> A review of your “ideal you,” your ideal future, your major goals and desires in life.
One 'problem' with many task management methods is that when you slip (which most of us do) there's an aversion to opening up your Wunderlist/Excel/moleskin months later and seeing how far your current self is behind your aspirational self.
Task managers are good at atomizing goals into objectives but overlook motivations and outcomes. They lack a 'remind me again what's in it for future-me?' feature.
I'm currently attempting to code such a feature into my app. By way of example, take learning French as a goal:
* Tasks: the usual list of todos. Go to evening classes; Watch 5 hours of TV5Monde each week. etc.
* Resources: links to Youtube videos, uploaded language podcasts, communities on the web.
* Inspiration: images of French cities you want to visit, scenes from a favorite French film, quotes, a mini journal-entry about that French girl or guy you met that one time. Snippets of things the French-speaking-you will appreciate.
* Insights: how much time you're dedicating to the goal, hours already spent and estimated completion date based on your current rate of productivity.
So your task manager serves not only as a checklist but also as a control-room (or if you like, moodboard) for that goal. Tasks, tools, motivation and a feedback loop all in one place.
It's also inspiring in another way, as a solopreneur-hacker-bootstrap success story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11999757
eta: the creator has also posted in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13251497
I personally do not need "Resources" or dairy features in my tasklist system. (Then again, this is typically you get 1001 opinions when asking 1000 people).
A public GitHub repo where my goals are recorded as issues and accomplishments are closed tickets. I've created milestones for each year (e.g. 2016, 2017) to track my progress. I've backdated some of my 2016 acheivements to get a feel for how it will work.
I hope that writing down my aspirations for the year ahead will help me fulfil them.
In any case, best of luck. I hope you achieve your goals -- but please don't interpret this encouragement as false social reality.
I believe that for specific, discipline-oriented goals -- like "I want to run 3 times a week" -- you're well advised to shout it from the rooftops, as common sense would dictate.
Sivers's clarification, along with his original TED talk: http://sivers.org/zipit2
Don't we all want this? :)
Anyway, good luck! It would be interesting to see how far you get, so please post to HN about your experience.
Perhaps I should make the goals more concrete than "learn". As an example: build a form to do X in Elm and deploy to production. Agree that learning is an ongoing, and never ending goal.
ps: as a deep nerd, my system is 4 notepad.exe (yes notepad.exe) opened with a bunch of markdown lists... the shame.
Alternate download link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2PaeRjVqAN7MngxTXFPQkpLVj...
Earlier, I lacked focus to read a book without fiddling around my phone and managing only a few pages in a spurt. Few months back, I pushed myself to concentrate and try to finish even if my mind pushed me towards just checking HN / Reddit. I managed to finish four in a month which is not a bad considering that earlier figure was one. I didn't lose any hours of my happier life but spent some in being more knowledgable.
There is more resistance to get started because of inertia but once I get going that inertia works in my favor.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161221130952/https://alexverme...
Also, perhaps a (2012) in the title?
Edit: my bad, there's a 2016 update:
• Values & Purpose • Contribution & Impact • Location & Tangibles • Money & Finances • Career & Work • Health & Fitness • Education & Skill Development • Social Life & Relationships • Emotions & Well-Being • Character & Integrity • Productivity & Organization • Adventure & Creativity
I actually liked these so much that I integrated them right into the yearly review section of the productivity app I run, Complice (https://complice.co/). The app is subscription-based, but you can use the yearly review without paying :)
To get to the yearly review, make an account then go to https://complice.co/YOUR_USERNAME_GOES_HERE/reviews/2016/yea...
Almost all these self-help "how to do X" guides focus exclusively on Conscientiousness. Yeah, they all pay lip service to "relationships" but it gets the same treatment as "bigger car": work! work! work! daily goal!
> • Values & Purpose • Contribution & Impact • Location & Tangibles • Money & Finances • Career & Work • Health & Fitness • Education & Skill Development • Social Life & Relationships • Emotions & Well-Being • Character & Integrity • Productivity & Organization • Adventure & Creativity
That list is absurd. If you're unhappy enough with your life to turn it into a 24-point daily checklist you need a vacation and possibly treatment for depression. If you think that's not it, here's some advice:
Get "Values & Purpose" straight and everything else will follow.
But I think it's also the case that part of how we discover purposes to orient towards is thinking about areas of our lives and envisioning how they could be different.
(Also I'm not sure why you're comparing the Big Five list with these lists)
'do 10 pomodoros/day for 1 month'.
Without these three, you're bound to spend your time usefully. Not necessarily, but relationships / sports / learning as well.
As I get older I realize how little time I have left. There are myriad of things I will never get to do no matter how hyper organized I get.
The worst realization is that there is no real time to master something new when you are older past the age of 40. You can fake it by setting lower goalposts but that feels deeply unsatisfactory.
Only solution is to enjoy the present (family, friends, my existing skills, a good book, a game, etc) as there is no real success in the end (the pieces all go in the same box).
https://alexvermeer.com/wp-content/uploads/8760-hours-v2.pdf
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-A14CtANtmIX3ZCQmFvVW5neU...
I tried maybe two or three times prior to integrate Anki into my flow. It wasn't until I worked through this booklet that it finally clicked.
Thanks!
And then I remember almost every tool/plugin/theme/etc. is for wordpress and I think "Oh man, must be nice..."
Always a tradeoff.
Why time management is ruining our lives
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/why-time-...
That said, the article doesn't really provide answers. It merely points out what maybe should have been obvious: excessive time management is excessive. It's true that productivity for the sake of productivity is a poor goal. However, suppose that with your increased productivity you are able to enrich not your life, but the lives of others. Then you are faced with the choice of working harder or letting others down. It's easy to say that taking a trip to another country for the sole purpose of filling your Instagram is just masturbatory (which might not be a bad thing!). A more difficult question might be whether it's worth taking such a trip to do charity work during a holiday that you would ordinarily spend with your family. The trade-offs between helping strangers vs letting down your family and between getting some rest vs using your time off well are complex.
At this point I am rambling. The shortest answer I have right now is the same, vague answer I have for similar complex things: operate in moderation and things will work themselves out. Finding exactly what the appropriate balance is will probably be a life long struggle.
My comment here is evidence that I suffer from that as well.
