In 2003, Quicksilver introduced me to the striking notion of "wu wei" as applied to software—effortless action, doing without doing, no decisions or cognition required; creates a feeling of speed. Can be a powerful design property! (e.g. iOS scrolling)
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Relatedly, I think checklists and playbooks access a weak form of this feeling—submission to a process, "becoming" the process. It can be really powerful to take something that normally requires decisions/will and to turn it into an "executable strategy."
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It's one thing I like about spaced repetition as a mechanism. Say that you’d like to study cell metabolism. Without SRS, you need to make a plan ("I study cell biology on Tuesday"), set up some trigger to help you remember the plan, and summon the will to execute it repeatedly.
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But if you have an active SRS practice, you can throw some prompts into your library and be confident that you’ll engage over time. You don’t need to decide how often you’ll study or to exert willpower to study those particular prompts—only to show up for daily SRS practice.
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This is very unlike the feeling one has when, say, maintaining an inbox, which is full of weighty decisions! Extremely un-"wu wei."
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I have an inbox thing I'm working on here myself trying to figure this out. Can you make an inbox "wu wei"... Super great search and "snooze" seem helpful?
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I'm finding this approach helpful:
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Yes!! I think the “almost SRS” here is important. The “maybe 1 day later”. I’m working on a snooze mechanism that has an rng element to it. I’m not trying to “remember” the content the same way as when I use Anki, but I really want to avoid loss aversion!
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I think statefulness is important in the snooze: if I've snoozed six times, it can't be that important; if I've only snoozed once, it's hard to say…
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Totally. Like an increasing rng snooze. I explored the idea of “decay” a bit too, and “rot” where something would rot more the more you snoozed it. But I’m landing on not actually indicating how many times you’ve snoozed a thing, it just spaces it out further (with rng)
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Complice has an interesting interaction here: if you specify an intention, then don't do it, then pull it into the next day's intentions, then don't do it, then pull it into the next day's list *again*, it prompts: ~"Write a note to yourself about why today will be different."
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Hah, that’s clever. There’s something to just having you stop and think! I love how this makes the computer feel like a partner.
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Just came across this exchange now via a search—I'm also working on a new iteration on this that will actually require you to break the notdone into smaller pieces in order to pull it again.
(It currently suggests this but doesn't actually have a UI for it)
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