This is an opening talk outline for an event I have not yet run, but will soon.
Event meta:
- Event prerequisite should be: if one of your hardest tasks is cleaning your room or reorganizing your shelves or such, take a picture of the room + shelves before coming.
- This strikes me as a Sunday kind of event.
Hello. We are here to do the hardest, most avoidance-inducing thing on our task list, over and over again, all day. If you’re here, you probably have many things that your eyes now skip over when you look at your todo list. Not only are you going to do some of those today, you are going to do the worst ones today. There are two rules:
- Finish what you pick up.
- When picking the next task, pick the most aversive one. Not the most important one, the most urgent one, but the one that most strongly makes you go, oh please, not that one.
finishing
Finishing can mean giving up for good. It might mean that you will never file that tax thing that will cost you thousands of dollars, or make peace with your father, or plan the transition into the dietary routine that you expect to increase your lifespan by five years. If, today, when you are filled with more determination and have more support than most days in your life, you cannot do it, it probably shouldn’t be haunting your todos at all.
Finishing does not mean doing the full project, of which only a single step was aversive. If all of your taxes are aversive, and will take the full day, by all means spend all of this event doing your taxes. But if filling out that one part of your novel outline is aversive, and writing the scene once the outline is known is not aversive, don’t write the scene once you’re done with the outline.
your list
If you don’t have a long list of tasks to pick from, your first task is to close your eyes, mentally walk through your life – your home, your relationships, your email (okay, open your eyes for that one), your finances, your job, your health, and write down every task you can think of that will mentally tickle at you occasionally until resolved.
rehearsing
Many tasks cannot be done at this location or time. You might have businesses you need to call, or things at home that need organizing. I argue that in most of these cases you can make significant progress here and now.
If you have been procrastinating on those, there’s a good chance it’s because you cannot simulate what the task will look like. Who exactly are you calling? What will you say on the phone? If you’re going to clean your room, what physical objects are you going to be moving around, and where do they go?
Deciding all of this is part of pre-work, which is gathering the required materials and rehearsing what you are going to do. If there’s some great confusion that keeps me from rehearsing, that means that this confusion must be resolved before I can start. Often, this confusion can be resolved by sitting still and thinking about the thing. If that is the case for your most aversive task, I urge you to think until you can simulate doing the task – by which I mean you close your eyes and can imagine physically doing the task, without semi-consciously routing around the parts you find unclear.
when stuck
There will be a pairing room in the back. If you are stuck, go there. Construe ‘stuck’ broadly. If you feel stuck or aimless but you can’t articulate the what or why, that’s still stuck. Come talk to us.
If someone else other than a host is there and unpaired, please pair up with that person. You will spend up to 15 minutes each working on your respective stuckness.
If you don’t find a partner after 10 minutes, or you need more than 15 minutes of pairing help, or the person you paired with didn’t quite resolve your issue, find one of the two hosts.
schedule: food and exercise
- 10am: Opening talk, then 7 minute run around the neighborhood.
- 10:30am: Begin, with muffins and coffee.
- 1-2pm: Lunch and break. Encouraged to keep it light, because next we have a…
- 2:30pm: 7 minute run.
- 5:30pm: 10 minute run.
- 7-8pm: Dinner and break.
- 10pm: End. There will be closing circle after which we will kick everyone out promptly.
We encourage you to go straight to bed if your body lets you, and notice any alterations in the mental and physical sensations of falling asleep, the way you’d enjoy the way your body feels after a hike.