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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?

#161

Post by lovelearning »

wrkronmiller wrote: post #151
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-…

How do you deal with dependencies and blockers? Edit: for example if you are waiting on an update to a library or a new version of iOS/Xcode?

Blocker in client project : either DIY, or look for workarounds, or escalate to client and reduce scope. Planning gets suitably modified for rest of the week and month.

Blocker in personal projects : some of my ideas have turned out to be not as easily implementable as I had first imagined. I usually reduce scope - because the idea after all started off as part of some life goal - but I have also dropped some ideas entirely. I record the reasons in the project directory to revisit later. I deliberately avoid overanalyzing in such cases - as somebody prone to procrastination, overanalysis of a tough idea is like entering a blackhole for me.

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

#163

Post by matwood »

MarsAscendant wrote: post #78
mezod wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 typi…

To be fair, it's difficult to not see yourself as having when is everpresent in many aspects of your daily life. I want to socialize, but it's difficult. I want to work out, but it's really difficult. I want to finish the projects I start, but it's almost impossible after a while. Not because I want it to be – so that, perhaps, I could escape the strain of putting in the effort – but because it just is . That's the s…

I'll answer both your questions here:

> Were you raised with discipline in mind – as in, were your parents/guardians promoting discipline within you? Did you get to it yourself?

Good questions. I think I was raised with less forced discipline than most kids. I say forced because there was necessary discipline. My family didn't have much so when I was old enough to want money to buy things that meant finding a job. With that said, external discipline never lasts. IMO, that's more like motivation. There is a reason discipline is almost always called 'self' discipline. It comes from within.

> How do you get to that point, mentally? What do I do?

Understand that there is no end point. If I reached my goal today, I would just make another goal farther out. The goal becomes less important than the process.

Also understand it's never easy. You may think you have no discipline right now, but in reality I might be a half step closer than you are. I fail at my self discipline all the time. Good, it gives me something to work on.

What you need to do is simply start. IMO, exercise is so important not just physically but mentally. Powerlifting taught me so much about the grind and pushing forward when your body wants to stop. It took months one time for me to add 5# to my dead lift.

So workout - right now. Get up do some burpees, push ups, sit ups, and squats. In 20 minutes, workout one is done. Set your alarm for 20 minutes earlier and do the same tomorrow and the day after that. Ignore whether or not those 20 minutes are meaningful (do you ponder the meaningfulness of watching a single TV show??), just do it. Embrace the strain of putting in this tiny bit of effort to get up and workout.

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

#164

Post by lovelearning »

MarsAscendant wrote: post #147
lovelearning wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question - made me revisit my memories. TLDR some aspects were a progression, but the planning part was something I had to try out over a year to convince myself that I finally have something that works. I'd say I have always done the daily todo all my professional life. Started it as my daily work plan when I was a salaried employee. Only tracked work-related tasks with it, but it was necessary because I had mu…

Thanks a lot for the answer. Do you have a routine to (re)visit your plans and see if you're on the right track? Do you even have a concept of the wrong track under this system? How does your work time, according to the `todo`, fare against leisure time? Is it similarly scheduled, or does it come whenever the work hours have been accomplished? Do you ever miss your goals during the hours of work? What do you do if th…

Revisiting: Yes, all the time. The yearly plan would be framed at the start of the year, but new opportunities and personal ideas arise quite often and unexpectedly. If something can help me achieve my life goals better, the entire planning cascade gets reprioritized from that point on. I have done things like defer personal projects, drop ideas that turned out to be impractical after prototyping (an example of a wrong track), and renegotiate scope of client projects. It's a dynamic thing - the idea of the system is to force life goals to convert into concrete daily activities, but the goals themselves can and have changed.

Leisure time: Leisure time is very much part of the daily plan. I put tasks like jogging, workout, reading, going out in all my plans. Even have things like fitness annual goals and explicitly write them in my weekly schedule and daily plans. Anything that I should allocate time for goes into these files.

Missed goals: Yes, that happens. I'm quite bad at time estimation, and some ideas involve a lot of exploratory prototyping that may take much more time than anticipated. I mark incomplete tasks as [PARTIAL] or [SKIPPED], analyze at the end of the D/W/M what made me skip them, adjust scope if required, and modify my plans to correct the problem by next D/W/M.

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

#165

Post by matwood »

mezod wrote: post #54
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'…

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…

Sure. I don't mind getting up many mornings at this point. What I wanted to head off though is people thinking that it's somehow easy. That I'm a 'morning' person, or I am different than everyone else somehow. I'm not. I get up early and workout because I chose to, and it's not always what I want to do.

My goal, if there could be one, is to make waking up early and working out just like breathing. It's not enjoyable, nor does it suck, it just is.

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

#166

Post by djohnston »

I have 3 Google sheets that I've kept for about 4 years. Finance, health, and things to read, the latter of which is basically a semi organized dumping ground of links and book titles color coded by completion state. I've found it to be valuable, though as of late I haven't been using it as much.

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

#168

Post by elliotec »

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’m really very surprised that so many people recommend GTD. I absolutely hated the book. It felt like he was trying to sell the book for half of it. The techniques are very outdated and manual. It requires a huge amount of categorization to the point of way too much. I tried it, and really strongly do not recommend it in any way. It’s like Org Mode in emacs. Feels like most people just recommend it because they bought into it so heavily and hive-minded around it. Sorry but I really wanted to balance out the positive comments about GTD.

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

#169

Post by makecheck »

I use a text file to hold only the top few items, with just a couple groups like “problems”, “ideas”, or general tasks.

I also don’t try to enumerate every possible thing that could ever be needed because in my experience anything that’s really necessary will eventually pop into my head again (and make the list later).

I also prune the list if it gets too long. I don’t store the pruned items anywhere; as above, if they’re really important I will eventually think of them again.

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

#170

Post by burtonator »

I've been working on a project for the last 4-6 months around managing your books:

https://getpolarized.io/

You guys loved it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960

... but I'm sure not all of you have seen it yet.

Basically you can keep all your books and web pages in one central repository, tag them, flag them or archive them and read them while keeping track of your reading.

It also supports highlights, annotations, etc.

It's also Open Source and free so have at it!

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