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Do It Now

aaronsw.com

60 pointsjoao15 comments

Aaron, you sound like a guy with not enough to do. If you can answer every email without prioritization, then I doubt you are getting all that much email.

I suppose I could go through every email, Seth Godin-style, and fire off a zinger one-liner the day it arrives. But though I might answer a lot of email, I wouldn't be doing the emailers any favors.

I often get emails from users that require some thought or research to answer properly. These people are better served to wait a couple days, than to have me try and be "productive." I agree with the general idea of "Just Do It." But it's just an aphorism, and any aphorism taken to extreme will end up being moronic.

What are you working on these days anyways? I'd prefer to see your software than your thoughts on answering emails or hiring programmers. Reddit and RSS are certainly helping me more than your essays brewed from boredom.

"I suppose I could go through every email, Seth Godin-style, and fire off a zinger one-liner the day it arrives. But though I might answer a lot of email, I wouldn't be doing the emailers any favors."

I remember reading not too long ago a heart felt email from a developer to Steve jobs that was several paragraphs long. Jobs' full reply:

"Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal."

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/dear-steve-...

From the time stamps, he replied within 3 hours, and probably within a few minutes of when he actually read it.

Maybe he could have taken more time to research and reply, ask a subordinate to research further, etc. But I doubt he could have given a much better response or made his position more clear than those 10 words.

I guess my point is, the "zinger one-liner" might be the most appropriate course of action more often than you think.

He could have said "Fuck You" as well - which is basically what he did - but most people don't consider that positive communication.

I don't think the response he gave was the one that would have the most positive effects.

I agree with you.

Personally speaking I reply to all my emails within the first 24 hours and my inbox has been empty for the last year or so - this is mostly because I do have a lot of free time and I don't receive a lot emails.

I think the author gave a bad example for "do it now" philosophy. I know quite a few people who receives a few dozen emails a day and most of them requires some level of thought to reply.

Yes... I run several moderately successful blogs and I'm overwhelmed by correspondence (in waves). Starting from the top and answering everything would be a way for me to make my full time job answering e-mail, while getting behind.

"We procrastinate because we are afraid." This struck a chord.

This is probably my own biggest trigger for procrastination. I avoid writing an email or calling somebody due to fear, or uneasiness. Then over time, I avoid it further due to fear of lateness. Luckily recognizing this is half the way to solving it. The other half is the temporary spike in willpower to overcome the fear.

You mean the "Getting Things Done" chord that's been singing around the Web for almost a decade?

I read this hoping it would be another really cool use of "dot" to make things easier to visualise, and hence easier to prioritize, and hence easier to do, thus making it useful, and a cool pun.

But it's just a mis-spelling.

Things I use "dot" for include:

- Diagramming links between Paul Graham essays. When I told him about it he suggested I submit it here to HN. That's how I first arrived: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=397408

- My site map. It's a real map, not just a list of pages

- Scheduling. Dependent tasks point to each other, and are set to the same level as the week they're due.

- Visualizing data structures. I've invented a new one and want to see how it evolves through time.

- System connectivity diagrams and data flow.

There are more, but that's enough. Dot and neato are incredibly useful tools.

More useful than yet another "Do It Now" page.

Just for making it easier to search for on the web: The package that includes dot is called graphviz. (An excellent piece of software.)

What's new or interesting here? Obviously if he was able to read and handle every every single piece of mail, it didn't matter what system he used, as long as he changed something up to renew his optimism and enthusiasm.

But he didn't renew his optimism or enthusiasm, unless I'm missing something. Rather, he just did the first one anyway, even though he wasn't enthused about it.

This is a lesson I have to learn over and over, because I want to do things I'm excited about doing. There's a lot of things, though, that I want to have done, and for things like that, there's typically no way to make them more exciting or to make me more optimistic about handling them -- I just have to start. Once I've started, continuing is far easier, for whatever reason.

When I programmed mostly for myself (that is, with no set schedule other than a dimly seen deadline), I had quite a lot of trouble getting started, and so I developed a trick to help with that: at the end of the day, I'd make sure to leave some small, quickly-accomplished thing undone, to have something to do when I started again. Sometimes I'd also write a note on how to do it, if it seemed like I might forget. Over months, though, this turned into a problem itself, since I would spend lots of time during the day coming up with tasks that I could do the next day to start, and then I would use that as an excuse not to do them today, because, hey, what if I wasn't able to come up with anything else to start on easily tomorrow? I might lose the whole next day!

Eventually, this got to the point where I'd spend weeks doing only one or two small tasks in the morning, and then being afraid to start on anything bigger lest I not have something easy to start on the next day. Of course, this defeated the purpose...

Actually accomplishing things, whether coding, or writing, or cleaning up email, or just cleaning the house, is something that you have to just do. You might be able to trick yourself into doing a little more of it, but if you focus on the trick, you aren't likely to build the habit of just doing things, which means that you'll easily stop doing them when something happens to make the trick less effective.

People for whom the trick(s) really seem to work have moved into a psychological realm where they have the habit of getting things done; the trick is no longer really the point, I'd guess.

Is anyone else puzzled about all this "inbox zero" stuff? My email is very manageable. And I may not be Aaron Swartz, but I'm not a complete loser either.

It's possible I am different, because I assume that any tweet, email, or blog post not directly ONLY at me, or my local work group, is usually ignorable without consequence. I also don't make commitments when I know my interest is only marginal. I may also be more immune to social pressure -- if someone adds me on Twitter or starts commenting on my blog, I feel no obligation to add them back.

Is this rude? Am I a recluse and don't know it? I don't understand how others get anything done without severely throttling the messages they receive.

Isn't it "Do It Now" ?

Or "Just Do It"?

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