the task manager if I feel I need to, otherwise I leave it as an action in email. The action of manually writing the email as a task in a context I can control and tag any way I want, to be the key for me. I become numb to hundreds of random emails in my inbox otherwise.
For emails that are reference material and not actionable, I use Evernote. I don't store too much reference material in Notion unless it's project support for active projects.
I use many methods of capturing but for the most part I have a page in my Notion called Brain Dump. All my capturing goes there for sorting later and of course, is available on my iphone. A pad and pen at the kitchen bench while sorting kids’ breakfast and packing lunches in the morning is where most of it happens though and I transfer to Notion as soon as I sit at my desk.
I favourtise (new word) in Notion pages I'm currently working on, my current week, the kids schedule, the current book I'm reading to take notes. Maybe an important project or two - to keep front and centre in my mind, if that's my focus for the week. I change these during my weekly review.
By far the best training I've done so far is Marie Poulin. She teaches setting up templates (which I use for my weeks) using relational data bases etc. I did have to modify her teaching to my GTD way but once I got the hang of it, it was super easy.
https://mariepoulin.com/notion-mastery/
Let me know if there's anything else I can help with, cheers Peter.
Kelly