72. You Don't Need Another List — You Need a Better Prompt

From Rhythms of Focus · 15:21

Show by Kourosh Dini

One might say the road to hell is paved with well-intentioned lists. Wandering minds tend to collect a stockpile of the latest apps, notebooks, and sticky notes in an effort to keep tasks top of mind. Unfortunately, when these lists and apps accumulate, it's because they aren't working. It can be difficult to know what tool will meet us in the moment we need it, versus when it's inconvenient and has no chance of being accomplished.On this week's episode, we discuss why you don't need another list, you need the right prompt.#ADHD #FindingFlowWithADHD #WavesOfFocus #ADHDadults #WanderingMind #ADHDfocus #FlowState #executivefunctionTranscriptMaybe I just need another list. Things are piling up, something slips. Deadlines creeping up. Project we were working on starting to gather dust.If I could only find just the right app, the right notebook, the right system, this time it'll finally hold.All right, so then we build one. And for a day, maybe two, maybe three, it holds up. Then somehow we stop seeing it, slips out of the way. It's out of our fingers. The list is still there. We're just not there with it. The list was rarely the problemThe lists we build are probably fine. Trouble is not usually that we pick the wrong tool or that we're the kind of person who can't keep a system.One trouble is often that a list stops reaching us in the moments that matter.For example, let's say we have a report to write. We put it on the kitchen whiteboard. We put it in bold, maybe alternate colors, draw a circle around it. However we've done it, by the end of the week, it's part of the wall. It's now just part of the decor. Nothing changed about the note. What changed is that it's no longer arriving. It's faded into the background. Organizing, at its heart, is this work of clearing and supporting paths for those things that we find to be meaningful. A list is one of those paths, but a path that never reaches us at the right time is hardly a path at all, which brings us to the part of organizing that does much of the work and the one that we tend to neglect. A prompt is about timeWhen we ask something to reach us at the moment it matters, we're asking for a prompt. Very often our prompts are poor, not because we did not write something down. We wrote them down in 10 different places. We put them in bold, we circled them, we told the app to remind us.Still, the report sits, the taxes sit, the email we meant to send sits. None of it surfaced when we could actually do something with it, and stayed out of the way the rest of the time.A good prompt is a matter of timing before it is anything else.It's the sandwich that I hang on the doorknob so that I can take it on the way out when I go to work. It's resting in our path at the door so it's not left on the counter again.It's this reminder that says, "Get milk," as we're walking to the store, not while we're lying in bed unable to act on it.Something that simply sits there blending into the background hardly works. Something that shows up at the right time, well, that meets us.To prompt is to bring something forward, to make it ready right on time. The word carries its own instructions. Prompts, it's not about being loud. It's about being well-timed.A good prompt leaves the deciding to usNow there's a version of prompting that most of us have already tried and it can hurt, in fact.We make the note bigger. We add another alert. We stack up so many reminders that they begin to drown each other out.Underneath, there's often this force that's kind of bubbling through. If I can just startle myself hard enough, maybe I'll finally comply. Every louder Post-It is the small message that we can't be trusted. That we have to be cornered into our own life. A wandering mind feeling that way often pulls away.A good prompt has to respect our working memory. It can't ask us to hold everything in mind at all times. That's precisely the load we're trying to set down. In this way, a good prompt respects our agency.When that thing surfaces, we still get to decide. We're not commanded, we're informed. We're left free to say yes or not yet or in our own time, all without compromising that prompt.That freedom is not a loophole in the system, it's the whole point of it. So a good prompt presents itself clearly, arrives on time, and then gets out of the way. Presenting well, that its virtue, timing is its work.Where good prompts already liveIf we look at the tools of this practice, nearly all of them - they are ways of being that prompt, that leave the deciding to us.In episode 57, we got into the tool of anchoring. It can hold this moment's options in front of us so that short-term memory can stop grabbing at them.The honor guide brings a project back into view on the day we meant to return to it. The calendar carries an intention across time, hands it back to us when it's due. And the visit shows up at the work, then lets us choose whether to stay.None of these are force. Each one brings a thing forward…

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