I’m experimenting with “sitting down with the project for a few hours and if I really can’t crack it, I’ll cross it off the list”. Accepting failure as a possible outcome. That sounds sad and desperate but it’s just been such a relief. It’s a safety valve. It’s a reverse reward. If I don’t do it, I get rewarded by not having to do it.
When I first started doing GTD, one thing I tried to get good at right away was noping out. The whole “I’ve really wanted to do this for a long time but now that I see everything I want to do, this one thing doesn’t seem worth it comparatively or I don’t even know how to begin doing it, so let’s just not”.
This new “try, then maybe fail” is a new thing, a kind of middle ground between noping out right away vs buckling down and throwing all my effort and resources and desperation at something.
And so far, it has surprised me because so far none of the “tries” have failed. I did manage to do it even though I didn’t think I could. So it’s still an experiment. I dunno how I’ll feel once I start racking up the L’s and the swamp has eaten all my X-wings.
So far it feels pretty good. Since it’s a middle ground, it’s hard to know when to apply this “try technique” compared to just really committing for real on something or to just nope out without wasting any more time on it. It’s been a motivational aid, like “Ugh, this thing has been on the lists for weeks, I’ll never get to it because it’s such a Totally Dreaded thing that I don’t even know where to begin with” and then I’m like “Okay, I’m gonna buckle down and try” and that helps me get going.
It helps with prospective or inchoative aspects of procrastination (dreading getting started), because in order to really give it an honest try, I do have to sit down and figure out the actual first steps (which is the part of GTD that the-people-who-don’t-need-GTD always scoff at, the fact that we-who-do-need-GTD need to actually take a breath and spend some time cognitively figuring out how to start doing something and what the actual first steps are).
It also helps with the perfective aspects of procrastination (dreading having to do the final touches), since I’m not as committed to seeing it through.
I just finished a project I was 99% sure I’d want to give up on. I just decided to give it one really solid try first.
(It was hacking a zigbee light switch to instead control music [I don’t even have any “smart” lights], a project I first started last spring, but then shelved because the websocket ports were world-accessible.
That wasn’t procrastination, that was just a good old noping out.
Then unrelatedly I switched routers a few months later, making the project possible again. It still wasn’t procrastination until I realized that I could do it and put it back on the list.
And there it stayed for several months. That was procrastination.
And I didn’t wanna do it because I didn’t think i was gonna be able to do it. I remembered last time trying it eight months ago, it was just flashing lights and crashing loops.
But that “maybe I can’t do it”, I realized I could reframe that as an out instead of as a reason to not try, something that had worked for smaller scale projects last week. And then I still procrastinated one more half-an-hour (by writing the first half of this essay) and then I finally managed to do it.
Conclusion: do, or do not. Or try.