[HN Gopher] List one task, do it, cross it out ___________________________________________________________________ List one task, do it, cross it out Author : Tomte Score : 242 points Date : 2023-06-09 06:02 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.oliverburkeman.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.oliverburkeman.com) | pengaru wrote: | > What's true of both the crisis situation and the daily | situation is that at any given moment, you can only ever actually | be doing one thing. | | Sometimes you can organize your work such that while yes, | technically you're just doing one activity, you're making | progress on multiple todo entries simultaneously. | | I think that's an important facet of effective "multi-tasking"; | it has more to do with how you organize your work than being good | at context switching. Sortof akin to enabling SIMD use by | organizing the data such that it's applicable. | | A practical example is I have this long-term excavation/grading | project on my property that needs eventual doing. The dirt here | is mostly sand, and I often mix stucco/concrete for projects. By | deliberately sourcing the dirt from areas I need to excavate | anyways, I'm making progress on the grading project when I'm | making pavers or whatever needing sand. | geerlingguy wrote: | For me, I loved the idea of WIP in the agile system we adapted at | one workplace: | | Instead of one thing, we would allow up to two WIP projects per | person, but there was a priority and a follow-up. | | I still do this day to day with Trello. | | I have a "Doing" column and what's on top is what I'm doing. | Besides procrastination, I don't allow myself to do anything else | until that's done. Sometimes I add a checklist inside that Trello | card if it's a more complex task, then check off tasks one by | one. | | The second card can be worked on if absolutely necessary (like | lining up a meeting or working on some background that's required | a month beforehand). | layer8 wrote: | Besides procrastination??? Isn't procrastination the most | difficult issue? ;) | geerlingguy wrote: | Haha yes... but I've learned just to live with it. I don't | know why, but I kinda have to devote 20-40% of my week to | procrastination. | | Otherwise I would have no karma on HN! | girafffe_i wrote: | This rang true at a very deep level. Thanks for linking. | | I just put this into similar words for the first time this week. | It's the ambiguous priority that kills my productivity. It's | debilitating and overwhelming. "Just do one thing. Any thing." Is | something that I've been focusing on, even though I have had past | feedback about prioritizing the wrong things, it's better than | nothing. | ghaff wrote: | I'm absolutely not a productivity system person but there are a | few Getting Things Done suggestions that resonate with me (even | if I don't always follow them). | | If you can do something quickly and have the time, just do it. | | (Also appreciate that certain things may lead to other things and | that your 5-minute task may be opening up a can of worms. But if | it's an expense report, probably just do it already.) | | Break projects into actionable sub-tasks. Now, mind you, I may | not be sure about one or more aspects of the project--and even if | I need to do it at all--and find it's OK just to let it sit on a | list even if that's somehow taking up brain space. | | Separate calendar and to do list. (I do list rough to dos in my | paper weekly calendar but don't list them on my electronic | calendar unless they really have to happen on a particular day.) | TeMPOraL wrote: | I used to love GTD. I've been using it - or rather trying to | use it, then increasingly personalized variations of it - for | almost two decades. I still appreciate the wisdom there, but I | wish someone would've told me 15 years ago that it assumes a | certain way your brain is wired. Maybe it's good for the | majority, but it still sucks to be the one with a brain that | requires inverting or replacing some of the book's ideas. | | Like, keeping your head clear is a wonderful selling point, but | externalizing all the tasks also makes them no longer feel like | they matter much. Keeping a list of projects and next actions | is a good idea in theory, but much harder to benefit from in | practice, when your visual system starts erasing the TODO list | from your visual field, like it was a piece of negative space, | an external equivalent of the blind spot in your eyes. | | > _But if it 's an expense report, probably just do it | already._ | | Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I've never had an expense | report that took me less than 2 hours to complete. Usually it's | half a day, as it involves scanning and attaching receipts. | | > _Break projects into actionable sub-tasks._ | | To this day I have a really big problem with the "actionable" | part. My attempts always end with tasks that are either too big | (and therefore too scary), underspecified (actionable, but not | to completion - always getting blocked by something mid-way), | or overspecified (20 steps, half of which take less time to get | done than it took to write them down, and getting 1/3 through | the steps usually invalidates most of the rest anyway). I just | don't know how to get to that magic point of actionable tasks | that you can just pick and do. | | > _Separate calendar and to do list._ | | This is interesting in that for people with ADHD, this advice | gets reversed: it's more important to have _one_ system for | everything, as the more of them you have, the less likely it is | you 'll actually use any of them. Don't know how widely this | applies, but it's definitely true for me. | ilyt wrote: | I kinda wish for a mix of todo/calendar system where I could | say, for example "remind me of this maintenance task in 6 | months" and it would disappear out of anything directly | visible for that 6 months then pop up in todo list without | due date, as just a thing to do. | | Calendars are good for stuff that needs to be done at this | exact date and hour but not great if it is just some routine | maintenance task that can be easily shifted a month in any | direction (say "replace oil and filters on car") | ghaff wrote: | > I kinda wish for a mix of todo/calendar system | | I imagine there are various ways you can do this with | existing tools. I just mostly find it useful to separate | calendaring from needs to be done in the next month or two | from bigger/more aspirational/not fully defined projects. | So I generally (if loosely) separate them into different | spaces. | | The main thing IMO is not to put stuff with loose (and | maybe never) dates on your calendar where you now have 50 | overdue items on your calendar which just encourages never | wrapping anything up. (Worked with someone like that once.) | TeMPOraL wrote: | > _The main thing IMO is not to put stuff with loose (and | maybe never) dates on your calendar where you now have 50 | overdue items on your calendar which just encourages | never wrapping anything up._ | | Thank you. This killed all my attempts at planning using | Org Mode and agenda views. I'd schedule a few things for | the day, and then invariably fail to do half of them, and | then they would show up on next day's agenda, sorting | above that day's planned tasks, and displayed with | emphasis. This was both distracting and created an | "emotional repulsion field" for the agenda view, leading | to more tasks not completed, and a week down the line, my | agenda view would have 20+ items due days ago. | | The second-to-last time around, I started pushing due | dates on those incomplete tasks into the future. But this | didn't help anything - soon enough, I'd be staring at an | incoming blast wave of random uncompleted tasks, which I | then had to push back again some more. The system | eventually collapsed under the emotional weight. | | Last time around, I forced myself to simply unschedule | such incomplete tasks - remove due dates from them | entirely. But that only cut to the thing I still haven't | figured out (one of many such things): how to represent | tasks that have some temporal component to them, but a | fuzzy or flexible one. Like, "do X anywhere between next | Friday and Tuesday in the week after - but I don't want | to be reminded of X before that very Friday". Or, "do X | somewhere between September and November". | | Basically, trying to walk a narrow line between the | system being not specific enough to be useful, and being | so overwhelming that it actually makes everything worse. | ghaff wrote: | >Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I've never had an | expense report that took me less than 2 hours to complete. | | For a big international trip, it can definitely take a while. | But I also have a lot of monthly cell phone bill, went into | town for a customer visit, etc. that really don't take very | long. (They're still more of a hassle than I'd like but they | have to be done and they're pretty quick.) | | ADDED: I do get the unification aspect, but I personally like | the separation between this has to happen on or by this date, | needs to get done within some reasonable time horizon, and | maybe/someday projects. | superposeur wrote: | I use a variation of this I call now-and-next: write down a "now" | task and "next" task, do the "now" task, switch "next" to "now", | write a new "next" task, and repeat. | | My spouse saw me doing this and adopted the technique. When | things get overwhelming, we say: "let's now-and-next it". | krm01 wrote: | Does anyone who recognizes himself in the persona of the article | have any insights into handling long todo lists. I understand the | idea if listing one task, but you inevitably have a list of | dozens of stuff. So even if you make a seperate list with one to | focus on, I seem to push down certain things for ever. Tending to | pock and choose the easy or very urgent ones. | thestepafter wrote: | I've heard it said that if it's important enough to you then | you will give it the time it needs. Either spending time with | certain people or when working. For long lists, pick the task | that's most important to complete and do it. Then pick the next | most important task and repeat. | krm01 wrote: | From experience what ends up happening sometimes, and the | reason why I asked, is that pushing some tasks down for too | long you end up working on them too late. Causing more | problems later. | balaji1 wrote: | Students (in some parts of the society), sometimes up to the age | of 25, are put on rails and it is always obvious what needs to be | done next. | | Once in the "wild", most individuals are forced to make their own | path. On top of that, minor tasks and chores pile up, leading to | decision fatigue. Very few things are fulfilling. It's hard I | guess. And that seems to be the topic in Oliver Burkeman's book | 4000 weeks. | BlargMcLarg wrote: | Eh, from a 'different society', school stopped holding my hand | going into adulthood and gave me far more freedom than any job | has ever done so far. Most jobs had more in common with | elementary school, trying to control most aspects. Only | elementary school did the feedback loop far better. | | None of that stopped procrastinating. Most people fill the | excess time allotted regardless. | bsder wrote: | > On top of that, minor tasks and chores pile up | | This. So much this. | | "Rich" people often have so much time available to them because | they make enough money to offload _all_ the minor tasks | (shopping for basic needs, government paperwork and | bureaucracy, scheduling appointments, etc.). | balaji1 wrote: | I noticed the phrase "accelerating world" on | https://www.oliverburkeman.com/books. Nice wording. A lot of | people feel it. | Tomte wrote: | See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmut_Rosa | | A German sociologist who coined the Akzelerationszirkel | (circle of acceleration). | miahwilde wrote: | Here's a thought: what if it's less that the rate of change | is increasing and more that our mental models of the world | tend to solidify as we age such that the perceived rate of | change of the world increases. This is more an observation of | the "the world was a lot simpler when I was young" mentality | rather than a comment on the long range compounding effects | of technology though they might be related. | balaji1 wrote: | Your phrasing is also super interesting. | | > mental models of the world tend to solidify as we age | | Mental models solidifying over time might be true. But | "acceleration" is a shared experience for entire | generations (of peers). It seems a broad enough experience | that it is more than perceived. Like a grandma is content | to read books instead of being on top of HN, etc. | | Solidified mental models also gives perspective on life and | its direction. And people tend to converge on few similar | timeless mental models on a meta level. | | > long range compounding effects of technology | | It's correct, most modern systems are enabled by better | tech at its root. But the collective will of humanity (at | least right now) is to leverage tech to push it further. | Instead of a sinusoid where we take time to fix unintended | side-effects we created (like pollution, resource | depletion, re-assess education, etc). | jamiek88 wrote: | You deffo have something there, we do ossify if we aren't | careful or we aren't naturally childlike (Feynman type | curiosity), but I think it's also true that acceleration is | happening. | | I mean that's pretty objective. | | In my own lifetime (only in my 40's!) social norms and | expectations have rapidly changed as has the constant sense | of urgency injected into the zeitgeist by profit making | 24hr news and social media. | | Propaganda was something you read about in history books | (naively) not something you were bombarded with constantly | by both anti and pro political positions. | | When teens went home they had relief from social pressure | now they are never, ever, alone with their thoughts. | | Fall asleep clutching their iPhones wake up to 100 missed | messages. | | Ever seen a normally popular teens phone light up? I got a | sense of panic and said 'what's wrong? What's happened?' | And they just looked at me weird. What? This is normal? | | My phone only blows up like that when there is a disaster! | ghaff wrote: | I have a minimum of notifications turned on. I'll | sometimes be in a work group chat for a customer meeting | or something. But otherwise push notification traffic is | pretty low. And sometimes I'm polling a lot but I can | turn that off. | balaji1 wrote: | wish all the teens (and adults, at least the adults) were | so intentional and in control. Most most most people are | really not in control over their phone use; no one can | deny that. | jamiek88 wrote: | Me too but my mental well being doesn't require constant | contact and social communication. | | In fact it depends on the opposite. | ilyt wrote: | Sure but there is definitely more access to info about what | is happening in the world so stuff someone might've had | simplistic view on 20 years ago now can be researched and | looked at by anyone that wants. | | I also think the fact many people work in not really all | that creatively stimulating jobs to begin with have a lot | of effect on that. When you are at school you learn | something new every day and are occasionally facing | different mental challenges, when you work at retail not | really. | 13of40 wrote: | It's kind of interesting that emotionally I agree with that | feeling, but if you just look at the fact that I'm reading | what you wrote in real time from the most remote island | chain in the world, and with a couple of finger swipes I | could switch apps and buy a buggy whip with one click...I | mean just imagine what you would have to do to buy a buggy | whip in 1985. | wholinator2 wrote: | What the hell is a buggy whip? And if you couldn't buy | one, what's stopping you from making one | wizzwizz4 wrote: | It might also be increased _awareness_ of changes. There | are many things in my personal history that I viewed as | normal, constant things, but that were actually changing | _significantly_ all the while I was learning about their | natures. | pessimizer wrote: | I think this a problem that LLMs can help with. If you feed | them your goals, they can give you a program back, and adjust | that program based on changing circumstances. | helmholtz wrote: | Oh my god can we just have radio silence from fucking LLMs on | one thread please! | hillcrestenigma wrote: | Applying LLMs or AI to our schedules isn't an unreasonable | idea. If it could improve our own productivity even just | slightly, I would consider that a win. It would be | democratizing the effects of value add from traditional | assistants to everyone. | | I think good ideas sometimes come from connecting two | concepts that seem unrelated, and we shouldn't really | silence any of these ideas. | barbariangrunge wrote: | This algorithm works well if you know what to do next. And how to | do it. And when you have what you need to do it, or know when | you'll get it. And you're sure it's the right thing and you won't | second guess it as you go. And you didn't forget something | important like exercise or personal time. And your body/emotions | are ready the same time you need them to be. Which is often, but | not always | mrbombastic wrote: | I do something similar to this with my dead simple todo list. | there is no TODO section a MAYBE section a DOING section and a | DONE section, only one thing ever in the DOING section until it | is crossed out, if you come across some rabbithole add it to | TANGENT section and resist urge to do it, once you are done with | your task pick another one from MAYBE. It sounds dumb because it | is basically the same thing but TODO sections stress me out and | bring about that foreboding feeling that you will never get it | all done, and they always grow never shrink. A lot of times i'll | look at the MAYBE section the next day and some things just | aren't as important as I thought or somebody else did it. Like I | said dumb and simple but thats why i like it. | TeMPOraL wrote: | I have a question that's maybe super naive, but it's something | I'm struggling with: that one designated item in the DOING | session, what happens when it turns out to be a big challenge, | perhaps a multi-day one, something you just can't possibly do | in one sitting? I mean, obviously, you should push it back to | TODO section and pick something else, but how do you deal with | the associated feelings of frustration and powerlessness? | borg16 wrote: | not the author of the comment, but try breaking down the | bigger task into smaller achievable tasks and add those into | the DOING section? This should address the issue you are | asking about. | TeMPOraL wrote: | This defeats GP's idea (and the idea from the article) of | only having one task at a time in the DOING section. | mrbombastic wrote: | I create another note dedicated to that big task with the | same rules, and try to find the simplest first thing you can | do for that task, and put that in DOING section, rinse and | repeat until the big task is done. Or if it is too big to do | in one go just call it Big task part 1 and timebox it with | the same approach. Tomorrow if it is still a priority make a | Big task part 2. Edit: about feelings of powerlessness when I | am feeling particularly useless or like I am struggling to | get things done I make my DOING items laughably tiny, like | "get the project running" "find file related to the bug" or | even something as simple as "create a branch" that way I get | a little dopamine from checking boxes and I can build some | momentum. | nchudleigh wrote: | I think this is why I love incident response. | | "In an emergency, that whole tangle of self-absorption lifts, | because "what needs to be done" is usually so obvious that | nobody, not even my inner critic, could reasonably disagree. For | a certain kind of person - and I'm definitely one of them - this | total absence of ambivalence feels freeing, even disconcertingly | elating, never mind the fact that what's unfolding around me is | unquestionably bad." | agumonkey wrote: | I tend to feel better in semi critical situations due to that. | Less friction, higher focus. Some people are even addicted to | these because it feels like a healthier deeper challenge. | | ps: and in an extrapolated variant, i remember reading an | article about vietnam us army vet saying they can't live in | society anymore because was has near zero ambivalence and they | prefer it. | gumby wrote: | I think this is the reason deadlines work so well for some | people: the need to finish task X before tomorrow | autodeprioritizes everything else. | tommilukkarinen wrote: | Lovely insight. | TeMPOraL wrote: | That works nicely until your brain figures it out and it | stops working - instead of "autodeprioritizing everything | else", it just cranks up the fear of impending failure to the | point nothing has any priority because you can barely think | straight... | | For me, this switch happened somewhere between my last year | at university and my second job. As a part of it, I lost the | ability to "pull off all-nighters" - not in the sense of | being able to stay awake that long, but in the sense of being | able to do anything useful in that time. | mckirk wrote: | I can definitely relate to that. I don't think it's | necessarily an effect of your brain 'figuring out the | trick', but more an issue of a part of your 'identity' | getting shifted in an unhelpful direction. | | When I was younger, I was absolutely sure that I'd pull off | whatever was required of me, even if that meant doing | everything under a ton of pressure. But at some point, the | circumstances just didn't allow that anymore... And after | the first time that this paradigm didn't work out anymore, | I didn't have this reassuring surety anymore either, which | was a big part of why it always did work out before I | think. | | So now I just tell people to be careful with their personal | 'axioms', and to not stress them to a breaking point. | wholinator2 wrote: | I can also relate that pulling off all nighters at school | tended to be at least a little rewarding. Either i was | learning something interesting or building something cool | but the similar calibre problems at work don't have the | same allure. If I'm doing the same at work it either | means work was incorrectly planned and now I'm expected | to fix that, or someone else broke something | unnecessarily and now I'm expected to fix that. It's just | an entirely negative context to extra work now. I'm not | really learning anything, I'm not getting paid more, I'm | not getting a cool project out of it. It's just an | accidentally (sometimes) manufactured catastrophe that | someone with more money or power has declared is my fault | or responsibility. I definitely do much better in | academia | abbadadda wrote: | Unfortunately, incident response was the first thing that I | thought of also. You might be an SRE if? :-) | ilyt wrote: | I like it because it cuts bikeshedding and people meandering | endlessly on possible ideal solution | TeMPOraL wrote: | I like it because it provides a socially acceptable excuse to | tell other people to GTFO and let me focus. Otherwise, I tend | to be distracted by requests from other people. Often | imagined ones. It's really probably just me who needs to | convince myself that yes, I can say "no", and yes, I can stop | thinking about every other obligation and expectation while | focusing on the task at hand. A crisis temporarily eliminates | this entire problem. | pontifier wrote: | I have a cleaning technique I call ant mode. A colony of ants can | accomplish a lot. They can move immense amounts of materials, and | create well organized groupings of things. | | In ant mode, I pick up one thing, and then I put it in a place it | belongs. | | If I don't know where it belongs, I put it down with something | else of the same type. I'm only ever picking up one thing, I'm | only ever putting it down in one spot. I envision myself becoming | a colony of ants. | | It's very helpful when moving lots of things from one spot to | another, and I pretend that I am one of multiple ants making the | same trip back and forth. It's surprising how effective it is | because there's no thought required. No second guessing. There's | no wondering what to do next, it's just pick up something out of | place and move where it belongs. | | The best thing about ant mode, is that I can stop anytime, and | I've accomplished something. Things are better than I found them. | southwesterly wrote: | I do ant more too. I'm going to call it any more now. | mucle6 wrote: | Not roasting you, just pointing out something interesting | | I've never seen 3 typos that "mutate" the word into a valid | word, in one sentence or comment | | > I do ant more too. I'm going to call it any more now. | solumunus wrote: | Not that hard to imagine if they have autocorrect on a | mobile. | flatline wrote: | Most of my typos of this sort come from turning auto | correct _off_ , because I do not like it rewriting my | language when it guesses a word completely wrong. | wholinator2 wrote: | Yeah, just kind of crazy that so many people don't proof | read their comments anymore. I swear the number of easily | spotted and fixed typos is getting ridiculous. I typed | this on my phone and if i didn't constantly fix mistakes | in word prediction it would be an unreadable mess. | | It's gotten so bad that I'm left either to assume that | most people out here either don't know English very well | or are roughly code bots. Read your own comments before | you post, people! | doubled112 wrote: | I made a few of the off-by-one kind of typos with clients | and coworkers really early on in my career, and learned | to always always proofread before I ended up having a | chat with HR for something completely unintentional. | | Examples: | | Mild kitty indigestion -> Milf kitty indigestion | | Is your free/busty time showing correctly now? | RheingoldRiver wrote: | I'm gonna guess not autocorrect, but swype/swiftkey. y is | next to t and d is adjacent to r. SwiftKey absolutely | butchers me like this when I type slightly unfamiliar | words, especially if I'm going fast. It would _never_ let | me type "ant" if I haven't already typed it once | normally. And "more" being preferred over "mode" isn't | that hard to believe too. | scarface_74 wrote: | My first job out of college way back in 1996, I was a hybrid | computer operator for a backup site for a state lottery and a | "programmer". My manager told me when shit hits the fan and if we | did have to take over from the primary site, I would be fielding | calls left and right and people would be breathing down my neck - | including my skip manager and people from the business side. We | had a stupid high SLA and steep fines for being down. | | He said ignore everyone and talk through the checklist of the | step I was taking on the checklist. I had permission to tell | everyone including him to give me some breathing room. In other | words - do one thing at the time. | | I've taken that to heart in my personal and professional life for | the last 25+ years. | | It's especially helpful when shit hits the fan at a job and I | need to prepare for my next move. I've developed a "it's time to | prepare for another job" checklist that I can activate at a | moments notice. | codetrotter wrote: | > I've developed a "it's time to prepare for another job" | checklist that I can activate at a moments notice. | | Did you ever have to activate said checklist? If so, at what | time or what times? | scarface_74 wrote: | 6 times since 2012 and I'm preparing for the 7th just in | case. I work for the BigTech company known for its "PIP | culture". It hasn't happened yet to me. But it always could. | | 1. Warm up my network. Reach out to people on LinkedIn, meet | coworkers and former coworkers for lunch whenever I'm in | their city (my wife and I "nomad" six months a year) and | recruiters. There are a few recruiters I've met in person who | know the industry and the players. | | 2. Prepare my "career document" - ie a longer form of a | resume where I list my accomplishments in STAR format so I | have talking points for my soft skill interviews. | | 3. Update my resume | | 4. Clean up my open source portfolio. This is new. I work in | a department where it is easy to put the reusable parts of | client facing work through our open source approval process. | It usual takes two weeks. It's MIT license so I can fork it | from our official repos and continue working on it. | | Notice I didn't say "grind leetCode" (tm) | r/cscareerquestions. I'm 50 years old. I haven't done a | coding interview since 2012 and that was my first time and | I'm still an active coder as part of my job. If we can't talk | like adults and I can't convince a company the value I bring, | it's not a place I'm going to work. | | As far as when: | | - 2008: at a company for nine years through four | acquisitions. I had become an "expert beginner". | | - 2012: a startup was on its last legs. We all knew it and I | was one of the tech leads who they trotted out to to talk to | potential investors and acquirers. | | - 2014: Working for the company that Jack Welch expanded on a | house of cards. | | - 2016: working on a "tiger team" at a satellite office until | the old guard pushed out my skip manager and my manager who | was brought in to modernize them. | | 2018: company acquired by a private equity company. I was the | tech lead and the company said they "didn't want to be a | software company" | | 2020: the first time I didn't purposefully activate it. The | opportunity to work at BigTech fell into my lap (cloud | consulting department). I was happy where I was. | | Present: I stay prepared. But figure between savings and | severance if things start going crazy, I have a window to | either get a full time job or _someone_ is going to pay me | for consulting especially with my current credentials. | cardy31 wrote: | I would also love to see that checklist! | scarface_74 wrote: | See my previous reply | barbariangrunge wrote: | What's the checklist have on it? | scarface_74 wrote: | See my previous comment | POiNTx wrote: | I used to do this. Not anymore as I feel I can do it without | having to write it down nowadays. | | I even wrote a little app for it: https://todo.wout.space/ | sidcool wrote: | Is there a relation between the quality of content and the ratio | of posts' points to the number of comments (beyond a certain | threshold)? | klyrs wrote: | The waterfall approach plus tunnel vision. Highly effective for | getting things done in a team of one with no overarching goals. | karmakaze wrote: | I've heard this similarly expressed as "Eating the Frog"[0] which | is the singular version of "Warren Buffet's Two Lists"[1]. | | [0] https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/eat-the-frog | | [1] https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus | chrisgd wrote: | I think lists also serve the purpose of getting your tasks out on | paper. If I am working on 4 projects, I need to be constantly | reminded of those tasks and need to break them down into smaller | tasks. Getting Things Done is an effective method, but all of | these things, including this method, require real effort. There | is just no way around the fact that there is effort required. | Rainymood wrote: | I have one notebook that I carry around where I list tasks just | in order to cross them out. There is something so viscerally | satisfying in crossing out a task that just provides so much | momentum to whatever I'm doing. There's just something beautiful | about making the implicit explicit and then striking it through. | ghaff wrote: | I have been known to list a bunch of sometimes fairly trivial | stuff I need to do in a day in my notebook calendar. And it is | very satisfying to cross a half-dozen things off. | lelanthran wrote: | I made a tool to help me do _exactly this!_ I even made a HN post | about it, after making some HN comments about how well it is | working for me. | | (It's | https://github.com/lelanthran/frame/blob/master/docs/FrameIn... | in case anyone is interested). | ftxbro wrote: | ok but if anyone sees your weird little list of normal activities | that have been written down and crossed out they are going to | suspect some kind of pathological loss of executive function, i'm | not saying that's how it should be, but that's what they are | going to actually assume | 0zemp3c wrote: | [flagged] | satisfice wrote: | I guess I'm the only one to speak up for the silent majority: | | I say: No! | | Take your cognitive reductionism and shove it. Take your | mechanical life hacks to your Mars colony, if you want to, but | I'll stay on the green hills of Earth and live a natural, flowing | life. | | Advice like this is tossed out as if there is no cost to | following it. The cost is self-alienation! This is a practice | that encourages self-enslavement! | | My super-ego is not the boss of me. Respect your procrastination, | man. Procrastination is a message from your unconscious. Ignore | it at your peril. | slobotron wrote: | TFA says the task could be procrastination too | | > And don't forget that it could be "take a nap"! | weakfish wrote: | What? | lars_francke wrote: | This is why I use Amazing Marvin. While far from perfect it has a | deceptively simple feature: Give me a random task from this list. | | It frees me from deciding between multiple equally important | things to do. And it helps tremendously by forcing myself to then | do this thing before moving on because I finally do those things | that I have been procrastinating on. | | Back when I last checked four or so years ago very few or no Todo | tools had this feature. | geniium wrote: | Writing only one thing down would raise my fear of missing | something out that needs to be done. | | I like to have some kind of backlog of tasks to do, and clean | that up regularly and start fresh with a daily list of tasks to | do. | Sammi wrote: | Often when I feel stressed out by stuff I need to do, I just | list it all out on paper on in a .txt. I'm not an organized | person in general, so I have strong aversion to doing so. But I | find that once I do I finally feel clarity and can immediately | see what is the most important thing I should be doing right | now, and I feel at ease that the other tasks are not forgotten. | jdrmar wrote: | Almost my philosophy! Except I do list multiple tasks at the | start of the day, but the next day I do a complete reset and | start over again (see https://can.do/about if you're interested) | benatkin wrote: | I've found the advice to remember that you "only ever actually be | doing one thing" not to be very broadly applicable. It's good | advice for some situations like driving a car, but for things | like writing code while responding to the occasional Slack | message, it's not specific enough to constitute good advice. | | Still, it's true, when understood properly, and maybe I just need | to study it more to put it into practice. | [deleted] | abbadadda wrote: | If you can, close slack while writing code - someone will call | or tap you on the shoulder if there is an emergency. | darth_aardvark wrote: | When I'm on call, I've got to respond to slack messages in 4 | different channels with a 1hour slo . Messages responded to | outside the SLO get brought up at perf review. This isn't | viable for some of us. | ilyt wrote: | But that's worse! | benatkin wrote: | Indeed, exactly my experience. =) | trafnar wrote: | This works really well for me too. I built a task tracker tool | (tasktxt.com) that has built-in timers for each task so you | choose a task, then press "start" and now you feel more committed | to doing that one particular task. It helps me focus on one task | at a time. | leobabauta wrote: | I like it, will give it a try! | | Can you make an option to only show the task being timed, for | greater focus? | drigbye wrote: | This looks great. Going to try it out! Where do you store your | weekly tasks and/or backlog of tasks? | koinedad wrote: | This is what I do, except I sometimes list a few things because I | know I need to do more than just one thing in the near future | larsrc wrote: | Same here, using a bullet journal took a lot of strain off my | mind. Now I wonder if I could adapt this advice to it. | jen729w wrote: | Burkeman has a lovely series on Sam Harris' 'Waking Up' app. It's | based on his book, which is also lovely, but isn't just him | reading it. | | Free month here. No benefit to me. | | https://dynamic.wakingup.com/shareOpenAccess/SC80D94AB | raman162 wrote: | I would say it's less about listing one task, but focusing on | doing the most important task at one point in time. | | I loved the book four thousand weeks, refreshing reminder that we | have limited time and attention and prioritization is the most | important thing. | jstanley wrote: | If it works for you, great, but the reason I like to write down | all of the tasks is so that I can let go of them in my mind. If I | am only allowed to write down one task, I'm forced to memorise | the rest of the tasks. | Johnny555 wrote: | I did it, but I'm stuck in a loop: | | List one task | | List one task | | List one task | | List one task | layer8 wrote: | How do you even get to "cross it out"? | TeMPOraL wrote: | They AOT-compiled the instructions, and only then started | executing. | totetsu wrote: | - task | | do it | | it | dilippkumar wrote: | 100% compliance achieved. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-06-10 23:00 UTC)