What systems and instruments do you use to set goals / priorities? For example, do you use OKRs?
How do you define key results?
How do you plan and manage your time?
What instruments do you use to stay productive?
Please give a brief snapshot of your life management routines.
Thanks!
Ask HN: How do you manage your life: set goals, plan, manage time, etc.?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your life: set goals, plan, manage time, etc.?
#2I use:
https://nextcloud.com/ (kanbam board, notes, tasks for longterm goals)
https://turtlapp.com/ (for some extra notes)
https://www.forestapp.cc/ (for tracking my time)
Excel is for tracking my finances.
Phone calendar is for basic day plan. Whole day is set up by work hours, leisure, events, time chunks what I do when etc.
Im learning about Gitlab for my future projects too.
Hope it helps.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your life: set goals, plan, manage time, etc.?
#3I use: https://nextcloud.com/ (kanbam board, notes, tasks for longterm goals) https://turtlapp.com/ (for some extra notes) https://www.forestapp.cc/ (for tracking my time) Excel is for tracking my finances. Phone calendar is for basic day plan. Whole day is set up by work hours, leisure, events, time chunks what I do when etc. Im learning about Gitlab for my future projects too. Hope it helps.
Wow, great! Thanks for sharing!
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your life: set goals, plan, manage time, etc.?
#4My life mngmnt is no goals, no plans, no work more than one hour a day and sleep as much as I can. So easy to maintain.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your life: set goals, plan, manage time, etc.?
#5My life mngmnt is no goals, no plans, no work more than one hour a day and sleep as much as I can. So easy to maintain.
Haha, lol, good for you!
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your life: set goals, plan, manage time, etc.?
#6For the tech stack: I use nextcloud on a physical machine at home, and a MediaWiki instance as a personal knowledge base.
On a goal and task management:
For tasks, I have a monthly Todo page on my wiki. I use nextcloud calendar provider, with connectors for thunderbird and Android.
For goal management: I learned to tackle a single "big thing" at the time. Right now, I'm dieting, and that's it. I've lost about 6.5kg so far (started at 66.5, 1.65m height). Before that there were things like buying my first apartment, getting RHEL certified, learning kubernetes, learning keepalived, learning django etc.
I have a list of vague things I'd like to do on my wiki, things like "learn German" or "graduate from university" (lol).
So when I'm done with something I look at that page and try and understand what challenge the most sense to take on right now.
The one thing I would like to stress is: whatever thing you adopt, it should be a low effort and a low friction thing. It must be an enabler technology, not an impediment.
Going extreme, for some people a paper notepad and a convention (like bullet journaling or something like that) is more than enough.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your life: set goals, plan, manage time, etc.?
#7For the tech stack: I use nextcloud on a physical machine at home, and a MediaWiki instance as a personal knowledge base. On a goal and task management: For tasks, I have a monthly Todo page on my wiki. I use nextcloud calendar provider, with connectors for thunderbird and Android. For goal management: I learned to tackle a single "big thing" at the time. Right now, I'm dieting, and that's it. I've lost about 6.5kg s…
Thanks for sharing! Good point on being low- effort and friction. I cannot agree more, if I cannot imagine maintaining a habit for more than a year then there is no point in even starting.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your life: set goals, plan, manage time, etc.?
#8If you're doing things purely from the ego, then expect things to get complex and feel tedious. Part of being able to hack your flow state is to get inspired early and often. The word inspire is derived from spirit so you need to think of your tasks as a spiritual act.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your life: set goals, plan, manage time, etc.?
#9This may be an unpopular opinion, but I stopped making even close term plans/goals a few months ago because I was obsessively over planing. After a few months of this strategy I can say I'm better off than I was.
Here's another unpopular opinion about staying motivated or productive because this question is on HN almost every day: reach out to a private practice psychiatrist on Zocdoc that has very good reviews where patients literally worship the doctor, but avoid clinics.
Make an appointment and be assertive when you talk with the doctor and be honest that you lack the motivation to perform at work for whatever reason (treatment resistant depression, chronic fatigue, ADHD, anhedonia, etc). Wait a few months while they put you on SSRIs or whatever nanny state meds the doctor tries and then say X or whatever isn't working or all have the same side effect and then ask if you can try a stimulant (never take an antipsychotic, they are impossible to get off of and are overprescribed by doctors these days).
You would be surprised that your doctor will actually give you what you ask for. However, I don't recommend amphetamines such as adderall until a few months on ritalin, because ritalin is kind of hard on your heart. You may have to try Wellbutrin first since it's technically a mild stimulant but just say it didn't work for you because honestly it's only good for quitting smoking.
You only get about 10 minutes each month to talk to your psychiatrist and you'll have to commit to that each month. If you do get narcotics then the first thing to do is go buy a ksafe to put them in.
This advice is obviously for those reading whom have tried everything in terms of motivation without results, but I feel that there are many among us for whom this is the case. Lastly, I'll say that you don't have to be mentally ill to be a better you and there are plenty of doctors who would agree.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your life: set goals, plan, manage time, etc.?
#10Ledger-cli for finances.
Plain structured text for daily goal progress ('2021-02-20 no-hn false'). For structure I use vnlog. For plotting I use R.
I track workouts the same way.
I use OKRs every quarter. KRs are things I need to do every day/ week (workout 90x or read 36x or assemble that one project or set up 13 dates w the wife).
All the text files and scripts live on a private git server. I've been doing this for 6 years now. It works for me because it has a daily component (a few entries in a text file) an easy way to track progress for that dopamine hit (run the plotting scripts).