1653 The Annoyance Factor

A personal story.

I am lazy.  I hate getting off my bum and doing stuff. I also am easily irritated.  And I have found a way to merge these liabilities into an asset that cancels each.

It’s a Rube Goldberg-esque system of annoying and prodding myself that requires little to no effort.  It’s something I wish I had thought of decades ago.  But even if I had, it wouldn’t have worked as well now because we didn’t have the technology back then.

Google is my hero.  Its calendar app links to its email app.  So you can make it send you an email reminder if you choose to receive it.  And I do.

I put all my to-dos on the calendar’s early hours and when I get up in the morning, each item sits in my email in its own individual folder.

I get annoyed when I see a bunch of junk I don’t want to do.  But the annoyance goes away when I perform the task and joyfully delete its notification.

So the emails prod. And most days most tasks get done.  Those that don’t sit in the inbox beneath the next day’s lineup.  That’s super annoying.

Things get done.  The inbox which I am fanatically good at keeping empty gets emptied.  And then I can go back to doing what I do most frequently and best: nothing.

This or some version of this may work for you, too.  Sometimes it works too well.  For example, when the task is to “pay the gas bill” and the gas bill gets paid and I don’t remember paying it… I have to go back to the checkbook and see whether I actually did.

But in perspective, this system is superior to its predecessor, writing everything on its individual little scrap of paper. You can lose a little scrap of paper.  Or maybe it gets wet and you can’t read it.  Or you wrote it in the dark and can’t read it.  Or you have that med school handwriting without the fuss of actually going to med school … and can’t read it.

You never lose the internet.  You may get service outages, but your stuff’s still there.  And you can always hit McDonalds or Starbucks to check your messages.

In any event, leveraging a liability into an asset is something worth thinking about.  Not too heavily, though.  That lazy thing will get in the way if you do.

Shrapnel:

--The Associated Press can now say its (AP) logo stands for Aggravating Piñata.  The agency could have been more cautious about the way it posted Hillary Clinton’s “clinching” the Dem nomination Monday causing political cat fur to stand on end and provoking a long line of bat swingers.  In the long run, it probably won’t amount to more than much ado about little.

Today’s Quote: “I hate writing.  But I love having written.”  --  Dorothy Parker whose quips and quotations were always better than the stuff she was paid for.  She is quoted in the NY Times’ series of memorable quotes from its obituaries.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments when you get around to commenting to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016