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Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

This may be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I just don't get it. The whole notion of setting personal goals, working out tasks and sub tasks and strategies and charts - like, you deal with all that stuff in your work life.

Give it a rest. Be with your family. Look at a sunset. Read a book or two. Paint or play the piano. Eat well, go for a run. Do things that are good for you and other people. Spend less time on your phone. Be a nicer person.

None of this needs a chart or a strategy or a plan. It's just common sense humanity.

Don't worry if you "fail", it's the journey that counts. You don't need to be grade VIII on the piano or the best artist in your social circle - just enjoy doing whatever it is. Find stuff with flow. Live life. Don't spend your time measuring it.

Just my halfpence.

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Myself, from ten years ago, would agree.

Today, between balancing life goals, family responsibilities, and professional obligations, I need organizational systems to hold it together. In another twenty years I don't think I'll need the same structures again.

For me, an organizational framework is the difference between reactive and pro-active. It need not be elaborate, but I need one to augment my own weakness and ensure that everything that needs doing gets done.

Same for me. I found it difficult to balance energy across work, life, wellness. My over focus on work meant I didn't get as much exercise in, which for me is an important outlet and endorphin booster. So would carry more work stress home. Ultimately built a simple notepad system for balancing which has improved my balance a lot.

Discipline is the only thing that allows my life to not completely fall apart. I believe it’s common in depression, to take an edge case, to lose “routine” either as a preceding or correlated or succeeding event.

Agree. On those mornings when I feel lazy, I've learned those are the game changing opportunities to exercise discipline. It's easy to stick to the plan when motivated. I find it empowering (and uplifting) to stick to the plan when unmotivated.

It's a false dichotomy.

I can't speak for the author (and indeed, from his tone, I'm inclined to agree with you that perhaps he may need to let off the throttle a bit), but taking time to set non-work goals can lead to greater mindfulness about an activity, precisely because you've spent time considering it.

If I decide that "In Q1 2021, I will be biking precisely 3 out of 5 workdays a week to the office", this might not sound 'common sense humanity', but that fact does not then preclude me from enjoying the chill of the morning wind on my face once I'm on the bike. But if it helps me get on the bike in the first place, hey...it takes all sorts right?

It’s more than that:

“Bike 3 out of 5 days to the office” is a reflection of your goals as a human — fitness, enjoying the outdoors, whatever.

The problem is our natural inclination to be lazy and take the bus prevents us from accomplishing our desire to be healthier or enjoy the outdoors.

Having an explicit goal you measure the results of is a way to assess if you’re living the way you want to.

You’re captain here: no one is making you ride the bike — but if you want to ride your bike more, making that goal explicit and measured is a way to overcome your own internal conflicts preventing you from doing that.

Captain made a call and now we’re doing it.

My cool-headed long-term-thinking self wants to "eat well, go for a run", but my saturday morning self just wants to sleep in and have a donut. Some of us need some form of accountability structure to help our rational selves prevail over our self-sabotaging hedonist selves.

Habit forming works better. That’s why you don’t need a teeth brushing OKR. Or a dog walking OKR. Check out tiny habits.

I find performance metrics tiresome these days, especially at work. As a programmer you are doing creative and fairly reactive work, yet you are trying to please some performance metric written 2 months ago for the quarter, which with new information is BS so now you need to negotiate to ignore the metric.

I probably have metric fatigue.

> That’s why you don’t need a teeth brushing OKR.

I do have a teeth-brushing OKR because I forget to do it otherwise, to the point where I've had to have two teeth removed.

I don't think those things are opposites. I don't exactly do personal OKRs, but I'm definitely working towards goals. To hit some of those goals, I build habits. And to build those habits, I carefully track how well I'm doing on that.

E.g., I had a goal of being more fit. I wanted a habit of daily exercise, so I set a target of 10k steps/day. My current streak is 33 days, but I'd say the habit is still forming. I'm going to shoot for 2 months and see how strong the habit feels then.

I do agree that bad metrics are terrible, though. My sympathies!

Be careful with streaks. There’s another thread on today (about phone addiction) that goes into more depth how streaks can be harmful, but as an anecdote, I had a 500+ day streak on my Apple Watch fitness rings until the watch developed a fault intra day and I didn’t notice til the end of the day, breaking the streak. There’s no way to reset that, or show me new streak information. So I gave up entirely. The pandemic didn’t start for another 3-4 months, by which time I’d given up already.

Fair point. Luckily, for me streaks become boring. They're just a tool for getting into a habit. Once I have the habit, I'll drop tracking the formal tracking of that particular metric. I really can only track so many things at once, and so I'll set some other goal.

> None of this needs a chart or a strategy or a plan. It's just common sense humanity.

For some folks. All sorts of different people in the world.

My wife needs a plan for every day. Not to the level of checklists and planning it out in software, but if she has an "open ended" day she doesn't do that well mentally and doesn't sleep well unless she has a mental model for the day coming up.

For me, I'm the opposite. I hate scheduled days, but I also know I need a bit of structure for myself otherwise it's easy for a long weekend to devolve into napping on the couch and posting to HN. My entire organization for this is just a simple TO-DO list where I toss a couple objectives of the day down in the AM while drinking my caffeine. It adds a tiny bit of order to an otherwise unordered personality and helps me move along my personal projects and social life.

It’s tough because it’s probably both.

Perhaps in the short time being more flexible and in the moment is better, while over time Marshall Goldsmiths maxim regarding goals not surrendered of “unrealized ambitions end up being frustrated yearnings for the soul” might hold.

Your solution sounds more European and likely better for overall satisfaction. However, if you for some reason did want to get to grade VIII on the piano and the ability to watch and notice the hues at sunset didn’t come with a mental cue to deep down legitimately let go of that (not to be Buddhist) inkling of desire, then you’re in trouble.

Throw in a Canadian quarter to your halfpence.

Frankly, if I'm not so driven to get to grade VIII on piano it's on my mind with or without fake goals, I don't really see the point of getting to there?

Sure, agree, but the more subtle second order point is that those unrealized potentially borderline subconscious things you set out for your self can accumulate and gnaw at you with low acuity yet chronically forever.

As a datapoint American garages are full of dormant dust covered dreams. It takes effort to donate that exercise bike or old piano to Goodwill because you have to face your demons that you will _never_ become that version of yourself, there's no future you that will be really fit, and without evidence I'll assert that it's that very conscious act which symbolically represents the destruction of ambiguity is difficult for most humans. So we go through our life with splinters serving as thorns we carry around forvever.

We're getting a little too foo-foo spiritual from here which is probably against HN rules, so I'll stop at that comment.

I can totally concur that the second order effect of being honest towards self is the key and valuable thing here.

Thank you for this insight, I did not realize earlier that this is the key thing and think it's an important fundamental idea.

“Work Life Balance” is missing and item—Career. I don’t think it should be that hard to find the right balance between all three, and you should especially try to have career bleed into work more than life. But if you have any aspirations of getting promoted to a high level and making lots of money (I’m not saying you should have those aspirations), then it’s very likely you’ll need devote at least some of your free time to gaining skills and knowledge that will help you grow in your career.

I am paraphrasing a bit but I recall David Allen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Allen_(author)

Saying something to the effect of goals are not there to be done in the future, they are there to orient your present.

I love this because if I have a goal of spending more time with my son then taking an after run is a bad idea.

They help guide your decisions which speaks to me.

> Give it a rest. Be with your family. Look at a sunset.

Yes, but... Perhaps a little bit of organization and goals, but never too much, is still doable?

This. Have a "me three"

I do shopping lists. If we're entertaining, we do a plan to ensure we get the food and drink ready in time. That's about it.

There's a packing list for the beach, but we haven't used it in years and years: life's too short for being driven by an organising principle.

Agreed.

I think people have begun to fetishize their actual plan. It's an excuse to not do any of the real "hard" work, but rather plan to do it. The planning feels great because it really isn't all that difficult. Look at all these colors and percentages! I'm doing something!

Obviously this isn't true for everyone. But I've found focused plans are much better than trying to juggle 3 million things. It'll lead to burnout.

Why did you assume that people are not enjoying life ? It is not a either or thing. You can relax and enjoy life with your families in nature and also spend some remaining time to reflect and strategize for a better future.

Making To Do lists I will never follow a one of my greatest Joy's in life.

You do you.

We've all got different drives and inner monologues, heterogenous backgrounds, unique perspectives, goals.

It's what makes the human experiment wildly successful. We're all living life as we see it.

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