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Show HN: A simple way to set goals you actually follow

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Re: Show HN: A simple way to set goals you actually follow

#61

Post by dimovich »

Hammershaft wrote: post #49
dimovich wrote: post #39

I have a feeling a better way to follow through your goals is to decouple tasks from the time it takes to do them. Divide your time in blocks, one tasks per block. The time doesn't depend on the task, and the task doesn't depend on which block you choose to do it. For me, 3 blocks per day is optimum.

Can you expand more on this idea? I'm interested. What do I do if the task takes longer or shorter than the block?

It depends. For a bigger task, can you divide it into smaller chunks? Do you have enough time to allocate a bigger block?

If the task took less than the block... hey, free time!

Re: Show HN: A simple way to set goals you actually follow

#64

Post by lowdose »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #42
superasn wrote: post #13

I would also like to add one more thing that helps you to achieve goals: "Make it fun". I don't like exercise but I love watching Netflix. Unfortunately, I don't get enough time to watch my favourite shows everyday. Solution: Put a treadmill in front of my TV. Now I happily take out half an hour everyday to do the treadmill just so I get the same 30 minutes to watch my show.

For quite a while I used the rule that my favourite TV show could only be watched in the gym on my tablet. So if I wanted to really watch the latest episode of breaking bad or whatever it was I had to go to the gym and work out. It compelled me to get to the gym and stay exercising for 30+ minutes. Then I would also typically push out some strength on top of that cardio. Surprisingly effective to tie the two together…

If you want to lose weight it would be better to do your cardio after strength. By reversing your schedule you immediately start burning fat in your cardio because it generally takes 20 minutes before you start using these reserves.

Re: Show HN: A simple way to set goals you actually follow

#65

Post by gen220 »

Hoasi wrote: post #43
lethologica wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a comment posted on HN a while ago that has always stuck with me[0] that basically said that plain old pen, paper, and a system of rules was more than enough to start a business, organisation, or, as a follow up comment said, even Rome. This has rung true in my life many times over. I've tried complicated note and habit tracking apps that just do far more than I ever need and I tend to get stuck in the weed…

> This has rung true in my life many times over. I've tried complicated note and habit tracking apps that just do far more than I ever need and I tend to get stuck in the weeds, missing the forest for the trees with these types of platforms. Exactly. Use something simple that works for you. Design a system yourself if you can. Here is a system that works for me, either on paper and with a simple text editor in Markdo…

> if you can't do it on paper first, you're not ready to computerize the problem

One of the first things I do when on-boarding engineers to our business is to walk through the entire flow on paper, in terms of assets, people, and handshakes (as if there were no computers involved).

The industry my company's in is old enough that our competitors actually used to process everything with pen, paper, and stamps. technology made everything faster, but the water flows through the same pipes, so to speak.

Our programs are an incomplete and evolving map of a real-world transaction-territory, and it sometimes takes people a while to grok that. Once engineers do, they gain the ability to predict behavior in un-mapped territory. Having this ability saves everyone an immeasurable quantity of time.

I guess the most important takeaway, is that one must have distinct mental maps of the business process and of the program implementing the business process.

This obviously varies a lot depending on the technology you're building. Although, I guess even something as abstract as `malloc` can be analyzed in this way (a map for the program, and a map for the idea of the program: allocating memory).

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