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Comment by yitchelle | Hacker News Reader

While this is good, it goes into the mix with 100s of other similar or same apps (but with a different name). What I have yet to see is how to increase the motivation to actually close the things on the list. Anyone with hints?

I try to be mindful of the things on my list, especially when I add new items on to it, but closing it out is a different story.

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I don't use this app, but I'm a big Kanban fan. For me the motivation to close items comes through WIP limits. For my personal Kanban setup, I have a WIP limit of 3 for active tasks, and three for "pending" tasks, by which I mean things that are blocked waiting for somebody else.

If I have 3 active tasks, that means I have to pick from among them to work on something. For me, that usually results in finishing what I've started in reasonably quick order. I also aim to favor closing an open task before pulling a new one from the backlog, which helps further.

Once I do this consistently, it generates motivation (or perhaps decreases the sapping of my natural motivation) in that I'm in the habit of getting things flowing through the system and minimizing WIP.

Astrid Tasks was the only one that really helped me get a lot of old tasks done, but Yahoo killed it. No to do list since really keeps me on task.

I've tried Habitica which attempts to gameify your tasks, but I dunno .. I just never got into it.

I have an OpenProject server running for myself, but I kinda forgot about it for a while and stopped checking in.

When I was a kid in the 90s, I found myself much more able to stay on tasks. Going into college, I could code for hours, building things, write things ... I don't even have kids/family as an adult, I just find my motivation waning.

I've taken sabbaticals in my life, which has helped me focus on some tasks and get some big things done, but even then there is diminishing return as I start to worry about money and look for work again: https://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/

I don't think a personal Kanban or anything else is a silver bullet solution. You have to hit a critical mass in the work you're trying to do, whether it's an open source project or creating videos or live-coding. I'm more impressed today by major YouTubers like 8-Bit Guy or Wendover Productions, and people like Drew DeVault who just write so much production ready stuff.

It's harder today because we have to fight greater distractions ... like browsing Hackernews when I really should try to get this regex working. :-P

I wanted to solve this problem for a while, but my learnings suggest that each person is so different it's hard to find products that generalize. What I'm building now is an app that logs over time many data points with tons of environment and personal status data, as well as how motivated you feel, so that it can process and find the reasons behind your personal motivation patterns so you can optimize them.

Habitica is really good for forming habits, but not really for completing your to-do lists.

It got me to floss everyday, which is actually a pretty big deal.

The small incentive from gamification works surprisingly well, especially for things where it's hard to visualise the net gains (Oral care, cleaning, etc).

For tasks though, I personally use Todoist, which I've haphazardly rigged via IFTTT and Microsoft Flow to sync through to Habitica. That way I get the organisation of Todoist, but the incentives from Habitica.

I hate to be that blockchain guy, but using Ethereum might be fun for this.

Stake some amount of ETH for an issue and when it closes you get it back. If it goes over some time period, the staked ETH begins to burn.

Just a thought. Could make a fun hackathon project. :)

I like how the rate of BTCUSD directly correlates with amount of comments about crypto currencies across the internet.

Beeminder already does this with normal money

Beeminder is cool, but have you seen the sister project Commits.to?

It's basically "Service Level Indicators" for your GTD queue

I've been thinking about hiring a remote PA/product manager for personal projects - just someone who knows enough about the projects and is able to spend 15 minutes each morning on remote standups to kick them along with me.

I think social pressure is a very beneficial thing in getting things moving

Getting Things Done is probably a useful tool for you. One of the principles is that things on your list must be such small action items that you can do them without thinking

The principle is that you should do your thinking separately from your doing, so you think about what you want to do, write it all out in detail, and when it comes time to do your code refactor you're not looking at "refactor the code" but stuff like "move this function over to this file". A list of mechanical tasks instead of a set of puzzles for the mind

Concrete actionable tasks which can easily be delegated

I find it helpful to split the tasks into smaller steps (often repeated advice). This does not necessarily lead to closing the main/parent task any earlier, but at least I can see some kind of daily/weekly progress on the larger stories.

It could be related to gameifying it. Finishing a task isn't simply a task, it's an item moved along the kanban board!

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