> IMHO, productivity tools should do more to help us stay on task: they should help with all aspects of cognition - from capturing ideas, to making plans, to making good on those plans. Fundamentally, productivity tools need to evolve to help us deal with the emotional components of 'getting unstuck'. It's the biggest problem, at least for me.

I've not seen any good solution (technological or otherwise) for meaningfully sorting all the information you've captured and prioritizing. There are plenty of ways to capture well (Org Mode!). In my experience, the more you capture, the worse things get. Until someone can come up with a scheme (need not be technological) to handle all that I've captured, /and/ in a manner that doesn't consume time, then you've got a solution.

One common approach is to timestamp things and just let anything beyond a certain date expire if you've not "handled" it. I honestly did not try it - probably should. The main concern would be that expired things will recur in my brain again and be captured later - over and over - a problem in and of itself.

I have to agree. I haven't found major improvements in projects/life goals via higher quantities of data capture, but I have found them through better-tuned filters, queuing and signalling.

With respect to stuckness, I have a kind of rule of thumb for everything creative now, which I can phrase as "underachieve twice over". The first time I capture somewhat less than the essentials of the thing I want to address, but require at least one; the second time(third, fourth, etc.) I plow forward and build another iteration on that, adding more of the requirements.

It's not different from estimation or calibration in any other sense, it's just that there is an element of following through on a bulk of knowable, ordinary work in order to collect the important data, instead of sitting there perplexed and avoidant when I don't instantly understand the whole of it.

90% means you're like 1/10th of the way there. It's logarithmic. Or something like that.

It does feel like a cliff.

I’d be interested in something like this as well. I have a discombobulated list of apps and attempted strategies to take notes and can’t seem to stick to something simple.

Sounds wonderful and just the right focus. I would like to try it as soon as possible

I'd like to try it out when you're ready to launch.

I'm very interested, email in profile.

Have you tried complice?

(Creator of complice.co here, summoned by HNWatcher.)

I'm glad to see this thread because yeah, most productivity apps are just organization structures that don't support metacognition at all, and so people end up in all kinds of stuck modes.

Complice is definitely better, in that for instance it has different phases for planning your day, working, and reflecting on your day, or that if you say you're going to do X today then don't do it, it doesn't just go on your list for tomorrow but instead you're prompted to break it down or come up with a new plan.

And, I think there's a huge amount of potential here that's yet to be explored, both in Complice and other systems. Relatedly, if you're familiar with developmental psychology or subject-object shifts, we've started strategizing on how to design Complice to guide people through growing into different ways of relating to the world, themselves, and their goals.

I have a different very simple workflow I use for this stuff that I call a Captain's Log. Basically it's like a journal but instead of reflecting after, you intentionally start journalling as soon as you're not sure what you're doing. Link to that: https://malcolmocean.com/2017/11/captains-log-ultra-simple-t...

I am interested.