on junebugging

Today has been a quiet day. I cancelled all my social plans. I have been trying to figure out a system that works for me. It has not gotten easier to focus. But I learned of a term called Junebugging. It comes from a Tumblr Post on cleaning. However, I am finding that it kind of works with tasks on different contexts too. The mental "pinning" of the task has been letting me complete tasks (even though they're not exactly the one that I wanted to do).

It still is not really a system. I have been trying to reliably capture my thoughts and tasks as they pop in my head. These past few days I feel as if this has become harder. I will think "hey I should write this down" but then nothing happens. Frustrating, to say the least. Last night I had a small eureka moment - using my phone's speach to text function! I still need to open a program on my phone to do so, but it is rapid enough that I seem to not mind doing it. I hope I continue using it even after the novelty wears off. That is one of the problem I find with these new productivity systems. I will get absorbed in them for a few weeks/months, but then not touch it again. I recently rediscovered notion.so and was consumed for a good couple of days. I set it up exactly how I would like it. I learned about the neat things it can do. And then...I did not care about it anymore.

I always return to workflowy because it is simple and quite unstructured. It is also the reason I get bored of it and sometimes overwhelmed. It is under-stimulating and over-stimulating at the same time. But I return to it and ever now and then completely shake it up. And I think I know why that is. I am trying to get it to do too many things. I need it as a knowledge dump/master list/second brain, but am also trying to use it for daily actionable items and calendar reminders. It cannot do those things. So I stopped trying to get it to. I am using my calendar for reminders and todoist for actionable items (although this may get replaced with my pen+paper notebook?). I cannot seem to remember to check todoist frequently enough. It does have 1:1 calendar sync with google calendar - so that helps a lot. I can just dump things in my calendar and they show up in the app and vice versa.

My therapist said something that seems to help me actually look at my lists. Put good things in there too. This should have been obvious, but you will not enjoy looking at your list if all you put there are the ugly boring jobs. What a revelation.

That has been a constant in my life. My todo lists are just the odds and ends that I do not otherwise want to do. Looking at it was misery. I hope to change that.