Eyes>Stomach: Goal monitoring

Tl;Dr: Data nerds want to check if they’re doing their plan. Todoist data should help.

I’m a data nerd – always have been. Data is great to understand how systems are working, especially systems that have expectations associated with them. For example: I have 37 different ‘projects’ in ToDoist, and I expect to things on almost all of them every month. But I’ve never checked.

A simple export of Todoist data can show me just how far off my expectations are from reality. More on that later.

But what’s really interesting is: Is the Elephant doing what the Rider wanted?

The Elephant and Rider is a metaphor from a book called The Happiness Hypothesis by Johnathan Haidt. I haven’t read the book, I’m probably getting important things wrong. But my understanding is: Imagine yourself as 2 beings: an elephant and a rider. The elephant is big, and usually does what it wants to do and is pretty unstoppable. The rider is small, and may have different desires than the elephant, which it can influence the elephant toward. Event more basically: We often operate on autopilot, executive control happens only occasionally.

So when you have executive control (e.g. when you’re deciding what to do), it might be a good idea to look back that that path you’ve been on. I think chances are pretty good that even the Rider sometimes get stuck in ruts, and can forget things that it wanted to do once upon a time.

Sometimes forgetting is OK – it’s a sign that you want to do something that wasn’t really important in the first place. A signal of that would be a ‘project’ that hasn’t seen any activity in months – a good candidate for deleting.

Sometimes forgetting is not OK. Things that were really important but have become lost because urgent things have distracted and confused us (well, me) is a real thing. For me the example is swimming. It’s something I want to do, but just haven’t gotten around to in the last 8 weeks. So: it’s time for Keep or Kill. And if I want to keep it, maybe boost the prioirity.

Basically: I’ll setup some kind of goal monitoring review with my weekly review.