Intend
- formerly known as Complice
- read about the name change here
- The app I've created to help people be more intentional in their lives. Has a very different philosophy from most other to-do apps!
- I'll flesh out this page later, for now you can read more about the philosophy in my indiehackers interview or check out the app at intend.do
- Here's a slightly-edited piece from a few years ago on the Intend Philosophy & Paradigm
- See also Intentionality, not productivity
38 linked references
Intend Philosophy & Paradigm
- Intend is a productivity app, but it's also a productivity philosophy/paradigm. This article outlines that paradigm.
- 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 paradigmatic differences of Intend, compared to GTD-based systems are as follows: (these are expounded later)
- emphasis on doing, over organizing
- goals as fundamental, rather than tasks
- aliveness, over exhaustiveness
- proactive, rather than reactive
June 21st, 2023
- Intend book list — books that in some way accord with the Intend philosophy
- Oliver Burkeman — Four Thousand Weeks
- talks about doing things in light of mortality
- Brian Tracy — Eat That Frog
- “there is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important things.”
- the "law of forced efficiency"
- Niel Fiore — The Now Habit
- has a principle called the Unschedule which is quite nice which is a way of keeping something like a PhD thesis from taking over your life by first scheduling everything else you care about and focusing on keeping those commitments and not letting eg thesis-work go outside the bounds you've created for it
- Zig Ziglar's goal-setting stuff
- Pick Four was a fun workbook but is basically no longer available
- most of Zig's stuff is tapes I think
December 30th, 2022
- relevant to Intend
- Here’s a short audio reflection from the Waking Up app: you once wanted most of what you now have
August 11th, 2022
- using accountability partnerships to have a daily pulse with your partner
- some people have started dating who met in the coworking rooms
- two people who met via GCI got married
May 19th, 2022
- Intend = goal-setting framework that allows you to be very present in your life
February 26th, 2022
- from a Intend user, re the commitment contracts feature - relates to towardsness & awayness & procrastination
- > You bring an interesting point up about how we want to perceive our motivations for goal completion. There's a podcast with Rich Roll and Andrew Huberman, and in it Dr Huberman states, that, to the body, it doesn't matter how we are motivated (either by passion or pain of losing money - which is another aspect of motivation in that podcast, Humberman goes on to state that there are two different types of procrastination (hopefully I'm correct on that) one is anxious/fearful the other would be hypo-aroused. If that's true, then the latter type would find it more advantageous to use extrinsic motivation.
- the two different types of procrastination seem like a vital component for any model of akrasia & commitment contracts
- although I guess I think in some cases the way Beeminder operates is that people have anxiety around school so they get school done, but unless they also generate anxiety around making sure to hang out with friends they they just become socially isolated, or whatever 😅
- like, someone might even already be getting their homework done due to the inherent anxiety of grades & deadlines
- but they put off hanging out with friends unless they beemind it
- (the podcast btw seems to be Rich's podcast, interviewing Huberman, not an episode of Huberman's podcast)
February 11th, 2022
- Here are a few tips:
- make separate lists for each complice goal
- do a mix of pulling in stuff from your list and deciding what to work on based on whatever feels alive today, without looking at the list
- depending on various factors, you might want to have tasks more broken down into smaller things in Trello, or in Complice (or ofc they may be the same)
- if the list gets stale & aversive, throw it out and make a new one
January 28th, 2022
- short video explaining the Intend Philosophy & Paradigm
- super detailed walkthrough, with "pause here then resume when you're finished xyz"
- could maybe somehow overlay this in the app
- Rob Hardy > call it "how to get started with purpose-driven productivity" or something, not "Intend guide"
Podcast summaries
- Keywords - brain hemispheres McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model Perceptual Control Theory barn-raising Internal Family Systems blindspot blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) it's only possible to be rational within a frame make shared or different frames explicit Change doesn't just happen Intend productivity Intend Philosophy & Paradigm how to think about goals PCT internal conflict much of human collaboration scales sublinearly but it's possible to scale superlinearly What are the components or dimensions required for collaborative culture? Geoffrey West Questions for teasing apart the concept of commitment commitment/choice is a confused way to relate to stances/mindsets Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings everyone is constantly overgeneralizing acceptance isn't the same as acceptance safety self-trust right hemisphere left hemisphere self-energizing
With Jonny Miller — Podcast with Jonny Miller Transcript › Outline of ideas discussed. (I'm M, Jonny is J)
- 29:11 - 43:49 - Reconnecting to desire, aliveness vs exhaustiveness Intend productivity Intend Philosophy & Paradigm how to think about goals PCT
- 58:01 - 1:34:30 - Helping Trace arrange work through the details on his course and on us working together. me as project advisor / biz consultant / design jammer / co-visioner Intend visakanv sacred gifts self-energizing
November 15th, 2021
- realized I could put the orienting questions on the Intend new tab page
metaphor
- eg Intend has a list of items with a checkbox next to them, that it calls "intentions" instead of "tasks" or "todos".
- Part of what legitimizes the use of a new word here is that those intentions have to be set afresh each day, so they are actively something the user is intending to do, not just a contextless "task". This structural change reinforces the different metaphor.
- (of course, people are so used to todos from years or decades from school, work, homework, deadlines... that it's easy for that lens to get projected onto the intentions. I don't yet know of an app-related solution for that, although techniques like Bio-Emotive have been helpful for me & others escaping being trapped in a Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings dream mashup)
September 28th, 2021
- George Woodliff-Stanley as cofounder of Complice-the-startup
- hackday with Andrew Schreiber on WebRTC
- metacog module makeathon
- visakanv marketing stuff
- nibras design stuff
September 23rd, 2021
- Huge day for @CompliceGoals—team page now tells our story in more detail, the primary impetus being that @joyurge is now fully on the team! He's essentially my cofounder in the next phase of Complice, as we prototype non-coercive teamwork principles & practices.
complice.co/about-the-team
Malcolm podcast appearances
- Intend & keeping your goals in touch with your feelings
February 16th, 2021
- mmm feels fun to be typing here with incline towards in my Intend UI
February 10th, 2021
talking with Agrippa Kellum & Raj Thimmiah February 10th,… › R > my notes on this idea › can › read only part of something and save the rest for later
January 26th, 2021
I'm doing a single-tasking experiment today as part of #T… › @ 11:26 - just finished a shower in which I began reworki… › and I'm noticing that, as part of the single-tasking work…
- there's an interesting Intend design question here actually, which is about a way to have like, progress marks/stamps on intentions, that are like, in some sense complete but you could still do more of them
- because it's not like I now want to mark this intention as complete, since I still intend to do more, but I want
- the satisfaction of logging a thing
- that intention to be complete when I get to my outcomes
- for now I think I'll use sandpiles for this, although it doesn't get that intention to be complete when I get to my outcomes
- I guess I could experimentally actually mark it complete then uncomplete it to set it as next action
- (whoa, how would it feel if "next action" were instead called "current action" or "on deck" or "right now" or something? 😮)
- might encourage people to use it in a more single-tasking way
- and there's ofc a question of like, am I gonna put "make lunch", "eat lunch" on there? I probably will today, but that would feel like noise most days - there needs to be a placeholder intention or even a placeholder mode or something
- anyway, I'm going to try this completion thing!
January 19th, 2021
- resonates with Intend and the full-fledged pomodoro technique
if you chain a big habit to a small habit, it may break the small habit
- lots of Intend users have requested, over the years, to add a journalling feature to the outcomes submission process (basically an end-of-day review of what you did that day towards each goal)
- and I've refused
- because in 2012 when I was using the email-to-myself proto-system that evolved into Intend, I had tried having a few journal questions I was trying to answer as part of the reflection email
- and I found that my reflections felt rich but they would sometimes be like 20mins long
- and some nights I was like "fuck I really need to sleep, not to spend 20 minutes writing"
- but the result was that I would also drop my outcomes, even though they could have taken only 2-4 minutes
Designing a better browser\workflow for Twitter & more
- / the Intend Next Action tab, which was itself inspired by NowDoThis
Better email
- One thing it does that resonates with Intend's vibe is that once you've looked at an email... you can kind of mark it as unread again but there's no way to just "leave it in the inbox". The equivalent action is "set aside" where "aside" means "I need to look at this later"—so it makes that action something you have to do rather than the default if you don't archive it.
- I have the Intend support mail living in intercom, so that has a separate inbox. I could also explore how I would redesign intercom, but that's somewhat separate, I think?
spreadsheets
- (This made sense in my case because I was trying to spend as little time as possible on my studies so I could focus on building Intend ... but I think the spreadsheet is potentially useful for any student who wants to consciously orient to strategic gradeseeking.)
What would a fluid or meta-systematic team coordination app look like?
- In some ways this thing seems basically like what Intend for teams would already be, since Complice is already designed for fluidity & purpose.
- Ah, another thing is "what are we already using and how could it work better?" in the same way that Intend evolved from a goal-tracking system based on P4 & iDT... yeah.
March 27th, 2020
- context-switching is the mindkiller Intend-related memes
January 6th, 2020
- Intend - handling short-term & long-term goals that are part of the same path... what to put as official Goals
Goal-Crafting Intensive
- A series of online workshops hosted by Intend, typically around New Year's, where we guide people through setting goals & setting up systems for how to achieve them.
November 28th, 2019
- Added some high-level notes about my app/business Intend, as well as a detailed document (drafted years ago) about how its paradigm is different from GTD (the system most to-do list apps are based on) Intend Philosophy & Paradigm