Show HN: A simple way to set goals you actually follow
motion.hoanhan.co
motion.hoanhan.co
As soon as the chain is broken, I'm never going to pick it up again.
Hypothetical example: If you were working on running 21km and worked your way up to 14km but stopped for some reason. You could get started again with a short walk or just getting dressed to go for a walk.
Streaks seem to be good at taking you from 99% compliance to 100%, but that’s not the problem most people face.
What has worked way better for me is to take the world a week at a time. I track my compliance across all of my habits. It’s usually only like 75%, but I bet you most people aren’t hitting that. Then I meet someone for up to 30 minutes once a week. She’s not an accountability buddy (also an unstable system). She’s a project manager. We talk about what’s going wrong and how to fix it, or what’s going well and how to keep it. Done it all year and it has helped tremendously.
Back to streaks, I had an idea for streaks that still give you a goal, but they’re not so huge. So you reach for the next number in the powers of 2 or Fibonacci sequence, and your streak counter starts over when you hit it. Then you’re not trying to preserve your one precious streak, you’re just setting a new record. “I did 128, let’s see if I can hit 256!”.
I don't even trust my connected devices since the amount of telemetry going on guarantees that everything I type will end up on some random VM in some random cloud.
edit typo and more info
AFAIK everything I type on my Windows machine is directly sent to MS servers. I assume the same for my Android phone.
Microsoft and Google ... I know it's the worst for privacy but my platform choices were made before I realized I was data mined.
I can't afford Apple, and frankly I think their privacy stance is more marketing than real care. Especially when I see the lengths they go to create a world were they OWN consumers.
Last Sunday I decided I had enough: I installed KDE Neon on my desktop. It failed to install drivers for my NVIDIA 950 gfx and proceeded to kill my sound card drivers in the process. So I installed Elementary OS (yes complete opposite from Neon). Graphic drivers were fine, but every time it played a sound it was preceded by a loud crack in my speakers. And it's not like it's fresh / unknown hardware, I assembled this PC between 2010 and 2012 (Intel Core i7 3770k on an Asus motherboard).
So I'm back on Windows, but at least it's a fresh install.
If the task took less than the block... hey, free time!
Feels like 7 days is enough to get the idea of the application, its philosophy, add the first few things I want to accomplish. Not more.
Trial should end when one small goal has been accomplished so that the user could realise he/she has accomplished a goal she wouldn't have without the application, plus in less time/easier than expected.
I have a folder called "habits", with reminders that appear at chosen times of day and days of the week.
I look at my phone frequently enough that I can't really ignore them. My memory is crap enough that I forget what they're going to be, so I scroll through them once in a while. It's mildly satisfying for me to "check" them at the end of the day, and to write my 5-word summaries on progress or lack thereof in the notes app.
This has rung true in my life many times over. I've tried complicated note and habit tracking apps that just do far more than I ever need and I tend to get stuck in the weeds, missing the forest for the trees with these types of platforms. The default reminders app and notes app on my iPhone so far, has been more than sufficient for everything I've needed to tackle in life from moving overseas, starting a business, and fostering relationships as well as building every habit I currently have.
Basically, this is just a long winded way of saying "keep it simple"
Exactly. Use something simple that works for you. Design a system yourself if you can. Here is a system that works for me, either on paper and with a simple text editor in Markdown. https://github.com/YJPL/personal-kanban
>[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21222150: "if you can't do it on paper first, you're not ready to computerize the problem."
So true.
One of the first things I do when on-boarding engineers to our business is to walk through the entire flow on paper, in terms of assets, people, and handshakes (as if there were no computers involved).
The industry my company's in is old enough that our competitors actually used to process everything with pen, paper, and stamps. technology made everything faster, but the water flows through the same pipes, so to speak.
Our programs are an incomplete and evolving map of a real-world transaction-territory, and it sometimes takes people a while to grok that. Once engineers do, they gain the ability to predict behavior in un-mapped territory. Having this ability saves everyone an immeasurable quantity of time.
I guess the most important takeaway, is that one must have distinct mental maps of the business process and of the program implementing the business process.
This obviously varies a lot depending on the technology you're building. Although, I guess even something as abstract as `malloc` can be analyzed in this way (a map for the program, and a map for the idea of the program: allocating memory).
I don't like exercise but I love watching Netflix. Unfortunately, I don't get enough time to watch my favourite shows everyday.
Solution: Put a treadmill in front of my TV. Now I happily take out half an hour everyday to do the treadmill just so I get the same 30 minutes to watch my show.
I would have tried this, if it didn’t require a card, and maybe a longer trial would be nice.
The effect on me is typically to increase my self-loathing when inevitably the chain breaks, and the feeling of "oh no, doing it all again will take so long!" discourages from picking myself up.
That's a way better pricing model for this kind of apps in my opinion.
Is this correct ?
It started as an online course (that is still there) but has branched out a bit into personal consulting.