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Ask HN: What do you use to align your daily todos with your long term goals?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you use to align your daily todos with your long term goals?

#161

Post by infinityplus1 »

passivepinetree wrote: post #158
daveguy wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three questions: How much have you had to pay beeminder? How do you make payments (escrow, credit card, PayPal, etc)? Is it a non-profit? It seems like this would be a great opportunity for a non-profit. Although it may reduce the incentive a bit. I expect it will be psychologically similar. Especially if the non-profit overhead is something like 10%. You are effectively losing 10% of what could have gone directly to…

Their FAQ is here: https://www.beeminder.com/faq 1. You set the payment amount, but the default is exponential. (Edit: didn't read your comment thoroughly enough the first time to know you were referring to the OP, not the general policy.) 2. Payments are done via credit card, although Paypal support seems to be in the works. 3. It does not appear to be a non-profit. It looks like a business where Beeminder's living…

Their company's success depends on their product's failure. Pretty funny if you ask me.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to align your daily todos with your long term goals?

#162

Post by beat »

Someone once said look after the molehills, and the mountains will take care of themselves.

The best thing I ever did for my to-do habit was to get rid of the backlog. I don't backlog tasks now. I only track things I am working on now, or will be working on immediately after. The backlog caused an urgent-vs-important conflation that led to a lot of analysis paralysis.

If something isn't important enough to stay at the top of my mind, it's not that important.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to align your daily todos with your long term goals?

#163

Post by dreeves »

infinityplus1 wrote: post #161
passivepinetree wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their FAQ is here: https://www.beeminder.com/faq 1. You set the payment amount, but the default is exponential. (Edit: didn't read your comment thoroughly enough the first time to know you were referring to the OP, not the general policy.) 2. Payments are done via credit card, although Paypal support seems to be in the works. 3. It does not appear to be a non-profit. It looks like a business where Beeminder's living…

Their company's success depends on their product's failure. Pretty funny if you ask me.

Oh man, we really need to bump this to the top of our FAQ :)

https://www.beeminder.com/faq#qcoi

But maybe the best way to refute that is that we've been around 5.5 years and our long-term churn (not counting short-term churn of dabblers which is embarrassingly high cuz Beeminder is super nerdy and intimidating-looking!) is only 2%/month.

PS: Huge thanks to enoch_r for the beautiful testimonial!

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to align your daily todos with your long term goals?

#164

Post by hawkice »

dreeves wrote: post #130
hawkice wrote: post #10

Beeminder. Everything from exercise to posture to meditation to work. It's one of the most clever pieces of software I've used, in terms of domain-ideas embedded in it.

Wow, thank you so much for the kind words! (I'm a Beeminder cofounder.) I'm actually also not sure what you mean about embedded domain-ideas, or I hadn't heard it put that way. Do you mean the domain idea being aligning daily to-dos with long-term goals by use of a commitment contract? And then our clever implementation is how we tie the commitment to datapoints on a graph? That's what we think is clever. But I'd lov…

I just meant, that, not only is the premise of commitment contracts well thought through, the smaller choices, like the 1 week delay on changing a goal setting, to why the exponential increase in punishments is closer to tripling than doubling, are all thought through and justified on the blog and have been clearly tweaked over time.

You guys even have super transparency, and iirc mention you provide it because commitment contracts would incentive you to encourage failure, and that's not what you want at all.

Compare that against e.g. Trello, which is good looking and usable, but it's kanban without queue limiting. That defeats the whole point! (I explain this in more detail here: https://gen517.com/queue-limiting-the-whole-point-of-kanban/ )

The difference between trello and beeminder (to me, at least) is that the beeminder people think about how to provide anti-akratic tools a lot, and embed their thoughts and discoveries into their product. The Trello people basically provide nice CSS for a tool so flexible it has nothing to say at all. If I want digital paper, sure, Trello is nice. If I want _actual help with something_? I'd prefer software developed by people trying to help me.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to align your daily todos with your long term goals?

#165

Post by daveguy »

nzjrs wrote: post #98
erelde wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ok. That's a weird detail to bother hipsterbragging about. > "Successful people have better things to do than arguing on reddit/hn"

That wasn't arguing. This is arguing.

> "Successful people have better things to do than arguing on reddit/hn"

A priori ad hominem. Very clever. I think I am going to end all my posts like that from now on.

Remember, kids! "Successful people have better things to do than arguing on reddit/hn" -nzjrs

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to align your daily todos with your long term goals?

#166

Post by taude »

hbt wrote: post #105

I like the 4dx approach. Lead measures vs Lag measures. you pick a long term goal and associate a metric to it. Example: weight from 180 to 170 That's your lag measure. Your lead measure are the activities you get done daily. - Daily caloric intake - sleep schedule - exercise routine - water intake - intermittent fasting Your lead measure influence your lag measure but as the name indicates, it takes time before you…

I read about this in the book, Deep Work. I guess there's a book just about it (that my boss forwarded to me once).

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to align your daily todos with your long term goals?

#167

Post by stagbeetle »

gspetr wrote: post #118
travis_d_ray wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first casualty of any war is the plan.

He who fails to plan, plans to fail.

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.

General George S. Patton, Jr.

No plan survives contact with the enemy.

Unknown

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to align your daily todos with your long term goals?

#168

Post by enoch_r »

passivepinetree wrote: post #154
enoch_r wrote: post #151

I cannot possibly recommend Beeminder highly enough, if you happen to have the personality type that it works well with. The basic idea isn't too far off from the million other "habit" apps out there. I say I want to meditate X days a week, tell Beeminder whenever I meditate, Beeminder gives me a pretty (okay, decently attractive) graph of how I'm doing, and they tell me if I'm not meditating as much as I want to. Th…

Wait, do you pay the company Beeminder that money? Or is it paid into a savings account or something for you to have access to later? If you actually pay the company that money, and if their app is based around that pricing, that's a pretty unique business model idea.

Yep, I pay Beeminder when I fail! As I see it, it's a mutually beneficial arrangement: Beeminder gets an incentive to keep operating, and I get an incentive to do whatever it was I just dropped the ball on. Maybe I'd feel differently if Beeminder were a huge, super-profitable company, but they're a tiny niche product that is ridiculously valuable to me and I have no problem rewarding them for that.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to align your daily todos with your long term goals?

#169

Post by thex10 »

renaudg wrote: post #39

A critical factor of success in achieving long term goals is to schedule corresponding daily todos on a calendar. Because if something isn't either obviously urgent or scheduled on a calendar, it never gets done. For this reason, I sorely miss the Timeful app (bought and shut down by Google) which nailed the process perfectly, integrating one-off todos, habits (e.g. 3 runs/week) and calendar management in a single sy…

If you use Apple's Reminders and Calendar apps at all, I highly recommend Fantastical. It works really well. I love being able to see my one-off todos and chores and appointments all in the same view.

The one thing it might lack is guidance to organizing projects/subtasks/dependencies. But luckily I don't need those in my calendar.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use to align your daily todos with your long term goals?

#170

Post by [deleted] »

renaudg wrote: post #39

A critical factor of success in achieving long term goals is to schedule corresponding daily todos on a calendar. Because if something isn't either obviously urgent or scheduled on a calendar, it never gets done. For this reason, I sorely miss the Timeful app (bought and shut down by Google) which nailed the process perfectly, integrating one-off todos, habits (e.g. 3 runs/week) and calendar management in a single sy…

[deleted]
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