The risk that any app will, now or in the future, be hacked, sold or just changed to suck all the data from your phone and send it somewhere you don't want it sent is too high for my taste.
Is America the same as China?
If you can't tell, here's food for thought:
How many people want to leave China to go live in America?
How many people want to leave America to go live in China?
That works for some things, but I feel like it breaks down when others put tasks on your TODO list. For example, when I finish a task around the house, my wife adds more, so by procrastinating, I'm reducing the total amount of work I do.
So there's always some element of prioritization, which means procrastinating on some things and not procrastinating on others. I think my trouble is properly prioritizing, and I'm sure that's similar for others as well.
This is beautiful. If you have a thing that takes some manageable effort, and that is important enough to do. Do it at the first time you to not have anything more important to do. It is nothing else but a different mindset. It sounds easy, because it is once you get going.
What you both describe sounds like a switch flipping in the brain. It's the holy grail of those struggling with procrastination - and the unsolved part is coercing the brain to flip that switch, to internalize that realization. I envy those who've done that by accident.
You're absolutely right, it's like a switch flipping in the brain.
Maybe a way to get there, or to try to explain it in a different way would be: You have to hate "having the item in your todo list" more than "doing the task".
I know I do. It's annoying to "carry" that todo item in my head all the time, with its danger of forgetting it, or the need to note it down somewhere, then remember to check the somewhere... So I know I'l feel liberated when I do it.
Yes, on the face of it this applies much better to "pay that bill" than to "write a book". But you'd be surprised. Soon you won't think of yourself as a procrastinator, you'll feel like someone who takes charge and does stuff. You know what people like that do, apart from the small stuff? The big stuff.
Did try that very early on (spoiler alert: it didn't work), and it's curious what mechanism my brain developed to neuter this trick.
One, in line with what GTD book teaches, writing down a task is very liberating experience - indeed, the act of writing a task down feels almost like doing it, so it drains the pressure to actually do it. Two, once the mental weight of a full todo list reaches a certain stage, I instinctively shy away from looking at it. The degree to which this happens subconsciously is probably worth a paper in a psychology journal; I'll instinctively stop opening my TODO files, my Org Agenda, and if I write the tasks down physically (e.g. on whiteboard), after a while my eyes will just gloss over it and essentially ignore its presence in the room.
To combat this, I started cycling through TODO stores - every other month or three I jump between .org files, bullet journal, issue tracker tickets, whiteboard, notebook, paper calendar, electronic calendar. The "freshness factor" seems to be working somewhat, but I still can sometimes go two days before realizing I have an organizer open on my desk with tasks already late.
We are the same intransigent nerds that originally moved to FF over IE6 on principle, only this time also with more disposable income (You know, the people you want to show ads to), on top of technical acumen and prescriptive influence.
Chrome is a couple more undeleteable tracking cookies or proprietary languages away from the tipping point.
Just recently moved to fastmail with my own domain, and I am slowly moving all my accounts to it.
It definitely has fewer features than gmail/calendar, and a less "slick" UI, but you know what? I don't even care. It's just a webmail! Do it, the experiment will cost you very little, if you don't already own your own domain (I'm going to take a stab and guess you already own your own domain...)
The risk that any app will, now or in the future, be hacked, sold or just changed to suck all the data from your phone and send it somewhere you don't want it sent is too high for my taste.