Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Meta-systems and getting things done

Seed topic:

When I was a little kid doing chores, what worked was for my mom to tell me to do one thing. Then I'd do the thing, and come back and ask her "what next?" And then she'd tell me another thing, and I'd do that, and so on.

A few weeks ago Brienne posted a technique that can be used to do this with a mental model of someone smart. You build a model of what an effective person would do, and you ask your model what thing to do next, and the model tells you, and then you do that. This one of many ways of reminding yourself to follow the pattern "find the best strategy, and then do the next step in that strategy."

If you desire homework: try doing this for a few hours at some point during the week.

By contrast, consider the Getting Things Done family of productivity techniques, where you write down what you want to do in advance and then follow your written plan. How well has this worked for you in the past? (As one might predict, results vary).