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Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?

#51

Post by everdev »

Are you doing these projects for fun, future profit, knowledge?

Whatever your answer is right now doesn't seem to be sufficient motivation. We all get the same time during the day but we all prioritize our day differently. You're prioritizing other activities over these projects (maybe for very valid reasons).

If you try and fail to create a habit, then you need a better reason for doing it.

Sometimes stoic philosophy can help find out why you want to do something: https://youtube.com/watch?v=A0XxceO4qX0

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?

#52

Post by MarsAscendant »

dharmapure wrote: post #26
mondo9000 wrote: post #8

Realize that this behavior is just fancy procrastination. I can collect recipes all day, but it won't make me a better cook.

Procrastination is fun and complicated. "Just Do It" doesn't seem to help much for me. After reading more I've found a number of reasons for procrastination that may be helpful depending on the cause: Is the task too vague? If so, making it more concrete helps. "Do taxes" is impossibly vague and scary and the brain rebels. "Make a list of all expenses this year" is better but still large. This is the most common actu…

You've hit the nail on the head for me with the last paragraph. Thank you for verbalizing it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?

#54

Post by mezod »

matwood wrote: post #44
dharmapure wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Procrastination is fun and complicated. "Just Do It" doesn't seem to help much for me. After reading more I've found a number of reasons for procrastination that may be helpful depending on the cause: Is the task too vague? If so, making it more concrete helps. "Do taxes" is impossibly vague and scary and the brain rebels. "Make a list of all expenses this year" is better but still large. This is the most common actu…

The mind is great at rationalizing excuses. It is about executing. It is about having the discipline to do the things you don't want to do, but know they have to get done. As soon as you start thinking about motivation, you have lost. Motivation is fleeting. Even the most important task that is also fun will likely become a grind before you are done. How do you get it finished? Have the discipline to grind it out. I'…

I agree that discipline > motivation. And thus, habit formation becomes important. What I'd like to add here is what I call "learn to enjoy". I try to "learn to enjoy" waking up in the morning to go to the gym. I think it's just an euphemism to lowering the barrier between "what I want to do" and "what I have to do". What makes waking up early suck at times? How can I make it suck it less? How can I actually turn my mindset around so that I actually want to wake up early and go to the gym?

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?

#55

Post by geezerjay »

mondo9000 wrote: post #8

Realize that this behavior is just fancy procrastination. I can collect recipes all day, but it won't make me a better cook.

> Realize that this behavior is just fancy procrastination. I can collect recipes all day, but it won't make me a better cook.

I don't believe this assertion makes any sense. I may never be a Michelin-star chef, but if I set a goal to learn how to cook and set a plan on how to achieve that, I will surely be able to cook a decent meal within a reasonable amount of time and results will be far better than what I would get if I procrastinated instead.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?

#57

Post by juvoni »

lovelearning wrote: post #40

4 text files that go from vague life goals down to concrete hourly tasks: - todo-year.txt : all goals for the year - todo-month.txt : track subset of annual goals to finish this month - todo-week.txt : track all monthly high-level tasks to finish this week - todo.txt : daily task plan based on weekly plan. Switch tasks every 1 hour. In a day, I plan for about 4 tasks, so each task ends up getting about 2 hours. Self-…

I do something similar.

It's similar to reverse engineering the year starting from the year end goals, although I personally think more in terms of building personal systems instead of setting annual goals.

The book "The One Thing" talks a bit more about that concept of breaking down the year into, quarters, then from quarters into months and then into weekly sprints and daily tasks.

I also wrote a little bit about my high level process here: https://juvoni.com/you-are-a-rocketship/

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?

#58

Post by mezod »

MarsAscendant wrote: post #50
matwood wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mind is great at rationalizing excuses. It is about executing. It is about having the discipline to do the things you don't want to do, but know they have to get done. As soon as you start thinking about motivation, you have lost. Motivation is fleeting. Even the most important task that is also fun will likely become a grind before you are done. How do you get it finished? Have the discipline to grind it out. I'…

> When the alarm goes off every morning to go to the gym, it sucks. But I do it anyway. The first step is accepting it is not easy and it will suck at times. This is a major problem for me right now. The depression doesn't help, but it's clear that it needn't stop me from doing well – as evident from all the great stuff artists with depression have made. How do you get to that point, mentally? Were you raised with di…

See I might be wrong here, but I think the problem starts when you see yourself as a depressed person. Do you see yourself as someone who can wake up early and go to the gym? Do you see yourself as someone who could be disciplined?

Don't get me wrong, you might be a depressed person. I see depression as a water swirl that keeps dragging you down and doesn't let you look at yourself as what you could be. It's the typical comparison of "I am trying to quit smoking" and "I'm not a smoker".

You get to that point, mentally, by acting. Mentality affect behaviour, and behaviour affects mentality. If you see you can wake up, it's more easy that you'll see yourself as someone who can wake up and go to the gym.

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?

#59

Post by JackMcMack »

b_b wrote: post #29

I would recommend for you to read and implement the organization/productivity system from Getting Things Done by David Allen [0]. It discusses essentially your main problems of dividing up your life into projects and timing yourself. The system also includes sections for putting some of your ideas in an 'Incubate', basically putting it off for another day once you get through what you have. Having a running list of a…

I can also recommend GTD, it was definitely an eye opener.

A few takeaways for me:

* There is no (need for) 1 list to rule them all. I'm using Google Inbox, Calendar, Keep, Post-it notes in the house on doors & walls, and a handwritten notebook for my day job.

* Inbox helped me organize a lot better. Snooze is great for getting an empty inbox. It used to have "snooze to someday" to incubate, but unfortunately that's not an option anymore. I still have 50+ items in there that I review a few times a year. I'm sad inbox is getting killed. Gmail has most of the functionality, but the UI is waaaay to busy.

* Keep is nice for simple lists. Grocery shopping has become a lot faster and easier. I will try to order the list so I can pick up everything in one pass. The kids & wife are joining the shopping trip? We can split up, see the list update instantly, and be done in half the time.

* GTD defines 5 phases: collect, process, organize, review, do. I wasn't used to having collect as a separate phase, but a lot of sites make this easy. Inbox has reminders, and a browser extension to save any page, Reddit has a save button, Inoreader has starred items. HN even has a favorite button, but does a very good job of hiding it. Seriously, I have to click on the post/comment age to favorite it?

Re: Ask HN: How do you organize everything you want to do?

#60

Post by juliend2 »

Lately, I've been using Trello like this:

* When I have a new "project" (boards are cheap, so everything can be a "project"), I run a ruby script that calls the Trello API to: 1) copy a template trello board that has "to do", "doing", "pending" and "done" columns. 2) name it with the argument I passed it to the script. 3) this new board is created into a specific team I created for those kinds of cheap boards.

* I have a PHP page that shows all those boards : https://www.dropbox.com/s/x9oce22p6p6o74m/trello-boards-dash... which is useful, since they all have the same columns in them, it's easy to visualize.

* In the PHP page I created, everything is an html anchor to its corresponding trello URL (boards, card).

So it gives me a birds eye view, at a glance, of everything I need to do. I still have specific trello boards for certain specific things, and I still use a calendar and a todoist account to organize my weeks. But i've found this hack to help me streamline all my non-time-sensitive tasks to do.

If you want, I can give you the code for those 2 scripts. Let me know if someone is interested.

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