Comment by Aurornis
1 day ago
> small tasks that they intend to do immediately but somehow get distracted mid-action from and never finish (and then forget about altogether).
That’s the idea, but now it creates a secondary burden of having to act on those notes to translate them into actions.
When it’s time to process your 20 different 3-second thoughts from throughout the day, is the easily distracted person actually going to sit down and work through all 20 of them at the end of the day without also getting distracted?
In my experience, the people who accumulate a lot of micro tasks because they’re too distracted to follow up on them in the moment are the same people who abandon their todo lists after they accumulate 50 items that weren’t important enough to prioritize at the time.
If someone is taking 20 notes a day, that’s over 100 notes in a week. I’m having a hard time squaring the processing of these notes with the idea that it’s for someone who is easily distracted mid task.
> When it’s time to process your 20 different 3-second thoughts from throughout the day, is the easily distracted person actually going to sit down and work through all 20 of them at the end of the day without also getting distracted?
I think the idea is that the person would be happy to circle back and finish the first thing they started, but simply forget about it altogether, so they think they are done with tasks and go on to other ("unproductive") stuff. If they can inject the habit of always checking stuff off a list when finishing things, they'll see they never finished the first thing they started, and then take care of that.
Checking off things from the list is much more satisfactory than adding things to a list, so it makes sense to have input be as low friction as possible, while checking off can be a bit more work (pulling out a phone which has the list).
I'm skeptical about the effectiveness of this in reality. Just a thought.