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Something about the future defeats our imaginative ability. “Present cars in front of one’s future,” says Tim Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University who learns of the delay. He says that we take our future as strangers, that he is someone we can throw a lot of work into his lap. On some strange level, we don’t get what we do.
One of Pychyl’s students recently tried a clever experimental trick to delay people less. The student studied through a guided meditation exercise. These predicted themselves at the end of the quarter, meeting the future self. “Look,” says Pychyl, “these people” developed more empathy for themselves in the future, and that was linked to a decrease in delay. ” They realized that time was not infinite. The future was not a stranger, but someone to be protected. It seems that to get out of our ass, we have to come to terms with the finite nature of the time we have on Earth.
This is the black-metal nature of task management: every time you write a task for yourself you are deciding how to spend the decisive moments of your most renewable resource: your life. All the to-do lists are ultimately about death. (“Do you love life?” Wrote Ben Franklin. “Then don’t waste time, because that’s what life is all about.”)
I began to suspect that this was an arterial and deep source of some emotion around the to-do lists. Those who make applications for the tasks agreed with me. “What should this software class do?” asks Patel, the founder of Workflowy, rhetorically. “What do I need to do right now to fulfill all my life goals?” He should answer the question. The scarcest resource we have for many of us is time. “
Ryder Carroll, the creator of the Bullet Journal-based method of organizing your work, puts it in more existential terms. “Every task is an experience waiting to be born,” he tells me. “When you look at the list of tasks that way, this will become your future.” (Or if you want to take European literary philosophy, here Umberto Eco: “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”)
No wonder he’s so paralyzed! His commitment to PowerPoint is not so great.
Considering that life is made up of time, a whole sector of philosophical magisterium to manage tasks says that empty lists will always be huge. As Pychyl showed, we overload ourselves with more than we can get and create Shameless Lists because we are horribly unaware of the little time we actually have. The only solution to this thinking is to use a time-based organizational system: a calendar.
Instead of putting tasks on the list, you do a “time lock” by putting all the tasks on the calendar as part of the job. That way, you can immediately see it when you bite over the chew. Cal Newport, a computer scientist at Georgetown University and a guru of what he calls “deep work,” is probably the strongest advocate of time-blocking. “I think it’s undeniable that blocking time, if done right, will throw the list method out of the water,” Newport told me. He says it makes you twice as productive as list-based absorbers. Blocking time forces us to fight directly with the angel of death. It’s natural then to fuck less.
Several researchers who studied the tasks told me that they generally agreed that blocking time avoids problems with applications and to-do lists. A task app, Reclaim, actually has an AI that finds how long each task will take and finds a slot in your calendar. (It is a hidden matter to show that there are not many places.) “We will only tell you when the tasks are delayed, we will tell you that they are tasks going being late, ”says Patrick Lightbody, co-founder of Reclaim.
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