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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?

#181

Post by dreeves »

hawkice wrote: post #164
dreeves wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commi…

Thanks! [glow!]

And really excellent point about queue limiting and kanban! Now I'm wondering if there's a hack or plugin or just a convention to make Trello work that way...

Or maybe the answer is Beeminder's Trello integration, to enforce limits on Trello cards. :)

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

#183

Post by malcolmocean »

poppingtonic wrote: post #172
XFrequentist wrote: post #103

https://complice.co Complice is aimed at exactly this problem. Integrates a bunch of other productivity hacks as well, I love it. The founder was interviewed on indie hackers recently: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/complice

You can also use Complice in a group setting, using rooms, if you think you might need accountability buddies.

Here's the Hacker News room, for instance: https://complice.co/room/hackers

(Not a lot of people in it lately, but we could change that ;) )

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

#184

Post by daveguy »

dreeves wrote: post #163
infinityplus1 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Premium seems really pricey as the only one that has a "give to charity" option. I expect some increased options to give to charity (10,20,40,60) would be a significant boost to good will / advertisement. "50% but only if you pay us $30+/mo" comes off as kind of greedy.

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

#186

Post by enoch_r »

daveguy wrote: post #156
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…

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…

> How much have you had to pay beeminder?

about $300 or so, much of it front-loaded towards early on when I was still gaining some necessary meta-habits, like "check beeminder carefully every morning/night."

> How do you make payments (escrow, credit card, PayPal, etc)?

They're credit card only for now.

> It seems like this would be a great opportunity for a non-profit.

I have no problem rewarding Beeminder for a service I find many times more valuable than what I pay them. Paying Beeminder my pledges is voluntary and mutually beneficial--they get an incentive to keep the service running, I get an incentive to improve my behavior. I like giving to charity too, but I'm fine with my Beeminder contracts strictly rewarding Beeminder.

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

#187

Post by jachee »

stagbeetle wrote: post #167
gspetr wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.

--Palindrome

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

#188

Post by m3adow »

awjr wrote: post #108

I have a trello board with the following columns: "Good intentions" :- Things I think I'm going to do. I investigate then put in other columns. "Next Up" :- Need to have a go at next. "Working On" :- Actively doing. "Done/Dead" :- Things that I did as well as things I failed at or discarded. "Follow Up" :- Something happened, so need to wait on something/someone to then allow me to continue. "Asleep" :- Sometimes thi…

This sounds very useful. I used to have something similar in a smaller scale on a whiteboard a couple of years ago. I guess a Trello board is just a better iteration.

I'll be trying this the next couple of weeks.

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

#189

Post by dreeves »

daveguy wrote: post #184
dreeves wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Premium seems really pricey as the only one that has a "give to charity" option. I expect some increased options to give to charity (10,20,40,60) would be a significant boost to good will / advertisement. "50% but only if you pay us $30+/mo" comes off as kind of greedy.

Super valuable feedback; thank you!

I realize your feedback is about the impression it gives, totally separate from how greedy we actually are, but we're still tiny ($22k/mo revenue with 3.5 FTEs). And like enoch_r and mgiannopoulos have averred, paying the penalties to Beeminder generally feels super fair. So that's why we've limited the charity option to the ultra-VIP plan. (We're super open to more feedback about this though. We tend to get a highly biased sample of opinion from our users, i.e., the people who weren't immediately put off by our apparent greed. :))

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

#190

Post by braymundo »

travis_d_ray wrote: post #112
LVB wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Plans are nothing; planning is everything." - Dwight D. Eisenhower I used to hear this a lot from one of my better bosses. I agree with it. It is, however, important to capture "planning". Any form is fine, whether scribbles or a list or a picture of a whiteboard. Trying to organize the raw info was usually a waste of time, but having it accessible as a reference wasn't.

The first casualty of any war is the plan.

As Mike Tyson put it: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
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