Ask YC: Critique my side-project | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Critique my side-project

whatshallidonow.net

10 pointsnostrademons12 comments

I wrote this last weekend because I was getting so overwhelmed with job lead emails and interview programming tasks that I was sure I was dropping promising leads on the floor, but couldn't remember which ones. Worse yet, since I couldn't decide what to work on, I ended up working on nothing and watching YouTube videos instead.

It should be pretty self-explanatory (I hope), but the basic idea is to remove as many decisions as possible from your to-do list, so that the computer just tells you what to do, you do it, and then you go back for more. It's also tracking what & when you complete, and I hope to add some views in the near future that show you everything you've done over time as an additional motivational boost.

I'm not sure whether it's a startup, a side-project, or just a personal tool yet, but I'll be listening to any and all feedback and probably implementing a lot of it. Still not sure whether I want to jump back into the startup world or go get a job, though I suspect that the job offers won't last long if I keep delaying their interview problems to work on side projects. I figured I had this idea, I needed it myself, it'd only take a weekend to implement, and then I kept coming up with cool new ideas for features.

Any and all feedback is appreciated. If it's something people find useful, I'll probably ELance out the design (my aesthetic sense is terrible) and maybe find a new name, since WhatShallIDoNow doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. I'd particularly like to know whether the concept itself is something folks would use.

Technology aside, the core idea: writing todo items on index cards instead of lists. Focussing on discoverability and not losing things rather than checklists. This is the most f___ing brilliant gtd idea I've seen since tiddlywiki.

I've been thinking about discoverability lately, about ways to make my scrapbook/tumblelog more easy to navigate around in, having the computer find interesting connections without me having to create them all the time. It's interesting to see discoverability in action in such a different space.

have you seen http://nowdothis.com ?

it looks very similar, but as simple as it really should be.

Hmm, no, I hadn't. And yeah, it's basically the same concept - though I've got some additional ways of getting data in, like bookmarklet & e-mail. How long have they been around, and does anyone actually use it?

Edit: Their blog says they're at 10k uniques/day after being around for a week, so it looks like there's some interest in this...

10k uniques a week? Look at their alexa rank, I seriously doubt that is true.

Alexa is disgustingly inaccurate. I would trust an obvious screen shot of Google Analytics (including a flaw, making it authentic) over an Alexa rating any day.

Did you see this? http://nowdothis.tumblr.com/post/44066616/synchronicity

What he says about immediately dropping everything and working on the new idea is key. I initially had the vague feeling that something like this would be useful about a week ago, but wasn't sure exactly what and figured that as a small side project, I could wait until I had a job. If I'd just dropped all the job interview stuff and done it, I could've beaten NowDoThis.

Jakob Lodwick launched it something like a week or two ago.

Cool? I write a list into Terminal and just follow that.

Exactly. Todo lists are just flat files :) I use ~/TODO for this purpose.

I discovered this by trying to write my own TODO manager:

http://git.jrock.us/?p=doqueue.git;a=summary

After working on that for a while, I realized I just wanted a flat file :) Implementing the file was much faster than writing an entire application, I might add.

When I get some interest in working on this again, though, I will make a FUSE filesystem that gets the information from the web and makes a TODO file for you. Then you can use the web interface when you're at a different computer (or you want to share TODOs with a friend), and the file otherwise. It might be interesting.

I'd always used paper & pencil, but the big problem with that was that my TODO list would get long & intimidating and I'd rather just ignore it. This keeps things manageable for me.

Also, I find it useful for those long-term backburnered tasks that I work on when I've got nothing else to do, but aren't immediately relevant to whatever I'm doing now. If I tried keeping those by paper & pencil, I'd end up losing the list by the time I got around to them.

I use a mind map tool called FreeMind for many things, one of them being keeping a todo list.

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