Connecting to yourself

General
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IMHO Good mental health means connecting emotionally and empathically to your past and future selves. You do both of these things through artifacts, since you can’t directly speak to those folks. You connect to your past selves not by following through on their decisions, but by experiencing and sharing their reality and emotions.

When you look at a book on your shelf, don’t think first about why you do or do not want to read the book. Think first about why past-you bought that book when you did. Why is the book there? (“Chesterton’s fence”) What kind of person was that person, what were they thinking? Connect.

When you make a todo list, make sure you are careful about what you put on it. Don’t put things on the list because you don’t want to think about them now. (“Don’t let your mouth write no check that your tail can’t cash.”) Put something on the list because you want to send a careful, important message to your future self. Connect.

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I’m not sure I agree with this at all. I find it’s one of the best parts of the GTD philosophy - write it down so it’s not occupying your mental bandwidth in the moment.

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I love GTD. I learned a lot from it. But like all things, taking it to extremes is a cure worse than the disease. IMO You should not write down everything you want to get out of your head. Some things that shouldn’t be in your head should be tossed aside or can take care of themselves without further reminders. Sometimes you need the help of your future self to know the difference, but often with only a millisecond of thought you can filter out some of your thoughts before you write them down for later.

I think too often with GTD people feel like writing down something for later is “free”, but it’s not. You’re reaching out to someone for help (your future self). If you abuse that relationship the other person will start to ignore you. If you write down too many things, your future self will be overwhelmed by the size of their inbox and start to feel like checking the inbox is a chore. Then they’ll start to feel like doing something else (not checking the inbox) would be time better spent. And pretty soon your whole system falls apart.

P.S. I’m using light background in the Mac browser interface and the text on the “reply” button is invisible. (The “discard” text is correct)

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I can see both sides of this and I ended up somewhere in the middle. I really took to the GTD method when I first implemented it about 15 years ago, and this was one of the biggest strengths for me. But I did at some point lose the ability to let the less important ideas and thoughts just bubble up, sit with me and then fade away. It was now all worthy of writing down somewhere, even if it was just the Someday/Maybe list. And that list can certainly become a giant bully for a completist like me :blush: Now, I’ve settled on a hybrid approach, and use a tactic from organizer Lisa Woodruff: time-sensitive tasks live in my reminders and calendar, but non-urgent tasks and ideas go on small notecards/paper scraps i throw in my inbox and I review them once a week. Anytime a “could I” or “maybe I should” pops up, I write it on a card. This is a good way to keep my actual task list manageable and realistic but still empty my head. It may seem unwieldy to touch a bunch of cards every week (and often I end up writing multiples of the same idea to clear my brain) but it sets up a single time each week to look at those items. If something has now become urgent/actionable, I add it to my task list. If it can wait til next week, I put the card back in the inbox. It becomes a trusted place to store things that I know will resurface, but I don’t have access to them at all times of day, everywhere, when I’m looking for a dopamine hit . And often, after I’ve touched a card week after week without acting in it, I find I’m ready to toss it and the loop is completed. I know that at first glance it seems that you could just easily keep all of these things in a digital Someday/Maybe list that you review once a week, but the offline, physical nature of this practice is key for me. The inconvenience sets the boundary for me, but I have enough of a process to keep trust in it and calm my mind.

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