We Still Don’t Get Things Done

> If you ask people to accomplish a loony amount of work this week, they’ll go, No way. Can’t be done. But if you tell them they’ll need to do that same bonkers amount in a single week one year from now? They’ll think, OK, sure, I could do that.

Really hit home.

From my perspective, some of what middle managers do is helpful, much of what they do could just was well not be done. My point being that these tools create work from top to bottom. There's information to fill out, statuses to be updated, progress to be tracked, reports to be generated, etc. etc. etc. which all fall on to a spectrum of "things which have utility" and "things which are busywork" often heavily favoring the latter. They make management jobs "easier" in that they create a clear set of "something to do" which is different than making their jobs easier in the mode of "providing value to leaders, makers, investors, etc." All being done in a cargo cult of "this is how you should work" and satisfying a certain kind of person's desire for things to be "organized".

This！

I launch my MVP last month. I can't agree more with you.

1. Tech debts. The coder inside my just to write better code. And writing better code is satisfying.

2. After launch, I become more of a marketer than an engineer. Being a marketer is less enjoyable than being an engineer. I secretly know this before launch.

3. Alternative for income. Yes, I have another side project, whose users calling for more features. I can't help spending time on that project.

Thanks so much for clarifying this.

edit: what truly prompt me to launch is the death of my mom, which reminded me I have waited too long to do important things.

I had an idea about To Do lists a few years ago. I realized that one of the biggest problems was the hidden complexity of the tasks, and unexpected roadblocks that I'd encounter. Some tasks involved a lot of unknowns, or things that I would have to figure out as I went.

The idea I had was premade To Do lists for various common tasks such as automobile maintenance, planning a trip, organizing an event, etc.

Never did much with it.

Article is about personal productivity moreso than corporate, but I'm going off on the corporate tangent because I think the HN crowd can relate.

A personal failing of mine, that I'm working on improving, is progress tracking that's as close to understandable-at-a-glance to management as possible.

Historically I've always been focused on progress, moving on to the next thing, keep pressing forward, but this comes at the expense of management understanding when it comes to status updates and awareness around delays.

Progress reporting, from a purely technical viewpoint, is a bunch of bullshit that gets in the way of progress, but from a business viability, profitability, and general good-management, it's essential. I have to keep reminding myself of that.

How this relates to the article: project task time must be allocated to determining and documenting progress. The best way for this to take up a minimal amount of time is to have a methodology determined up front: give management an expectation of what they'll see, and the technical folks an understanding of where progress milestones are, so they'll know what markers are important to progress reporting. It's got to be collaboratively developed.

This, in itself, also takes time.

More directly related to the article, continually trying to find "the perfect to do app" is just a distraction. Any app is fine. If you're not getting to your tasks the problem is you and / or your expectations, not the app(s). Been there, still doing that...

Apt quote from article regarding personal expectations of productivity: "Present self screws over future self".

I've stuck with tiddlywiki / noteself as my Swiss-army-knife note taking and organizational tool. I'm also messing with it for tracking project "threads".