I live by alarms and reminders. I also try and automate as much as possible so I don’t have to rely on me remembering or being focused.

Finch (app) for little dopamine bursts for doing the basics - I have everything like get out of bed, take meds, put on clean clothes. It doesn’t penalize you if you miss anything, it just celebrates when you check things as done. When you do enough things in a day your penguin gets to go on an adventure.

Alexa and Siri - I have routines set up through Alexa, either to remind me of things at a certain time each day or ones I can set by saying a specific phrase. For example, when I say “Alexa I started the laundry” she’ll remind me an hour later to put the laundry in the dryer. Siri I use to make phone reminders whenever something pops into my mind so I don’t have to try and hold onto the thought and then forget what I was doing. My kid will even say to me, “Tell Siri now so you don’t forget.”

I’ve been playing around with the project management app Trello. I don’t have everything set up yet but it has “boosts” I think they’re called - basically different automations you can install and use within Trello. So for example you can link Trello to your calendar and then when certain events get added to your calendar Trello can automatically create a list of things you need to do before the event. And if you also link reminders it can automatically create the reminders to get those things done too. My struggle right now is just having the focus to figure out how to set up all the automations and link everything.

I found a neat one today. So the thing that’s currently working for me wears off right? Therapist suggests that I rotate through my bag of tricks periodically when I start to spin my wheels. The thing is, I don’t exactly recognize when this is starting to happen, only when it’s full blown productivity breakdown.

I told her that if I put a sticky note on my desk to remind me to switch up coping systems that I would become blind to it eventually. I said I would do calendar reminder for every x weeks, but the reminder would be so regular that I’d be predicting it and ignoring it.

She said you need one that goes off randomly but still roughly once a month.

A few test runs of apps on the Play store later and I found one that is minimalist, yet I can customize the range of minutes/ hours/ days for the interval of recurrence. I can remind myself to switch procrastination tools, to water the plants, go through that stack of mail…

We’ll see how long this lasts or if i start ignoring these too. Hopefully they’ll be novel enough to work for a little while.

The app is “Remind - Random Notifications”

I use YNAB for budgeting

Plan to Eat for meal planning.

Unfuck your habitat for cleaning.

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