Tasks and Stories
May 2020
By thinking about tasks, we automatically create stories about them. When planning to cook, we imagine the components, the efforts, the look and taste of the final dish. A set of events with emotional peaks and valleys. A story. Unconsciously, by default, we feel that the more exciting a story is, the more important its task.
This doesn’t cause much trouble, except when we perceive an unimportant task as important, only because its story is exciting.1 These deceivingly important tasks are getting stuck in your head and prevent you from focusing on truly cool stuff. What can you do about them? Well, you can try making the task’s story less thrilling(like by removing the emotional reward2), but trying to fight the narratives can be time consuming or impossible. While just being aware of stories that drive your actions, is the most powerful way of being disenchanted by them.
Notes
One powerful and common story template is “by finishing this(any) task, my life will progress”. It applies well to media, where the desire to “just finish it” can often be the only reason to continue consuming that media. “I’ve finished consuming X!” feels good. ↩︎
Like, spoiling a fiction book ending can destroy the thrill of finishing it for good. ↩︎