Intend Philosophy & Paradigm

Intend is a new approach to goal achievement, in the form of both a philosophy and a software system. Its goal is to create consistent, coherent, processes, for people to realize their goals:

Intend currently spans from the ground-level to about 35,000 ft on this planning abstraction diagram.

Virtually all to-do list software on the internet, whether implicitly or explicitly, is based on the GTD (David Allen's "Getting Things Done") philosophy.

The main paradigmatic differences of Intend, compared to GTD-based systems are as follows: (these are expounded later)

Here are some of the primary marketing materials from the homepages of other todo-list sites:

All of these either talk about managing tasks or “to-do lists”.

Intend is, by many appearances, a to-do list app, in the sense that it is an app (✓) where you make lists (✓) of things you intend to do (✓). But with Complice, the focus is on doing things, not on making and organizing lists.

The main way that the app currently embodies this philosophy is by not offering any place in the app to write down a bunch of stuff that you're not planning to work on yet and may never work on yet. It's not that we think such lists are not valuable—they are. But they have costs, and one of those costs is that people get too focused on keeping the list organized, at the expense of focusing on what they're actually trying to achieve and taking actions towards achieving those things.

A famous quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower:

I sometimes characterize the opposite of aliveness as staleness, as in “is your productivity system full of stale tasks?” but I’ll be charitable here and talk about the positive framing of GTD in this respect, which I’m going to call exhaustiveness.

The first Step of GTD is Capture. Capturing things is important for getting them out of your working memory so you can focus on your work. But in my experience (and based on talking with people) it has issues as well:

The result of these issues tends to lead to the person keeping a separate list for newly emerged tasks that are of clearly higher-value than the original list, either within the same context or perhaps by starting to use a new app. The old “trusted system” is no longer trusted, because it’s full of stuff the person knows (at least implicitly) they don’t want to do.

In principle, most of these failure modes can be combated with an effective weekly review that pares down the lists. In practice, almost nobody I've met actually consistently does the GTD weekly review (which means they aren't actually following the GTD system, but a hollow shell of GTD that nobody ever claimed would work).

One of RememberTheMilk’s taglines, as of this writing, is “Never forget the milk (or anything else) again.” The idea here is that nothing escapes the system—you put things in, and you can keep track of them, and not forget them. This is great, but some things actually are worth forgetting. Or worth ignoring.

Complice currently has two main ways of prioritizing aliveness over exhaustiveness.

(talk about notdones propagator)

Future implementations of Complice may also have a system for brainstorming potential future tasks, or breaking down big things into small tasks, but without the assumption that all of those necessarily will be completed eventually. Instead, the brainstormed list would act as inspiration for choosing one’s daily intentions, and tasks from it that are ignored would gradually be slid into a backlog, automating the process whereby the user makes a new list when the old stuff becomes stale.

Since most people have at least a couple goals where there is some sense of “things I might do in the future,” they end up using other systems to keep track of those. I am aware of several users each of WorkFlowy and Evernote for this purpose. Perhaps these users will use those apps totally effectively, but importantly... with a list+Complice combo, even if the list goes stale, Complice will still be there, asking you what’s most important to do today. That might be some object-level things that are obvious, or it might be the task “purge my old task list” or even “switch from using workflowy to track future tasks to todoist”

I believe that this kind of system works better than GTD-like systems for people who are pursuing personal goals where they get to decide what their priorities are and where most small tasks are not critical. Where small tasks are critical, other systems (including email inboxes) can supplement Complice for ensuring those are taken care of. An administrative or personal assistant would not want to use Complice to keep track of the tasks assigned by their employer. Many Complice users are students, self-employed, and/or freelancers. Of those who are employed, many have substantial control over how they approach their work assignments, and those who are not tend not to track their work-related tasks in Complice.

Many other to-do list apps feature, in their product demos, people buying groceries. Seriously? Groceries? You built this app so people could buy groceries better? RememberTheMilk has it in their name.

Anyway, enough snark. While GTD-based systems have projects, the projects mostly are just buckets to put tasks into. Tasks exist as freefloating entities that might not be associated with a project at all, or might be in theory associated with a project but when you put the task in your inbox you didn’t assign it to a project, so you first need to process your inbox, etc.

With Complice, goals come first. You can’t use the app without having at least one goal that you’re working towards. Most users have 3-6. At most 10 are permitted (each has its own digit, so you have a goal 1, goal 2, etc).

You also can’t enter an intention (aka task) without indicating which goal it is for (or that it is a miscellaneous task). This means that it is really clear why you’re doing what you’re doing. That’s not to say that you will necessarily do the most strategic thing towards that goal, but it does make it more likely that you will do something rather than nothing, and also much more likely that you will notice that what you’re doing isn’t really strategic, because:

I think that having goals come first means that users are more likely to forget to do random small tasks and less likely to forget to make progress towards their high-level goals, which I see as being probably a good tradeoff, especially if the person has other systems in place to ensure small tasks don’t get forgotten if they’re indeed really important.

The goals-based approach has other cool potential applications, such as notation to indicate which actions make direct progress towards your goal versus which are auxiliary/support actions. For example, unless your goal is something like reading books, no amount of reading books on a subject will achieve your goal. Also if your goal is running a business, then you have a bunch of maintenance tasks like filing expenses, which are important for staying afloat but don’t ultimately move things forward.

To some extent, you need to have a goal-oriented framework to do this classification, because otherwise it’s not clear what works directly towards it versus acts as a support task or upkeep. Technically you could just envision your entire life as “I start here, then I go here” and you could ask what moves you directly along that path, but I don’t expect that would feel intuitive for most people. In practice, using goals to distinguish the different paths you're moving on seems to be better than smushing them all together.

This section has some overlap with both the pieces on Capture and also the section above on goal-orientedness. Essentially the distinction here is:

This represents a difference between reactively prioritizing incoming demands (from coworkers or email newsletters) or random impulses, and proactively seeking ways to reach a goal.

As described above, Complice currently doesn’t do that much to guide people towards strategic goal-approach, but for many people the bottleneck isn’t unstrategicness but lack of momentum towards goals at all. So Complice focuses on momentum. I have some ideas for how to increase strategicness too.

In our Goal-Crafting Intensive workshops, we encourage people, once they've set some new goals, to come up with a thing to do towards each goal immediately (today or tomorrow) that they wouldn't have thought to do at all prior to having the goal. This also points at the distinction.

Articles that I resonate with and that ultimately I want the Complice philosophy to be compatible with (though the app may not yet be particularly optimized for that)