2018-12-28 Facebook My wife bought the tidying up comic book, and the idea of “don’t move from the spot” is interesting. When you move around while trying to decide whether to throw things away, etc., you unconsciously avoid things that are difficult to decide. As a result, even if there is a slight reduction in the number of things, there are difficult-to-judge items scattered here and there, and the situation is not “tidy.
You make Definition of Done “the area within reach from that location will be cleaned up” without moving around.
If we project this by analogy to Task Management, it seems to solve a question I’ve had for a long time.
In GTD, the collected items are processed in order from the top, and in the KJ method, the collected items are arranged so that they can be listed. If the amount is too large to list, I could understand dividing it by quantity, but otherwise I could not understand why they do top to bottom. I thought it would be more beneficial to have a broader perspective to discover things that can be put together and solved.
If a list is made and the easy-to-resolve items are resolved first, progress is rapid in the early stages. However, after the easy-to-resolve items are resolved, the “hard-to-resolve” and “hard-to-decide” items will remain on the list.
This is where the “unconscious avoidance of things that are difficult to judge” comes into play. The task is written down, but “there are many choices with high psychological costs to choose any of them,” making it impossible to choose any of them. The effect of having many choices is to make it impossible to choose.
As a result, the tasks are written out, and even though I know in my head that I have no choice but to do them, and in fact I have experienced success with them, at a certain point the tasks stop moving forward.
When a relatively easy task comes along in that state, they tend to do it. This is a state of mind in which one feels so busy that he or she is doing only the chores that come along, even though the important things are not progressing at all.
- Related Important Matrix.
We have unconsciously assumed that increasing listability and broadening horizons is a good thing, but as long as there is a bug in the human device that says “when there are many choices, the probability of choosing ‘do nothing’ instead of the best of them increases”, we must design around it. - Jam Experiments
- So many choices, so little to choose from. So you need a mechanism to force people to choose one if a situation arises.
I’d make the key phrase not “don’t move from the spot” but “unconsciously avoid things that are difficult to judge.”
If a situation arises where there are so many choices that you can’t choose, you need a mechanism to force you to choose one. So that would be “putting it on the schedule,” “deciding to do it in order from the top,” etc.
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