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One year of keeping a tada list

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Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#51
>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.

The problem here is that they think it forces you to have an accomplishment. Just write what you did in short form. IT can be "Was very stressed and couldn't get anything substantial done, attended the monthly developer meeting and did some work on documentation".

I do this as well to better remember what I have done at work, to quickly be able to document my value towards the company, and to have some "tabs" to show if there are any questions regarding what I did a day.

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#52
post #20
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the existence of AI make watercolor painting less of a challenge for a human?

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?

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#53

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!

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#54
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's surprisingly useful; I share it with my coworkers and we often consult it if we notice something has been behaving differently starting at a certain date to see what was going on then. Don't you have commit logs for this??

Not for everything, but things that I do have commit logs for it's a needle in a haystack problem of which repo the commit logs would be in. At work we have ~120 repos, at least a dozen of which I'm likely to have been in over a couple weeks. Other things are likely a ticket rather than a commit (running OS updates, switching to a new haproxy might be a commit from days or weeks earlier when done in staging but the c…

I think git keeps a per-branch history but in practice I have never seen it used

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't appease a: 10 PRINT "You didn't do enough! Scum! Do more!" 20 GOTO 10 loop by noticing the things you do during the day and bowing and scraping, offering them up to the loop, trying to convince it that you did do enough. It doesn't have a definition of enough it only has a demand for more . When does a hoarder list all the things they own and then feel happy because they won at hoarding and they can stop no…

bro sorry your comment is sort of disproportional to my comment to the point that I'm not sure if it's AI or not, also I already have a 3rd party who can neutrally assess my views and point things out (my therapist) so im not bothering reading :broken-heart: Plus by noticing things you are doing it already makes inner critic quieter, and this is THE practice to get rid of it

> "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.

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#57

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 !

Not just for psychological reasons!

As a scientist, it's best practice to keep a daily notebook called a "lab diary" where you document your work, e.g. details of experiments conducted, day by day.

It is sometimes important to prove when you had a particular idea (e.g. for patenting purposes or copyright lawsuits or documenting the history of a field), and it is important to keep track of the details of experiments in order to be able to reproduce them. For that latter aspect, I recommend self-documenting data nowadays, i.e. data that comes with meta-data to explain how it was derived, such as parameters used to create data in an experiment, which I often encode in POSIX filenames (e.g. -n=-iter=-k=.eval => "randombaseline-n=20-iter=500-k=3.eval").

Of course you can maintain such a diary in the form of a plain text file, and I often do that as additional companion, but files are editable, you may lose them, and they have not much worth in terms of serving as a proof; a paper diary with daily entries, in contrast, is telling a story that is less likely to be fake.

It also makes you accountable (in case management asks you what you did on March 3 last year, you'd open your lab diary and could say "that was when we had the meeting where we decided to cancel the XYZ project"), and you can use it to extract achievements for your annual or quarterly performance reviews from it.

Re: One year of keeping a tada list

#58

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…

It also means that you have immediate context for your / items when you revisit them.
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