Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret | Hacker News Reader

Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret

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83 pointsparallel37 comments

Awhile back, HN users rguzman, peng, and I (met on HN and) built http://idonethis.com based on the Seinfeld productivity secret and launched it on HN. We got some great feedback and kept moving forward with it.

We recently crossed 200,000 things done (http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/09/22/idonethis-announces-it...) and a bunch of people have told us that it's helped them tremendously.

Great stuff! but, why have you not used big oversized X's? These blue check marks dont give enough satisfation as big red X's. Test it :)

This might be the 10th post I've seen on Hacker News about Seinfeld's calendar.

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=seinfeld+ca...

Fair comment. I'll search first in future.

I'm glad you posted, I had never seen it before and found it to be very valuable. Thank you.

I have also seen this a number of times before, but it is worth re-posting since a lot of people miss stories and the audience here has grown.

If in doubt, submit, the upvotes will judge

Fair point, but I and assume others had missed htme (hence the upvotes).

http://touchwoodsoftware.com/yctrends.html#seinfeld%20calend...

Two other interesting ones from there if anyone fancies a trip back in time?

[I]t is the consistent daily action that builds extraordinary outcomes... Skipping one day makes it easier to skip the next.

A recent New Yorker article quotes singer Tony Bennett on his practice regimen as saying "The first day you don't do the scales, you know. The second day, the musicians know. The third day, the audience knows."

I've heard this saying but in the context of martial arts. "The first day you don't practice, you know. The second day, your coach knows. Third day, your competitors know" I wonder what about origin of this saying.

This concept has actually been turned into a pretty decent website.

http://dontbreakthechain.com/

Nice. I knew about the technique, but didn't know there was a website dedicated to it. Has anyone made an app dedicated to this?

Not sure, I used the website maybe 3 years ago to quit smoking though.

If you mean a mobile app, there's a Don't Break The Chain[1] iPhone app that I use on/off. It's free with a premium version with no ads at $5.

There's apparently an Android app out there[2] as well.

[1] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dont-break-the-chain!/id31356...

[2] https://market.android.com/details?id=com.geolinx.android.do...

> "Don't Break The Chain[1] iPhone app that I use on/off"

You may be unclear on the concept! :)

Definitely, it's an area I need to work on significantly ;)

Yep, Unbroken Chain ( http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/unbroken-chain/id415158247?mt... )

I released it in January just thought it would be interesting to see the usage stats, I haven't checked in forever!

Goals Added: 17,642 Chains Added: 247,104

Kind of cool to see actual usage from someone other than me!

# of goals added is pretty obvious, but # of chains added probably bears a little explanation: Every day you do something is a chain - I probably should have called it a link in the stats system.

"Streaks" for iOS: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/streaks-motivational-calendar...

There's also a very nice Sinatra app specific to open source repos on Github:

http://calendaraboutnothing.com/ (app)

https://github.com/technoweenie/seinfeld (source)

This technique works best if, for your particular goals, there exists an x such that "Doing x every day will help me meet my goals" is true. If you're a stand-up comedian, x is fairly clear. For many people (including me), it's not obvious that such an x exists. (It's still probably worth looking for it, though.)

There is one really important thing that needs to be brought-up: Being consistent is important. But it is more important to choose the right things to be consistent at.

Some of us are really consistent at watching our favorite sitcom. But how, exactly, does that help our businesses? Couldn't those precious minutes be spent doing something to help advance our businesses?

Here's us committing to an average of one User-Visible Improvement to our startup per day:

http://beeminder.com/meta/uvi

It's not quite the same as the Seinfeld calendar strategy in that we can in fact break the chain, we're just forced to maintain 1/day as an average.

(Anyone reading this thread who wants to try something like that, use the invite code SEINFELD and I'll get you hooked up.)

That's an awesome idea. My main goals are: 1. One Thing - do one thing to advance my startup 2. Exercise

Suggestion: Swap the two. Exercise first.

Well. There is yet another minimalist implementation of this - http://sein-cal.co.cc/ that works very well for "I (don't) want to do X" and check for each successful day.

In principle, it would be exactly like a full-year calendar on the wall.

Edit - This was our weekend hack some time ago. Feedback on the application is welcome.

Is there a way to abstract this into a service that has an api ?

You could setup your daily goals and the Tenacity API ( a name just invented http://declancostello.com/tenacity-api/ ) could be updated by different clients.

Tenacity could check an RSS feed to see if you've blogged every day ( like yahoo pipes )

It could parse an email sent to a custom address ( like idonethis )

Flashcard Software like anki could have a plugin that would access the API

twitter hastags, github checkins etc.

It would provide you with a dashboard of all the things you care enough about to be doing every day.

I'm not sure I'd like it to email me like facebook when I've missed some goals, but it might be a productive option.

I don't have the mojo to develop anything like this but would it interest other developers?

I wrote a free weight tracking web app based on this idea. You track your weight daily. It gives you some simple analytics on your weight over time. It's a small thing, but tracking your weight every day helps it drop over time and keep you accountable to your diet.

I'm 285 days in a row and I've lost right at 40 lbs. It works.

http://thediet.org/

I've always found this productivity idea weak. I might set out 1 hour a day to accomplish a task, but if my heart isn't in it, it's just an hour of low-quality work--I may as well have not done it at all or waited for an optimal time.

However, I do see how this could be useful for tasks which aren't creative or need much thinking. Say for example, brushing teeth after lunch.

But at least you've done something. When you see it's not going well, you might stop early but it's still better than skipping it, because the next day, when you are ready, the stuff you were doing is one-day-fresh, not two-days-fresh. If you put it off until "an optimal time" you'll both make it easier to keep putting off and spend more time catching up to where you had previously been.

The grad student version of this advice, which I heard from several people and more or less followed, was "once you start your thesis, write every day, at least a sentence." It's good advice.

A diary app implements this: https://github.com/dev1/kotivox/raw/master/kotivox-screen-1....

This is why HN needs improvements. Jerry Seinfelds productivity secret has been leaked on HN plenty of times. How come no one flags this?

This can't be reposted too much. This secret changed my life.

Hmmm, can't be that great of a system. The guy never made it as a comedian and works in computers or something.

Maybe he realized that he didn't want to be a comic. It would be a sad world indeed if we were all measured against goals we created when we were twenty.

Seinfeld was a successful comic. The end goal for a lot of comedians is to parlay it into an acting career, which Seinfeld did. Forbes estimates his net worth at $800 million. If that isn't a successful comedic career, than I'm not sure what is.

"woosh"

As much as I like most aspects of Hacker News, this place is easily in the running for most humorless site on the entire Internet.

Actually that's one of the things I like about HN. So easy for a community site to degenerate into a handful of long-running in-jokes, applied to the topic of the day.

Welcome to the Asperger's ward...

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