2010

A group of people who are tired of your unjust bullshit, who are not going to let you shrug it off or get away with it, and who are not going to stop confronting you with it.

Yes. I find it helpful.

Space Invaders.

• Todoist for projects and tasks
• Standard Notes or Obsidian for notes or temporary lists

I prefer to have one authoritative database of tasks (Todoist) and then I use whatever plain text or Markdown tools are available to me in the moment for short term lists. I have settled on Standard Notes for longer term/reference notes, but I could just as easily use anything with plain text files.

You’ll almost certainly need both paper and electronic solutions, because you’ll remember stuff when you don’t have paper handy. If you can get ideas out of your head quickly, that tends to help more than having the right medium available.

I like using paper for scribbling things down while working on a task, but then my phone and computer for almost everything else. And if I have something on paper that I haven’t finished, I either move it into Todoist or throw it away.

I’m an old index card person, so I love ripping up completed task lists. It feels very therapeutic to me.

“till och från” is a new one for me, so thank you. I would have used “här och där”.

The last formulation makes perfect sense to me. I like to think I could even have written it.

Tusentack för att du tog tid för att förklara lite.

Thank you. What little I can speak or write is very firmly 1980s textbook German.

Unsurprising. I’m still well in the stage where I’m formulating thoughts in English, then translating into Swedish. Very occasionally something pops out spontaneously, fully-formed, and in Swedish.

I’m mostly thrilled to have got “i” right there, because I haven’t quite memorized i/på with time expressions. It will come.

How well does your formulation convey the nuance that I’ve been learning (off and on, often passively), but often not actively studying? The verbs “att studera”/“att plugga” feel more to me like actively working, but of course, my feelings in this regard are more about English “study” than those Swedish words.

Mostly self study from a variety of sources. I lived part time in Stockholm for four years, but it was far easier than I’d expected to speak only English, so although my reading and writing improved, my speaking and listening didn’t. Every time I tried, they switched to English on me. I don’t blame them.

Now I’m a bit stuck: I can’t find much to listen to that’s at my level. I’m past the beginner stuff but can’t keep up with Swedish spoken at full speed.

• I have spoken English since birth.
• Je parle français depuis l’âge de 7 ans, parce que je l’apprenais à l’école.
• Estudiaba el español en la escuela secundaria.
• Jag lär mig svenska i fler än tio år.
• Ich kann etwas Deutsch lesen und verstehen.

And thanks to my Swedish, I can read a surprising amount of Danish and Norwegian.

I would call myself proficient in French, passable in Spanish, barely functional in Swedish, and I can get by in German in a very banal emergency. 😉

“Delightful”.

In your shoes, I’d want to understand more about what makes me miserable about not finishing things. In fact, I was in those shoes a decade or so ago. I take a much more measured view of that now. If I genuinely want to finish it or need to finish it, I’ll finish it. The rest is noise.

Everyone gets there in their own time. Meantime, you’re welcome, good luck, and peace.

Aha, so that’s something in the way: it might be more work than it’s worth to you. Either the uncertainty interferes with you or the certainty that it demands much more effort than it’s worth interferes with you. Does one of these hit you more than the other?

I’m certainly familiar with both feelings with regards to different projects.

So… Let me address each of those, just in case.

• Can you just do some of it and then stop and be satisfied with the part you’ve done?
• Can you start, figure out that it’s more trouble than it’s worth, then undo and go back to where you were before?

I don’t merely mean “Are you able to?” but also “How would you feel about those outcomes?”

Peace.

Is there also something you don’t want to happen that seems likely to happen if you try?

For example, I work with many folks who struggle to leave projects unfinished, so they resist starting for reasons they don’t quite understand.

I relate to these patterns, which is why I have tried to learn about the fundamentals of motivation.

What is the relationship for you between my prior suggestion and your clarification above?

One of these is likely to be true for you. Maybe more than one.

• You don’t know what to do, at least some part of it.
• You know what to do, but you don’t know what will happen if you do it.
• You know what to do and you know what will happen, but you don’t want that to happen.

If any of these resonate with you, then that might give a clue about what to try next.

In addition, you can act without feeling motivated. Some people like starting with 10 minutes of effort or a single step, because sometimes doing anything is enough to sustain energy and focus. It’s a way of using inertia to work for you, rather than against you.

How do you react to this?

In the Bible, it says clearly that no one should make a dare to edit or correct the Bible by any words. But many chapters and contents are extremely censored from the original Bible.

I’m curious about what you think. How do you react to this?

It sounds perfectly normal to me.

Hell is other people. You only exist because other people see you, which means that other people have a chance to judge you. You can never escape the risk of their judgment. Never.

Most people go through three stages:

1. Discovering this.
2. Fighting this.
3. Accepting this.

This is not a problem to solve, but instead a reality to accept. Think about this for a while. One day, you might realize that:

1. They, not you, are responsible for how they judge you.
2. You can’t stop them from judging you, only they can. And even they probably can’t.
3. Most people most of the time are too busy thinking about themselves to pay much attention to you.

It’ll happen when you’re ready.

I spent decades worried about what people thought of me, because I’d been bullied in my youth and had to be aware of people’s motives for self-protection. I kept this habit even after the threats had gone away. That’s the power of habits established in childhood.

You could try, when you have this impulse, looking at the impulse as nothing more than an impulse that will fade away, if you look right at it.

Peace.