[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.
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