Re: sticking with it
Ava, my apologies—I may have caused you mild annoyance. 😆
I agree with Ava, keying in on her point about stress: if I'm stressing about which tool to use, or changing my rig leaves me stressed out, then I know I need to slow down and just stick with something for a while.
At the same time, I think there are legitimate reasons to try new things. If I'm doing it for a purported productivity boost, then I've learned to think twice. (Good chance I'm just bored or procrastinating.) But if I'm doing it for fun or to learn, and I can spare the time and expense, and that sort of thing actually is fun or educational for me, well hey, I'm gonna go enjoy some hobby time.
No doubt though, the siren song of a shiny new system, unsullied by the inevitable messiness of real life, is powerful. And I suspect that's because it's hard to accept that life just is messy and uncomfortable, and that any tool that you use to capture or contain your life, like a todo app, is doomed to become messy and uncomfortable as well.
I like Oliver Burkeman's analogy from Meditations for Mortals:
A pair of images that help clarify things here are those of the kayak and the superyacht. To be human, according to this analogy, is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time towards your inevitable yet unpredictable death. It’s a thrilling situation, but also an intensely vulnerable one: you’re at the mercy of the current, and all you can really do is to stay alert, steering as best you can, reacting as wisely and gracefully as possible to whatever arises from moment to moment. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger described this state of affairs using the word Geworfenheit, or ‘thrownness,’ a suitably awkward word for an awkward predicament: merely to come into existence is to find oneself thrown into a time and place you didn’t choose, with a personality you didn’t pick, and with your time flowing away beneath you, minute by minute, whether you like it or not.
That’s how life is. But it isn’t how we want it to be. We’d prefer a much greater sense of control. Rather than paddling by kayak, we’d like to feel ourselves the captain of a superyacht, calm and in charge, programming our desired route into the ship’s computers, then sitting back and watching it all unfold from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge. Systems and schemes for self-improvement, and ‘long-term projects,’ all feed this fantasy: you get to spend your time daydreaming that you’re on the superyacht, master of all you survey, and imagining how great it’ll feel to reach your destination. By contrast, actually doing one meaningful thing today – just sitting down to meditate, just writing a few paragraphs of the novel, just giving your full attention to one exchange with your child – requires surrendering a sense of control. It means not knowing in advance if you’ll carry it off well (you can be certain you’ll do it imperfectly), or whether you’ll end up becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing all the time. And so it is an act of faith. It means facing the truth that you’re always in the kayak, never the superyacht.
I want an app that feels like a superyacht. But sooner or later, they all turn out to be kayaks.
Obsidian and Things are my chosen kayaks for notes and tasks. They're great, and each time I've tried to leave one of them, I've come crawling back. That's not to say I'm unwaveringly faithful, clearly, but I'm at least a touch more steely eyed. 😉