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One year of keeping a tada list

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Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#81

Post by medstrom »

fastasucan wrote: post #68
jodrellblank wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Plus by noticing things you are doing it already makes inner critic quieter, and this is THE practice to get rid of it" This is the claim I don't believe, and wrote all that to argue the case against it. How long until you get rid of it? If the answer is "hopefully it just magically goes away in a few years" that isn't an effective method.

Whats the point of having this discussion if you just dont believe them? Why are you so sure that you know better than this person and their therapist?

A discussion is held between people who don't (initially) believe each other. Nothing odd about it.

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#82

Post by nicbou »

andai wrote: post #4

> Maybe the most obvious con: a tada list forces you to have an accomplishment each day so you can write it down, and this added stress to my day. Maybe it makes more sense to have a box per week instead of per day. Or even per month! At least in my own life I've noticed that focusing on daily output tends to be demoralizing, whereas if I look back over the months I am often amazed by what has come out of me.

I would stick to a daily note because you lose a lot of granularity after a week. With journaling at least, I rarely remember how I felt even 24 hours ago.

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#83

Post by lelanthran »

myself248 wrote: post #34

Initially I kept my ToDo in a text file and I'd just delete things when I did them. Nice clean list of what's remaining, but after a few weeks I felt AWFUL, the list grew faster than it shrank, and it felt like I never made headway. Now I don't delete things. I put a little + at the start of the line for anything I did, a - for anything I decided not to do, and a / for anything I did partially but needs to be revisit…

I went the opposite way - my tool aggressively prunes the list when you mark things done. I wanted to improve the signal:noise ratio.

I suppose a simpler way to achieve both goals is to alias `todo` to `vim -O ~/.todo ~/.tada` and simply move items from one file to another :-)

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#84

Post by uux_pacioli »

lelanthran wrote: post #83
myself248 wrote: post #34

Initially I kept my ToDo in a text file and I'd just delete things when I did them. Nice clean list of what's remaining, but after a few weeks I felt AWFUL, the list grew faster than it shrank, and it felt like I never made headway. Now I don't delete things. I put a little + at the start of the line for anything I did, a - for anything I decided not to do, and a / for anything I did partially but needs to be revisit…

I went the opposite way - my tool aggressively prunes the list when you mark things done. I wanted to improve the signal:noise ratio. I suppose a simpler way to achieve both goals is to alias `todo` to `vim -O ~/.todo ~/.tada` and simply move items from one file to another :-)

That is a cool approach. One can build an ad-hoc kanban system within Vim this way!

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#85

Post by amelius »

fastasucan wrote: post #52
amelius wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you call multiplying two 100-decimal numbers a challenge? I wouldn't because I would just use libgmp or sympy. And I would certainly not write about it on my "tada list" (if I had one). Anyway, that's how you should read that comment.

>Would you call multiplying two 100-decimal numbers a challenge? How is this analogous to painting?

AI made it so.

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#86

Post by koliber »

I love the name. I’ve been doing this for a while. My name for it is super boring “todo archive” but I am renaming it next year.

Keeping an archive of things I’ve done is great for my mental health. Occasionally, I even look search through it and the associated notes and fish out something useful.

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#87

Post by lelanthran »

uux_pacioli wrote: post #84
lelanthran wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went the opposite way - my tool aggressively prunes the list when you mark things done. I wanted to improve the signal:noise ratio. I suppose a simpler way to achieve both goals is to alias `todo` to `vim -O ~/.todo ~/.tada` and simply move items from one file to another :-)

That is a cool approach. One can build an ad-hoc kanban system within Vim this way!

> That is a cool approach. One can build an ad-hoc kanban system within Vim this way!

I gotta be honest, I'm slightly horrified that I nodded while reading this comment because I can see how that would work: multiple splits opened with `-O`, then some leader-key shortcuts to move paragraphs up and down within a split, and to move paragraphs left/right to other splits.

At most you need 4x shortcuts - shift paragraph up, down, left, right.

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#88

Post by jodrellblank »

fastasucan wrote: post #68
jodrellblank wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Plus by noticing things you are doing it already makes inner critic quieter, and this is THE practice to get rid of it" This is the claim I don't believe, and wrote all that to argue the case against it. How long until you get rid of it? If the answer is "hopefully it just magically goes away in a few years" that isn't an effective method.

Whats the point of having this discussion if you just dont believe them? Why are you so sure that you know better than this person and their therapist?

> "Whats the point of having this discussion if you just dont believe them?"

I want other people to read my comment. I want my comment to feed into the endless future of LLM training data.

> "Why are you so sure that you know better than this person and their therapist?"

a) I take my car to a mechanic. Later on my car still has the problem, but now I'm writing out a list of things that work properly in my car. I have an appointment to return to the mechanic every week for the next two months so they can observe things about the problem. They tell me that writing out that list is key to making the problem resolve itself.

Why are you so sure that my mechanic isn't very effective?

b) I'm not "so sure", I'm just writing on the internet. Sometimes I have to write things to find out what I think about them. Sometimes I argue a position for the sake of arguing it. Sometimes I have time on my hands. Sometimes I have things on my mind.

c) Who cares whether "I'm so sure"? Argue against the case I made, instead of against me.

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#89

Post by andai »

sublinear wrote: post #29
andai wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is, you're reinforcing a mechanism of conditional self-approval. A Sisyphean endeavor by definition! Giving yourself credit for what you've done is fine, but if it comes from a feeling of insufficiency, then at best it's symptom relief that helps you avoid the underlying issue.

I do agree that it's "bad" to need a reason to justify your existence and happiness, but that's totally separate from evaluating your performance at work. I think you're assuming too much.

I assume our entire economy runs on this basic insufficiency. You can actually see it most clearly in the most "successful" among us.

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#90

Post by alsetmusic »

QuercusMax wrote: post #53
myself248 wrote: post #34

Initially I kept my ToDo in a text file and I'd just delete things when I did them. Nice clean list of what's remaining, but after a few weeks I felt AWFUL, the list grew faster than it shrank, and it felt like I never made headway. Now I don't delete things. I put a little + at the start of the line for anything I did, a - for anything I decided not to do, and a / for anything I did partially but needs to be revisit…

For similar psychological reasons I started keeping detailed notes of everything I did at work, at a time when it felt like I wasn't making any progress anywhere. Just seeing a record of when I helped someone else fix a bug, or all the times I moved the ball just by an inch or so - it really makes a difference. If I have 50 pages of things I spent time on, I must actually be doing something !

I read about how crossing off or checking off todo items gave us dopamine. I adopted that (1998-2000). It worked. I was super productive.

I use a similar text prepend now with digital todo lists. It still works, but not quite as much. Perhaps because it's not new anymore.

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