Watching.2021.03.Beyond Getting Things Done

Systems can never cross over into the realm of reality. The present moment is a leverage point for everything else. Everything you do always has to do through the present, you doing it. It matters because it matters to you. The system is not what you care about, nothing trumps checking in with yourself and planning is reheasing. – Yatharth Agrawal

Introduce Complice as the opposite of gtd in a bridging way. Both are systems allow the maximum possible of your intuition to flow in a given moment. They both approach that in very very different ways.
He is introducing complie by contrast to systems like gtd
- People have tried to use it but don't actually use the full gtd system which creates this kind of freedom if intition. They end up using a smaller system that falls apart.
One of the most important questions with any system or framework is how does in work in the meantime.
- I am not ganna have the perfect system set up, so things need to fail-gracefully.
The four principles of complice:
- aliveness as distinct from exhaustiveness. Two kind of different values
  - exhaustiveness is trying to list out everything. Can be powerfull to clearing your mind and is worth doing. i. "Plans are useless but planning is invincible"
  - The exhaustive Listing things out is great but its really important to not get into the common fantancy to do all of it. i. "Yes, i put all of these in the system and i will take care of them". No, will die without many of these not being done.
  - What's most alive. In order to do that you need some context.
  - Snarky: Aliveness vs staleness
- Why am i doing any of this
  - The fundamental unit is goals than tasks
  - Shift from doing things to causing things to happen i. What do i deeply care about
    - Could be any really long scale or just kind of in this moment
  - What kind of change do i wanna see and how can i move through the world in a way that creates that change.
- Proactive rather than reactive
  - With systems like gtd you have all this stuff you could do, and directs you to ask what of that does make sense to do. From complice perspective this is backwards because where did all that stuff come from and why are you doing it.
  - With complice the flip is what am i trying to achieve and what needs to be done in service of that.
  - Its a lot of work to manage all the ideas that you captured in the gtd sense and its very easy to end up with this stale feeling.
  - By contract there is a different approach with says: I don't need to remember everything and willing to without even tracking it somewhere to just return my thinking to what's important right now and trust that i'll pumb into that again if i need to.
    - This is not true for everything because maybe you have an insight and you need to get that down. But the point is the generator of what i wanna do next, instead of ultimately a question of what here is all that stuff and what do i do next.
    - David Allen's original system had that in mind and he underscored that you want to run from your intuition and not from methodically trying to execute your plan perfectly.
  - Why have this idea than plans are for executing in a systematic way as opposed to a plan being kind of a communication with your future self. i. Like hey future self here is my best idea of what you'll wanna do today just for your information. ii. There can be a tendency to execute methodically
  - reactive is arbitrary
- Choosing and doing over organizing
  - At the end of the day what is most important is, stop thinking about success and embody in each moment what it feels like to be successful.
  - You are always doing what makes to most sense to your system as a whole. Your system may not be good with talking with itself and so it maybe as a whole not very aligned to a particular thing.
  - Ultimately you are iterating on your best sense of what you are doing.
  - Trusing yourself
  - Complice Philosophy is you don't have to have a plan or organize all of your things to set out, you just need a sense of what you are trying to do and then to be in touch with what is my best guess at how to do that.
  - You always know what the next step is towards your goals because (proof of contradiction thing) if you don't know what the next thing to do is towards what you care about most than the answer is figure it out. The question itself is the answer. If you don't know how to fugure that out then well figure that out. You always have to do that.
  - You could use gtd to track your tasks and then plan them in complice. You might also use a big spreadshit or roam. i. The point ultimately you just need to tap your sense from all this systems wether they're working or not, into what do i do now? ii. What am i doing towards my goals today iii. Given the context of my whole life .. what next.
Complice:App
- List of goals which are basically your whys(values)
  - things that aren't things you are trying to complete but more things you want more to live and embody
  - You realize them(whys, values) in the present in relation with the world you wanna create. So in that sense they are still future oriented.
- So each day it asks you what you are going to do in service of those goals.
  - So you put that in those lists and then you work on it.
  - For each item in those list it ask how do you feel about my progress towards this goal today
  - It gets you reflecting regulary how you are doing towards the things that you care deeply about.
  - Crucial to this aliveness is that the things you did not do today don't go automatically into the list for next day.
    - They go into the list if what i thought i was going to do yesterday.
    - Because you don't have access to everything you know directly. The resistance that you have to take some action comes from some part of your mind/body system that does not think this thing makes sense even though you conscious thought that it did. This is why the aliveness in a given moment is important.
Questions
- What is your history in creating this and what was your concepts.forcing-function to create that?
  - Two paralle tracks
    - Everything is a remix or mashup of something
    - There are no original ideas
  - Its a combo of things..
  - But it feels very original
  - In 2021 book read "Pick Four by Zig Ziglar"
    - Pick 4 goals and now work on those everyday.
    - And then each day a litte question is this enough yes/no
    - Simple act of tracking things towrads things as opposed to random stuff
    - And am i actually on track here?
    - Often there is someone else assesting this for us and ther is something meaningful in tapping in to our self
  - Year's later i want to make a business and i thought wouldn't it be cool to build an app for this same gail setting process.
  - I did that because i wanted to and i think most people have not experienced self-directed pursuing something because they want to and i wanted to share that with people.
- Does have code-switching have a validity in context of productivity tools like lists, gtd, complice, etc.? Taking the example of "Cynefin framework" and its quadrats.
  - There are trade-offs to any system
    - taking an goal-first approach and using complice app which does not leave things on your list until you do them has the trade-off you forget random little things.
      - You can track those little things with other apps and that might work well,
      - But its basically saying that the trade-off is worth it to forget more random little things but be really powerful purposely self-directed.
        
        There are contexts where that is not true
        
        Persoanl assistence for somebody you probably want a gtd system and you are likely in that context not super self directed.
        
        You are not waking up each that saying what do i want to do today in the context of everything i care about.
  - complex systems tend to have a life of their own and its kind of stay alive naturally and sort of self-healing. It a piece falls out it will naturally notice and repair.
  - a complex system like a computer i you take out the video part it will not go anymore.
    - with complicated systems tracking its important to track, what are all the peices.
  - That is a good distiction between the two.
- What is your perspective on "open loops" that might keep messing with your head if you don't capture it.
  - Ways to think about this
    1. There might be a kind of neurotypicality thing going on where people might be more or less bothered by "open loops" a. If something is worth doing i want to have it happen in the future. People often get into a past-shaped energy in relation to "open-loop", there are like they want to do this because they are commited to do it. b. There can be this thing you want to cause in the future and not placate the past. c. So i think if in as much as any "open loops" you have is oriented towards the future then it's well that is one of your goals, you're going to be moving towards that. d. If you need to write down things to remeber, yes write them down e. But the idea to write things down that are important to you in a kind of app is am .. i have trubble putting words into it.
- In projects i am not taking into account the things that make me energized and let me keep going. Things that happen inside me and others. It helps me to see that task-list as a kind of dance between me and the outside world and i am wondering if this is kind of part of complice.
  - I started to think more about systems-thinking specific "The Fifth Discipline" and sometimes changes take a while to propagate through the system and so you have to kind of let it do its thing.
  - And complice has grown with me but very much stayed the way it was thought of at the beginning.
  - But there is something that the questioner is pointing out that i don't have adequately captured in the philiosophy or the app.
  - Which is something like being able to rest. It's not relaxing.
    - Mixing in brain-hemispheres
      - There are some old not very good models but a scotish psychartrist spends 20 years to the question of why though do we have these two hemispheres.
      - Without laying out his whole theory the two hemispheres tend to the world very differently. Basicalls constructing entirely different worlds.
        
        The right: Big picuter, wise spriritual master
        
        The left: being the emissary of that and take care of stuff
        
        The master needs to have the head in the clouds and the emissary needs to have an oversimplied version of the world to take care of things.
    - So as the emissary being able to say, you know i have no more commands to follow right now. I will wait for my intuition the world to give me more to do. Until that a kind of surrendering can happen. Like i have done all i need to do right now and trusting that both systems in me, that i i/we don't fully understand, and the rest of the universe is going to be in motion with those things and i don't need to constantly pushing to make it all happen.
- How do you chekc in with yourself in the present self that goes beyond the preferences of the moment?
  - When you are visualizing the future and actually going through it in your head, whatever the possible outcomes default probable is, your are chaning something about yourself and are recognizing that in somewhere the future gets encoded in the present self. There is this dissolving of trade-off of what is better in the present vs better in the future. That visulization helps understand how to live in a, what you i would call a timeless way. This comes to the hemispheres, imaginal exercises are grazy powerful.
Yatharth Agrawal: A meta-systematic perspective in orienting towards aliveness.
- In contrast to the different philiosophies of David Allen's GTD and Malcolm Ocean this is meta-systematic perspective of how do you relate to these systems and how do those systems relate to your being.
- Two propositions
  - Your productivity sytem is not what you think it is. Its want you actually end up doing. a. Samsara wheel of productivity: make a routine -> enjoy routine -> feel trapped -> crash routine -> enjoy lack of routine -> feel disregulated and disoriented -> repeat b. It seems that is resonate with many people and that is crazy. c. There is this thing where the system, whatever we are using, it ends up constructing it own reality about how things should be or are according to it. And that reality slowly (boiling frog) starts to become increasingly unhinged from your own reality.
    - Like the lists you capture as items to do or creating the perfect timeline. Do you think it's going to go like that? Part of you does and part of you knows that's ridiculous.
    - The best way to point at this is to think about the last time you where using that system, whatever that system way, and you started to have an idea of when your ystem was slowly to go in one of those lower degrading cycles.
    - Your productivity system is not what you think it is, it's what you end up doing, regardless of your goals and how overwhelmed you feel or like whatever your task list says. The point is you exist and there is this living ecology in you generating all the things you're doing. It keeps you breathing and doing like whatever you got done over the last week. And that is what actually exists, seperate from the aspirational self that you might want. So that is your system. d. When you get that you can see that this samsara cycle seems inevitable you can actually always be on contact with where you are at any given seconds, like where your ecology actually is and wher its taking you. e. That is what complice does. When you open it there is no backlogs. No schedule of future task. Only a black slate of wher you put your intention. It put's you in contact with where you are and what needs to be done, seperate from any reality system constructs about where you should be. f. The reason this matter is because its easy to forget the system is not meant to be real. The timeline and the task list is not necessary what's meant to happen. When you are making a plan you are like rehearsing for a improv show, each time you think about the plan its a reheasal. So when you actaully doing it you are a bit more equipped to what actually comes up. You thought about it and emotionally processes what was going to happen. And at the day you are not trying to write and come up with a plan it that it's not was is supposed to happen but to prepare you for the actual doing of what's going to happen. So planning is reheasing. g. So when you open comlice you set up your list of intentions you basically planning or reheasing for the day. h. See going through a task and visualize your entire day and see how it feels in my system. Does that feel good or does that feel gross. And if it does not feel good, do i even wanna do it. I can adjust, i can emotionally process, i can change my idea of what happens, i can add on things util my system says it's okay or doable. i. Your system is a rehearsal for the actual moment of doing. That whats matter.
  - You always know what matter to you. You always know what the next thing to do. a. Your brain is always thinking what next to do. b. Your systems change but not you. You don't can stuck but systems you use might. The reason this matter is because, when we are using any of these systems, we can never ever bypass checking in with ourselves. c. Nothing ever trumps checking in with yourself. d. When you are looking at your tasks it can start to feel like they are these atomic things of duty and i can forget that they are linked together in a series or sequence to somewhat leading up to an my idea of what i want. And when you have a system you want it help to connect those task, why they matter to you in the first place. You want your sytem to remind you of you goals and not of your tasks. That's why complice emphasizes goals over tasks. e. The ultimate measure is because you want it to do and not because the system want's it you to do. f. GTD actually got this with his "capturing" phase to free up to actually focus on what's actually going on in front of you, your reality. g. The point is not that GTD does not work, its that its easy to slip into any number of failure modalities like when entering a task into the system and we forget that the point is not to actually do them. The system is intended to hold everything in place while we are actually deal with reality. And that is actually the essence of GTD and complice is more of a complement and also a distillation of that. h. Systems can never cross over into the realm of reality. The present moment is a leverage point for everything else. Everything you do always has to do through the present, you doing it. It matters because it matters to you. The system is not what you care about, nothing trumps checking in with yourself and planning is reheasing i. Rememerbing this you can remember what it means to relate to systems. j. Complice is about helping you to get into contact with your reality of where you are as much as possible. So you never loose sight the reality and not confuse it for the system. Everything you know comes from your system and your system can never replace your thinking for you.
- The central project of productivity basically boils down to answering two questions:
  - What needs to be done right now.
  - Can i be in touch with why this needs to be done right now.

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