Organizing a system that abstracts your life and makes it easier and effective to plan, track, and manage your life is a difficult task. At the end of the day, it is like math- you need to simplify things to their essence so that you can manipulate them into a system that is flexible enough to evolve with the changing matters of life but rigid enough that it holds you within the bounds of what you are trying to achieve with it.
As I mentioned before, a good system abstracts concepts into their essential nature so that they can be arranged and played with in a way that is creative without losing their core meaning. For example, when I think of something I need to do, like “taking out the dog”, there is a host of steps that it requires as a preliminary step like putting on the leash, putting on my shoes, locking the door, etc. Unless I am programming a robot, listing these out does not make me more effective at completing the task, therefore, we can just simplify the complex task as “taking out the dog”.
The problem is that there is a lot of nuances in the world and it makes it hard to capture these in an abstract system. Furthermore, we have to be very clear what we are trying to accomplish with any system. In the beginning, I just sort of threw things together that I instinctively knew I needed mental help with, like keeping a list of tasks I need to complete and tracking larger projects ( a computers compute and memory are much better than mine ).
The issue is what you assume is true always need refining. For example, I want a task tracker or “to-do” list because I have a bunch of little things I need to get done but will mostly forget about if I do not write them down due to their small, ephemeral nature. The goal is to track my tasks more effectively which should stop me form forgetting about things and hopefully, allow me to be more clear about my plate of responsibilities.
The problem is that sometimes we might be solving the wrong problem- why should I make small tasks easier to jot down and store? *playing the devils advocate*
Maybe by making a dedicated storage space for small tasks just leads you to making more tasks that you do not need. Maybe without it you would only remember the important tasks and stop wasting time on the non-important. Now, I do not believe this but it is important to try to pick apart your thinking.
One thing that does come to mind is that ideally, I would not need to have “small tasks” to do because I could just offload that to an assistant. Maybe my question should be, how can I not only make sure I do not forget any important small task but how can I make sure that after noting them down, that I do not have to do them? Or furthermore, how can I have someone else do the thinking for me about what small tasks I might be needing to do or forgetting to do?
It is an interesting switch in thinking. The reason most people do not think like this is because of the obvious limitations a person has in building these systems. The problem is although I have identified that an assistant who completes tasks for me or maybe even thinks ahead about these things for me would be a better goal to strive for but I also know that the reason I did not think about this in the first place is because I know I cannot afford an assistant in this economy 😉
The opportunity is technology and it has never been more possible for a well educated person. Although I cannot actually hire an assistant, I CAN engineer a system that mimics it to a small degree and provides these benefits to me. So let me state my identified goal clearer:
My goal is not to design another to-do list- a system that offloads small tasks from my long-term memory to a permanent storage device.
The goal is engineer a system that actively completes these tasks for you in the background and ideates for you about what maybe you should be thinking about completing.
These are both grand tasks, undoubtedly. One requires an AI system that not only understands my tasks and context, but has output capabilities to perform these actions. The tasks are undoubtedly going to be dynamic- such as making calls, logging into systems, and completing ambiguous tasks. How then could a program do this for me?
The later is also difficult, when you realize there is a task you need to complete, it usually comes from understanding your current context. You realize you have a charge for a subscription you meant to cancel so you add “cancel subscription X” to your list. The program would need to know your financial transactions and ALSO know that you do not want to continue this subscription- something it cannot inherently know without your confirmation. So how could we design this?