[HN Gopher] To-do waves
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To-do waves
Author : pawsys
Score : 85 points
Date : 2022-07-14 05:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sysiak.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sysiak.substack.com)
| Cerium wrote:
| My first thought here is that the composition of todo waves
| allows the opportunity for a human to become arbitrarily busy on
| a given day when the waves positively interfere. Thankfully many
| of these items phase lock to the circadian rhythm or enjoy some
| scheduling flexibility.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I thought it was going to try to actively schedule based on the
| opposite of that, like get your passport renewed early because
| you have a lot of stuff coming up next year.
| Cerium wrote:
| Yes, I thought it would go there as well.
| divbzero wrote:
| Unfortunately the troughs of the waves are at minimum zero so
| we cannot benefit from negative interference to cancel out
| waves.
| divbzero wrote:
| Or perhaps the right mental model is to treat help from
| others as negative waves. When you anticipate a particularly
| busy "rogue wave" you arrange help with shopping, food prep,
| family care, _etc._ , to cancel out some portion of that
| wave.
| happimess wrote:
| Presumably, that header graphic is not to scale.
| Lexarius wrote:
| As the old saying goes, "'Tis impossible to be sure of any
| thing but Needing to Pee and Taxes."
| thenerdhead wrote:
| It's a cool metaphor. I think the examples are a bit more of
| things that you just do though. I don't normally think about
| having to pee, it just hits me. I don't normally consider going
| out for ice cream a "to do", I see it as a reward for doing
| things on my todos.
|
| I can't tell the authors perspective on breaks though. They
| mention scheduling them are counterintuitive but believe they are
| needed for diffuse-mode thinking. The reason why the pomodoro
| technique is so effective and widely used is that we have a
| natural time limit to our "waves" in term of our active focus
| before we need a wind-down.
|
| https://jondouglas.dev/fast-brain-slow-mind/
| pawsys wrote:
| I meant that it's counterintuitive to think about scheduling
| breaks, but it's actually very helpful thing to do. Thanks for
| the feedback. I will see if I can make it clearer in the
| article.
| johnnyo wrote:
| Yeah, some better examples that I use on a regular basis:
| 1. Take out the trash on Mondays 2. Pay the credit card
| bill on the 5th of every month 3. Get a haircut every 5
| weeks 4. Pay the water bill every 3 months, etc
|
| Having those sorts of things in my recurring To Do list are
| very helpful to ensure they don't get forgotten.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| I'm autistic, and I have a whole category of recurring self-
| care stuff like haircuts, having a shave, doing some pull-
| ups, crunches, something to eat, that kind of thing. Without
| that, I wouldn't function so well. Never shared that before.
| macNchz wrote:
| I made a little email/web app that makes it easy to have a
| shared list like this for my wife and I, it's very barebones
| but I use it every day: https://www.onit.today/
|
| I found the alternatives to be either: designed to build your
| life around them and therefore too complex, or simple but
| lacking a good mechanism to have a shared list with others.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Love the name. It's great!
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Looks great! Right now we just use a Google sheet but I'm
| looking to upgrade. There's something I need that isn't
| obvious when comparing features of apps like this: I need
| the next due date of a recurring task to be a specified
| duration (say, a week) after I mark the previous occurrence
| as done, not when the previous occurrence was due.
|
| Example: my cat's water fountain can only be in service for
| a week before it must get washed. So I put it out on July 1
| and it's due to be washed July 8. Alarm goes off on the
| 8th, I take it out of service (putting a non-fountain bowl
| out temporarily) hopefully that day but maybe a day late,
| and put it in the dishwasher. Some time later (maybe July
| 9, 10, or 11) I finally run the dishwasher and put the
| fountain back into service. Next due date is a week after
| that.
|
| Right now, I have to manually type the next due date into
| my spreadsheet. I'd rather just click a button and have an
| app know to set another alarm a week after the button was
| clicked.
|
| So a wave that isn't strictly periodic, it has a hold
| phase...
|
| One thing I'm trying now is "hey Google remind me to x in a
| week" at the time of putting the fountain in service, but
| basically I'm looking to avoid specifying the duration or
| due date _every single time_.
|
| I find many chores to be of this type. Another example is
| changing the HVAC filter. I want an alarm to happen 3
| months after the last change, but maybe it won't be dirty
| yet so I let it alarm for a while, in which case the next
| alarm happens 3 months after marking the last one as done,
| not 3 months after the last alarm started.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Ticktick will do this. I have one called 'air filter
| every 3 months' and the next iteration is always exactly
| 90 days from when I mark the current one as done, even if
| I am late or early.
| whiterock wrote:
| Do you need the premium version for that? Is there any
| OSS that does that? I might need to get onto that then...
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| No, I use the free version. My todo listing needs are
| actually very basic, I just think ticktick has the best
| semantic scheduling out of any that I have tried and I
| hate fiddling with scheduling widgets.
| macNchz wrote:
| Thanks for the detailed info-I think what you're
| describing is how onit actually works. By default, when a
| repeating todo item is due, you'll get a daily email
| listing the things that are currently due. For each
| repeating todo item you can choose what happens when you
| check it off: either schedule it again based on
| now+interval, or on a strict schedule (e.g. always on
| Wednesday, always on the 15th of the month etc).
|
| I use the strict schedule for things like bills or annual
| registrations, and the now+interval schedule for things
| like your cat fountain cleaning example, where I'm happy
| to just get a morning reminder about it until I get
| around to it.
|
| I should probably update the homepage to provide some
| more detail on the actual functionality!
| amflare wrote:
| I've been looking for something like this for a long time.
| IS there a demo or screenshots to see what it looks like in
| use?
| slategruen wrote:
| I'd rather think of it like a pulse wave rather than a sinusoidal
| one
| pawsys wrote:
| That's a good point. I was thinking about it during writing.
| Really it is binary - doing and then not doing for a while.
| There is no ascending part of the graph - even though spiky
| line would be closer to depict this it is also incorrect. I
| chose to use the simplest wave form just to highlight the
| nature of most to-dos - they repeating over and over again like
| waves on the ocean.
| a_e_k wrote:
| This reminds me a bit of the old "biorhythm" concept.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biorhythm_(pseudoscience)
| ozim wrote:
| I don't find it insightful because for me tasks that are ToDo are
| not like sine waves.
|
| I am also not a person that gets annoyed by cleaning dishes or
| brushing teeth. I just do these things and I accepted that these
| are time costs that I cannot do much about.
|
| Not brushing teeth - getting even single infection from rotting
| tooth would cost me much more in terms of wasted time than
| brushing twice a day.
|
| Just like trying to cut on sleep time, you might get away for 3-5
| days sleeping less but then you will have to pay it back with
| interest.
|
| I think it is mostly difference in approach "unrealistic" trying
| to schedule and squeeze in as much as possible - vs - I have
| bunch of stuff to do, let's see how much I will be able to finish
| and anything that drops goes to the next day or ends up never
| done because if I did not do it and no one complained (even
| myself) it probably was not that important at all.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Nice article, really clean and hits my taste just right. The
| content was not too profound or wise or anything I usually look
| for, but I just wanted to say the layout and flow of the page was
| a good read.
| bckr wrote:
| Agreed, I liked the graphics especially.
|
| The concept of waves is really nice. It supplant my previous
| visualization of these kind of tasks, which was more "spiky".
| xivzgrev wrote:
| This sentence " And a week, year or longer waves like cutting
| nails, tanking a car, renewing a passport"
|
| I initially read that the author only cuts his nails once per
| year. Yuck...
|
| Then I realized he was more likely giving an example of weekly.
|
| Anyone else read it that way?
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| What is "tanking a car"?
| pawsys wrote:
| thanks, changed to "refueling a car"
| thenerdhead wrote:
| filling up the gas tank with fuel.
| whiterock wrote:
| probably a ,,germanism".
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