Nice article, really clean and hits my taste just right. The content was not too profound or wise or anything I usually look for, but I just wanted to say the layout and flow of the page was a good read.
It's a cool metaphor. I think the examples are a bit more of things that you just do though. I don't normally think about having to pee, it just hits me. I don't normally consider going out for ice cream a "to do", I see it as a reward for doing things on my todos.
I can't tell the authors perspective on breaks though. They mention scheduling them are counterintuitive but believe they are needed for diffuse-mode thinking. The reason why the pomodoro technique is so effective and widely used is that we have a natural time limit to our "waves" in term of our active focus before we need a wind-down.
Yeah, some better examples that I use on a regular basis:
1. Take out the trash on Mondays
2. Pay the credit card bill on the 5th of every month
3. Get a haircut every 5 weeks
4. Pay the water bill every 3 months, etc
Having those sorts of things in my recurring To Do list are very helpful to ensure they don't get forgotten.
I made a little email/web app that makes it easy to have a shared list like this for my wife and I, it’s very barebones but I use it every day: https://www.onit.today/
I found the alternatives to be either: designed to build your life around them and therefore too complex, or simple but lacking a good mechanism to have a shared list with others.
Looks great! Right now we just use a Google sheet but I'm looking to upgrade. There's something I need that isn't obvious when comparing features of apps like this: I need the next due date of a recurring task to be a specified duration (say, a week) after I mark the previous occurrence as done, not when the previous occurrence was due.
Example: my cat's water fountain can only be in service for a week before it must get washed. So I put it out on July 1 and it's due to be washed July 8. Alarm goes off on the 8th, I take it out of service (putting a non-fountain bowl out temporarily) hopefully that day but maybe a day late, and put it in the dishwasher. Some time later (maybe July 9, 10, or 11) I finally run the dishwasher and put the fountain back into service. Next due date is a week after that.
Right now, I have to manually type the next due date into my spreadsheet. I'd rather just click a button and have an app know to set another alarm a week after the button was clicked.
So a wave that isn't strictly periodic, it has a hold phase...
One thing I'm trying now is "hey Google remind me to x in a week" at the time of putting the fountain in service, but basically I'm looking to avoid specifying the duration or due date every single time.
I find many chores to be of this type. Another example is changing the HVAC filter. I want an alarm to happen 3 months after the last change, but maybe it won't be dirty yet so I let it alarm for a while, in which case the next alarm happens 3 months after marking the last one as done, not 3 months after the last alarm started.
Ticktick will do this. I have one called 'air filter every 3 months' and the next iteration is always exactly 90 days from when I mark the current one as done, even if I am late or early.
No, I use the free version. My todo listing needs are actually very basic, I just think ticktick has the best semantic scheduling out of any that I have tried and I hate fiddling with scheduling widgets.
Thanks for the detailed info–I think what you're describing is how onit actually works. By default, when a repeating todo item is due, you'll get a daily email listing the things that are currently due. For each repeating todo item you can choose what happens when you check it off: either schedule it again based on now+interval, or on a strict schedule (e.g. always on Wednesday, always on the 15th of the month etc).
I use the strict schedule for things like bills or annual registrations, and the now+interval schedule for things like your cat fountain cleaning example, where I'm happy to just get a morning reminder about it until I get around to it.
I should probably update the homepage to provide some more detail on the actual functionality!
I'm autistic, and I have a whole category of recurring self-care stuff like haircuts, having a shave, doing some pull-ups, crunches, something to eat, that kind of thing. Without that, I wouldn't function so well. Never shared that before.
I meant that it's counterintuitive to think about scheduling breaks, but it's actually very helpful thing to do. Thanks for the feedback. I will see if I can make it clearer in the article.
My first thought here is that the composition of todo waves allows the opportunity for a human to become arbitrarily busy on a given day when the waves positively interfere. Thankfully many of these items phase lock to the circadian rhythm or enjoy some scheduling flexibility.
I thought it was going to try to actively schedule based on the opposite of that, like get your passport renewed early because you have a lot of stuff coming up next year.
Or perhaps the right mental model is to treat help from others as negative waves. When you anticipate a particularly busy “rogue wave” you arrange help with shopping, food prep, family care, etc., to cancel out some portion of that wave.
That's a good point. I was thinking about it during writing. Really it is binary – doing and then not doing for a while. There is no ascending part of the graph – even though spiky line would be closer to depict this it is also incorrect. I chose to use the simplest wave form just to highlight the nature of most to-dos – they repeating over and over again like waves on the ocean.
I don't find it insightful because for me tasks that are ToDo are not like sine waves.
I am also not a person that gets annoyed by cleaning dishes or brushing teeth. I just do these things and I accepted that these are time costs that I cannot do much about.
Not brushing teeth - getting even single infection from rotting tooth would cost me much more in terms of wasted time than brushing twice a day.
Just like trying to cut on sleep time, you might get away for 3-5 days sleeping less but then you will have to pay it back with interest.
I think it is mostly difference in approach "unrealistic" trying to schedule and squeeze in as much as possible - vs - I have bunch of stuff to do, let's see how much I will be able to finish and anything that drops goes to the next day or ends up never done because if I did not do it and no one complained (even myself) it probably was not that important at all.
32 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 63.6 ms ] threadThe concept of waves is really nice. It supplant my previous visualization of these kind of tasks, which was more "spiky".
I can't tell the authors perspective on breaks though. They mention scheduling them are counterintuitive but believe they are needed for diffuse-mode thinking. The reason why the pomodoro technique is so effective and widely used is that we have a natural time limit to our "waves" in term of our active focus before we need a wind-down.
https://jondouglas.dev/fast-brain-slow-mind/
I found the alternatives to be either: designed to build your life around them and therefore too complex, or simple but lacking a good mechanism to have a shared list with others.
Example: my cat's water fountain can only be in service for a week before it must get washed. So I put it out on July 1 and it's due to be washed July 8. Alarm goes off on the 8th, I take it out of service (putting a non-fountain bowl out temporarily) hopefully that day but maybe a day late, and put it in the dishwasher. Some time later (maybe July 9, 10, or 11) I finally run the dishwasher and put the fountain back into service. Next due date is a week after that.
Right now, I have to manually type the next due date into my spreadsheet. I'd rather just click a button and have an app know to set another alarm a week after the button was clicked.
So a wave that isn't strictly periodic, it has a hold phase...
One thing I'm trying now is "hey Google remind me to x in a week" at the time of putting the fountain in service, but basically I'm looking to avoid specifying the duration or due date every single time.
I find many chores to be of this type. Another example is changing the HVAC filter. I want an alarm to happen 3 months after the last change, but maybe it won't be dirty yet so I let it alarm for a while, in which case the next alarm happens 3 months after marking the last one as done, not 3 months after the last alarm started.
I use the strict schedule for things like bills or annual registrations, and the now+interval schedule for things like your cat fountain cleaning example, where I'm happy to just get a morning reminder about it until I get around to it.
I should probably update the homepage to provide some more detail on the actual functionality!
I initially read that the author only cuts his nails once per year. Yuck…
Then I realized he was more likely giving an example of weekly.
Anyone else read it that way?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biorhythm_(pseudoscience)
I am also not a person that gets annoyed by cleaning dishes or brushing teeth. I just do these things and I accepted that these are time costs that I cannot do much about.
Not brushing teeth - getting even single infection from rotting tooth would cost me much more in terms of wasted time than brushing twice a day.
Just like trying to cut on sleep time, you might get away for 3-5 days sleeping less but then you will have to pay it back with interest.
I think it is mostly difference in approach "unrealistic" trying to schedule and squeeze in as much as possible - vs - I have bunch of stuff to do, let's see how much I will be able to finish and anything that drops goes to the next day or ends up never done because if I did not do it and no one complained (even myself) it probably was not that important at all.