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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?

#201

Post by enoch_r »

tedmiston wrote: post #196
enoch_r wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The company making money when you fail a goal doesn't sound very mutually beneficial.

I guess all I can say to this is that Beeminder has been worth many, many times what I've paid them (hence the evangelism), and I've paid them quite a lot. You might worry about perverse incentives, but they're going to make a lot more money by creating happy customers like me than by somehow tricking their users into failure for a one-time cashout.

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

#202

Post by 1123581321 »

tedmiston wrote: post #196
enoch_r wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The company making money when you fail a goal doesn't sound very mutually beneficial.

Take a look at what they've written on their site when you have time; it's more thought out than you might expect.

The gist is that they make money by a) selling a monthly subscription to give you more options and features, and b) charging you the amounts too small to motivate you so you can get up to the amounts that you take seriously.

They've set up their pricing so that you will pay half of the motivating amount to find the motivating amount, e.g., you might lose $5+10+30 over three weeks in order to find out that the threat of paying $90 motivates you. They argue that most people would never feel that $90 threat without experiencing the first $45 of losses because they'd either not sign up for $90 right away or cancel quickly since they hadn't sunk anything into the program.

Their more experienced users pay the monthly premium to skip the first few weeks of penalties and make progress faster since they already know the level of financial risk that motivates them. They also let you adjust the number down since circumstances and habits can change your ideal wager.

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

#204

Post by commenttolearn »

cJ0th wrote: post #96
imranq wrote: post #60

Advice from my physics professor: make a detailed plan and then discard the plan and do what you feel. This doesn't mean the plan was unnecessary...rather the plan carves out the neural pathways in your mind. The feeling part is important too since if I am so rigid then I am going to be crushed by the randomness of life.

That's what I arrived at as well. However, sometimes it's good to make a new plan after a while and then discard that one as well and so one. One could call it "iterative creation of intention".

Exactly. This is also the conclusion I got to. Detailed planning is great in order to tell your mind the direction you want to go to but then it's important to discard it so that you don't get lost in the details or feel frustrated because you are unable to follow every step of it, which may lead to demotivation.

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

#206

Post by trendoid »

1123581321 wrote: post #202
tedmiston wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company making money when you fail a goal doesn't sound very mutually beneficial.

Take a look at what they've written on their site when you have time; it's more thought out than you might expect. The gist is that they make money by a) selling a monthly subscription to give you more options and features, and b) charging you the amounts too small to motivate you so you can get up to the amounts that you take seriously. They've set up their pricing so that you will pay half of the motivating amount…

do you have any particular blogposts in mind that go into details of what you explained here?

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

#207

Post by arvind_devaraj »

use this chrome extension Limitless. "One thing I found for myself is that simply being more aware of where and how I’m spending my time dramatically improves my focus" writes http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/limitless-chrome-ultimate-produ...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/be-limitless/jdpnl...

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

#208

Post by nikisweeting »

mmattax wrote: post #157

Disclaimer: This is my startup. We're building Jell ( https://jell.com ) to tackle this problem. We have 2 sets of core functionality: OKR tracking, and "checkins" which can act as a daily/weekly/monthly "standup". You can add plans/tasks to your checkins (and mark them as complete), and link these items to your OKR's. We've seen a lot of companies have success with our tool (many replacing daily standups with it). W…

What does Jell do better than https://www.workingon.co/?

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

#209

Post by nikisweeting »

I recently discovered Noteplan after trying and failing to find a good notes app for years. It's geared towards programmers and techy folk, and it lets you make simple Org-mode style notes with markdown, and integrates pretty well with your other calendar apps. http://noteplan.co/

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

#210

Post by EduardMe »

Hi, I had exactly the same problem and was also using a moleskine journal/calendar kind of notebook for every day. I couldn't find any apps supporting my style of workflow, so I designed NotePlan (http://noteplan.co) for Mac, iPhone and iPad:

NotePlan is a daily planner app based on markdown. You can

- fill a note with todos and other text for every day (just like moleskin).

- You have a calendar with an overview of all your notes.

- Store reference material, backlogs, checklists, etc in separate project notes.

- Link everything together with Markdown. Use markdown also to format your text and segment it through headers into different projects

- NotePlan pulls your data from Reminders and iCalendar events automatically into the calendar and every note.

- Everything is saved and backed-up in plain text files inside your iCloud Drive. Nothing hidden and nothing on our servers.

Learn more here: http://noteplan.co

And besides using this tool, I'm writing a lot of notes. I'm writing down everything coming to my mind. Then sorting it into project notes and finally scheduling it into days, if those are actionable. Most importantly I'm reviewing all notes each sunday, at least 2 hours. See my article here for more details: https://hackernoon.com/turn-your-todo-list-into-a-productivi...

Let me know, if you got questions, happy to answer :)

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