#captainawkward

“Social distancing is an incredible act of solidarity. Those of us who can stay home are saving lives by “flattening the curve,” i.e. slowing the spread of the virus to hopefully allow overwhelmed medical facilities and researchers time and resources to handle urgent cases and work on vaccines/treatments, respectively.”

“Not everyone can stay home right now. Some people are saving lives in doctor’s offices and hospitals, keeping us fed, preventing us from being buried in piles of garbage, delivering our necessities, keeping the lights on and the toilets flushing...Staying home (for those of us who can) for the next few weeks helps the people who cannot.” 

“The challenges many of us are suddenly dealing with are not new – Disabled people have been fighting to work at home, to have meds and other necessities delivered, to have telemedicine covered...We can learn from them now, we must fight for and with them – and against ableist eugenics and fascism forever. When things go “back to normal” for able-bodied people, we can’t leave anyone behind.“

Captain Awkard

One unique thing about Complice is that you can’t just put in a task and not say what its for. All of your intentions need to either be designated towards a goal, or marked as miscellaneous. This helps to make it really clear how much of what you're doing is goal-directed and isn't, and can show you when your focus is getting derailed.

Sometimes, though, users create a "miscellaneous" goal, or something slightly more specific, like "chores". My intuition is that you probably don't want a goal for that. Just put those intentions as miscellanous, and you're good.

But I thought about it a little bit longer and realized there were a couple of reasons why it would be worth setting up an explicit goal for this stuff.

Reason 1: Because otherwise that stuff gets totally neglected

Still not sure about this one. But I guess if your life just turns into a mess when you don't do any chores, and using Complice is causing you to basically only spend time on things that are "goal-directed", then this might make sense. Even in that case, I'd recommend something more like...

Reason 2: Because you want to systematize

I think that systematizing your chores is an awesome goal. If you think you can seriously reduce the long-term amount of time spent on chores (possibly by spending more time on it in ther short-term) then that's totally worth prioritizing. But then you're going to want to make your daily intentions be things like "set up a place for all the house's car keys" or

Reason 3: Breaking the Low Mood Cycle

This one is interesting. I was reading this guest post on Captain Awkward called Breaking The Low Mood Cycle, which describes how somehow the best way to get out of a bad mood is to do something—anything. Even something that's not productive per se, like having a shower.