How more self-coordination can lead to more self-love
I built systems to organise my life and now I feel like I’m part of a caring team.
Summary
Over the past few years, I have increased how much I communicate with myself across time.
The clearest example of this is my regular review process, but also by employing many of the strategies described by Building a Second Brain.
This has created a significantly increased sense of self-trust, self-understanding and has made it easier for me to maintain habits and achieve goals.
This also caused me to see myself as being a more “in-the-moment” or “3-dimensional”, and less “4-dimensional” (i.e. - I identify less strongly with myself at different points in time)
I can now more easily see my future self as a person I am caring for and my past self can be a person I am grateful for.
I find this way of framing my experience really helpful. I don’t inhabit this all the time, and it hasn’t been a complete transformation, but it’s had a strong enough positive impact on my wellbeing that I wanted to share it.
The before and the after
There are moments in life that mark clear milestones in the timeline. Moments for which there is a before and an after. Moments where daily experiences, thoughts and feelings change significantly and permanently. I have a bunch of these milestones; mostly new jobs, new relationships, world events, or moving cities or houses. My life before I moved to London was very different to after I moved here. My life before that first Covid lockdown was very different to after. But one of the most important milestones in my narrative is Trello. My life was very different before and after Trello. In 2016 I started using it at work and It. Changed! Everything!!!
Trello is a task management software that allows you to add tasks to one of several lists. You can then move them around, tick them off etc. It’s very simple and easy to use.
I don’t even understand what I was doing before Trello. I assume I used post-it notes a bit. I think I would send emails to myself sometimes. I probably tried to not do too much. But after Trello I could now write anything down one day and be able to be confident that future-me would pick it up. This was the first step in improving the most important collaboration of my life…. my collaboration with my future and past selves.
I now use online project management tools like Trello to manage a lot my personal time and projects. Everything from when I change my contact lenses, to deciding my annual goals. But this isn’t a post about productivity or time management. This is a post about self-love.
Why build personal systems
Having good systems has been a huge emotional relief. I am not naturally organised. I tend to daydream and get easily distracted. If an event is not in my calendar I will not be going to it (I have missed giving talks because of this). Forgetting things has caused me a lot of stress and anxiety. I remember having this constant sense that there was something that I should be doing. Half my attention was spent scanning my memory for the things I needed to do; repeating and revising mental to-do lists to myself. I suspect this was awful for pre-Trello Toby (I can’t be sure though because he wasn’t gathering any data on his wellbeing).
I now have much more complex systems of apps to manage my reviews, priorities my to-do lists and record my thoughts, feelings, and ideas. These systems provide two main benefits:
By recording more thoughts and feeling, and then drawing out pattern, I understand myself, my experience, and my values much better.
By recording what I have done, what I need to do and collecting data on my progress I am better at sticking to habits, and achieving goals.
These are both a product of the same general improvement: Improved communication and coordination between my past, present and future selves. And after 7 years of building this better self-coordination architecture, it now really feels like my past and future selves actually exist.
Feeling in the moment (or feeling more 3-dimensional)
It’s clear that these future and past mes are not exactly me. I’m this thing right now. This 3-dimensional current thing. They are somewhere else in time. They look similar, but a little different and probably feel a little different too. They share my name and many of my memories, values and beliefs, but they aren't exactly me.
My default way of seeing myself before was as a vaguely four-dimensional thing. But not across my whole life. I didn’t really feel like 5-years-ago me, was me. It was more like I slowly disappeared as I went further back. If I thought about something embarrassing I had done a month ago - it was still a thing I had done, so it made sense to still feel shame about it. If I had had an achievement, I could continue to luxuriate in pride years later. And the things I’m trying to achieve were for me. When I booked a holiday, I would be the one going on that holiday.
Now that so much of my memory and decision making is externalised into software, I don’t need to identify with them as much. I don’t need to be all up in future-me’s business making sure he’s doing things right. And the decisions and data that past-me has produced are all there in my apps. I trust this 4-dimensional community much much more now. Past me was looking out for me and made some generally decent decisions. Future me will handle the things when they get to it, I just need to delegate to them effectively. I can just be now.
I should mention that creating self-coordination infrastructure isn’t the only thing that has contributed to this change - I’ve also been building a meditation habit over the past few years. Most forms of meditation involve “letting go” of thoughts about the past and future, which definitely helps feel more in the moment (but I’m not sure I would have maintained my mediation habit without my digital systems though)
Love, trust, and gratitude across 4 dimensions
Less identification with my past and future selves has affected my emotional response to memory and anticipation. Instead of feeling shame at past embarrassing moments, I can feel compassion at past-me’s pain. Instead of pride, I can feel gratitude for the things he has done for my present benefit (I wrote a bit about self-gratitude here). Future me consistently feels more like a person who will exist and who I feel a sense of care towards. There is this person in the future who really exists and matters to me and I want them to be happy. And because of the improved self-understanding I more am confident about what will make them happy. This means maintaining habits and delegating to them in a way that is kind, clear, and realistic. Past, present, and future me now feel like a strong team who care about each other. This is a really nice, and unexpected result of having good systems…
…but there are occasionally some trade-offs: