#complice-tips

A user asks: what is a good number of intentions to set in Complice each day? And how big/specific should each one be?

Ultimately it’s less about size and more about clarity. You want to maximize 3 components:

#1. Actionableness

You want it to be clear how to get started on a given intention. Consider this intention:

1) Move the x project forward

...could be clear if you have a next action list for that project somewhere. But if you don’t immediately know how to start a particular intention, you’ll want to be more specific. So maybe the intention would read more like this:

1) List out remaining steps for project x

One specific instance of this that I’ve already written about: Make “think about” intentions concrete and actionable.

#2. Attractiveness

Do your best to frame the intentions not just as random actions to perform, but in a way that gets you in touch with the purpose of the action. To some extent, Complice helps with this by colorizing each intention with the goal color, reminding you of why you’re doing it. So for example, consider:

&) clean my room

...if cleaning sounds like a chore to you, you might instead want to frame it something more like:

&) make my room a delightful space to be in

...provided, of course, that that’s something you know how to take action on, as per #1. If not, then maybe combine them:

&) put away or throw out a dozen things in my room so it’s more delightful to be in

#3. Organization

Don’t put in a ton of little intentions that will make your list hard to skim, unless having dozens of little items to tick off is super motivating as per #1 and #2.

But also, put enough detail in your tasks so that later when you’re reflecting, you can be clear on what it was in fact that you were doing.

Part of the value of your Complice data is that it represents a log of what you did each day. By keeping this in mind, you’ll tend to put a level of detail that is appropriate both now and later. (But this component is third because the other two are more important).

The Complice app is famously designed to avoid one of the major problems that plagues productivity systems: staleness. Staleness is when a list gets full of items that are no longer priorities or perhaps no longer useful at all, and it's a common reason people give up on a system (implicitly or explicitly).

The main way Complice has avoided staleness so far is by keeping your list focused just on today. You can't put in a bunch of stuff days or weeks in advance, and if you didn't do something yesterday, Complice doesn't assume that it should hang over you today.

...but what if today's list goes stale midday through the day? Sometimes I set a bunch of intentions last night and when I look at them today I'm just like "ugh I don't want to do any of that."

Introducing: the Now Page. It's the Today Page of the Today Page. It always starts blank, even if you've already set intentions for the day, and just asks "What now?" You choose something to work on, by typing in an intention or picking one from various lists, and then it shows you that.

At first glance, this may strike you as essentially equivalent to the Next Action view or the New Tab Page extension. There's one key difference from those though: when you mark your Now intention complete (or "not now/today") it doesn't automatically show you the next item on the list. It goes back to the expansive, open-ended "What now?"

If you just want to grab the next item from your list though, that's easy to do, just ctrl+click on the list icon and you'll automatically get the next item from the list. If you ctrl+shift+click, you'll get a random item from the list! You can do this with the existing intentions list, or the notdones list, and potentially other future lists.

The fact that it integrates with the existing intentions list means you can use the Now Page in parallel to the Today Page. You might set a list of intentions on the Today Page in the evening, then open the Now Page the next morning to decide what to do freshly. However, you can also use the Now Page exclusively, bypassing the Today Page altogether. This is a first for Complice—having a totally different primary workflow, that still integrates with outcomes, reviews, etc. I have the sense that more workflows are on the way.

First I want to say that I really support you honoring the movements of your energy and not try to get more done than you have the capacity to do at a given time. I figure that probably would just make the downswings even worse.

It sounds like maybe the thing to do is to find if there's a way that would feel good to refactor your goals. I've been wanting to build systems into Complice that would walk people through various refactoring processes. One thing that sometimes is helpful for me on this front is to sort of back up and ask myself "what are all the little things I'm trying to cause to happen?" and just write them down, on paper or my phone or a doc. And then they kind of naturally cluster into something that's usually pretty similar to my existing goals but sometimes usefully different.

Sometimes it does serve a goal but that wasn't the point of doing it. I'd say it's an issue if you're *only* doing these, or rather if you're only doing things that are tangentially relevant to a goal but don't move the needle, eg reading a bunch of books about making music but not actually making any music. But otherwise I think that noticing things that serve your goals even if you got drawn into doing them for other reasons is actually very much part of Complice!

If without reviews your goals are getting stale, I'm guessing you might have goals & plans too tightly coupled or something. Because if you're aiming at a multimonth goal, while it'll evolve a bit as you do more things and learn more about what you really want, it shouldn't build up too much staleness in my experience unless you've been making a bunch of assumptions about *how* you're going to do it.

You could try shortening the reviews—reduce each of them to one question or something like that. (idk if you know but you can customize the reviews questions, right in the reviews or on the goals page)

I'm experimenting with not presetting intentions, and not having intentions feed into larger structures of goals, and unsure how to represent this in the complice ontology.

The first one is very compatible with Complice—it's something I recommend people do if they're feeling averse to any sort of planning process but still want to be intentional. The second... hm. Okay, well, when I combine this with a sense of you wanting to refactor your goals, one idea that comes to mind is to just completely change the level of abstraction of your goals, so they're not about specific projects they're just about something like "peace of mind", "flow states", "meaningful learning" or something like that.  Also I notice you have 10 goals right now—might be easier to manage a bunch of what you're doing if you had fewer. You can assign intentions to archived/completed goals by using the 2-letter code for the goal:  CL) something towards CL goal

That might make it easier to archive some of these goals if you know you can still tag things towards those goals. Currently it only works in intentions but I want to add that to outcomes too. Maybe I'll do that right now!

A new user writes:

I use evernote for lists, and for planning my week. What do you think the additional benefit would be to adding goal-based tasks with complice? What are the must-dos for complice to get the most out of it? Thanks!

There are a few potential benefits, one of them being that Complice's daily outcomes review may more clearly help you make sure that you're actually working towards all of your long-term goals, and not just 1 or 2 of them.

Another is that many people find that GTD systems that involve collecting lots of items on lists often end up with a bunch of random things on the lists that aren't that important, but require a lot of managing, and mostly don't happen anyway. If you're not having this issue, congrats!

A third could be things like the integration with accountability partners, coworking rooms, etc.

As for must-dos, the most important thing I would say *is* that outcomes submission process. When Complice started, there was no site, just 2 emails a day asking for intentions & outcomes, and ultimately it's the outcomes that are the keystone of it all, because they allow you to see clearly which goals you're moving towards and which need more attention. And then some days it may also make sense to set intentions, or to use the pomodoro timer, and then maybe it also makes sense to do the weekly/monthly reviews, where again for each goal you look at what you did that week/month and consider if you're on track and what else you need to focus on.

A weekly review oriented to "how did I work this week and what's most important towards this goal?" is very different from a weekly review that's trying to organize a huge pile of tasks and prioritize between them, without deep consideration for "what am I actually trying to accomplish with all of this energy?" If what matters most to you is staying on top of lists and not missing deadlines, then such an approach may suit your lifestyle better than Complice! If what matters most to you is that a year from now you've made concrete progress on a few things (even if that means a couple of deadlines or tasks slipped) then Complice is probably a better fit.

A user writes:

I have been using Complice for a while and I am at a stage where I am reminded to do a few things that I might not have remembered, but I am not excited to craft my things to do.

I think part of the problem is I have a bunch of stuff coming in from Workflowy, which includes little reminders (wear a belt, which I sometimes forget) and (do not eat after 9pm, which I sometimes ignore)

I am just blathering, but if this is a thing that people go through (and has an article written, I would not mind being pointed to it, or) you can just nod and listen

This is a natural cycle. What you're encountering is a form of staleness. Complice is in general designed to combat staleness, for instance by not allowing you to enter a bunch of tasks that you're not actually going to do today. However, staleness can still show up in a few ways. The dailies and notdones features were ones that I knew would introduce sources of staleness into the system, so I did my best to counter-optimize for that. I think I did a reasonably good job, but it's not perfect yet.

The WorkFlowy integration... needs major work. Having established that, there are two levels to it:

What can you do differently? (since you're asking)

What can Complice do differently? (since most Complice users won't read this article)

What can you do differently?

It sounds to me like you want to fix your belt problem using something other than a reminder in your task list. I wrote an article called How to send perfectly-timed physical messages to your future self which would advocate for a strategy something like "when you take your belt off, put it on top of something that you'll pick up tomorrow after you have your pants on" and then obviously when you go to pick up that something, you'll first need to pick up your belt, at which point you put your belt on.

This is a specific example, but the general principle is that doing your desired behavior automatically is better than doing it by reminder. And if you do have to use a reminder, the best kind is one that leaves no ambiguity about whether or not now is the moment. So for "do not eat after 9pm", maybe what you want is something that will make your phone buzz once at 8:30pm, to remind you that it's your last chance to eat today, and something to make your phone buzz at 9pm, indicating that eating is now over for the day—whether you heeded the warning at 8:30 or not!

Another even-more-general principle is: if something isn't working, stop doing it. If the Complice "do not eat after 9pm" intention isn't reminding you to stop eating after 9pm, then find something else. You might still keep the intention around if you want to track which days you were successful at this, but it's clearly failing as a reminder.

Making sense of staleness

While writing this post, I ended up writing so much under dealing with staleness that I decided to make it its own post: Making sense of a single stale task

The basic gist is that it could be because the thing actually doesn't matter, or it could be because you're conflicted about it. If the thing doesn't matter, don't do it! If you're conflicted, either fix the task until you're not conflicted, or find a way to get back in touch with why the task matters so that rather than forcing yourself to do it (and resisting being forced) you're naturally drawn to it based on your sense of purpose.

What can Complice do differently?

Well, one thing would be if Complice could detect when people might be in situations like yours, and encourage them to reflect a bit like this post is doing.

Another piece is that it's currently hard to stop stale WorkFlowy things that are getting pulled into Complice, from within the Complice UI. My workflow for this looks like "copy the node id from my intentions textbox, open up a WorkFlowy tab, replace the node id in that tab with the one from my intentions, then delete/complete/untag that node." Even though that only takes 10-20 seconds, it's still way too cumbersome.