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Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

This "don't break the chain" approach has worked extremely well for me, particularly during busy periods of high stress. I first learned about it in my college writing classes, where you're supposed to write something, anything, meaningless jibberish even, every single morning. Recently I read about Seinfeld using this approach to great successs. Every day he works on material, and puts a big, fat, "X" on the calendar.

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An important change that I made, compared with these techniques, is that I require myself to write meaningful code. It's certainly much harder to do that but as a result I find myself developing good time management skills. Knowing that I have to be mentally "present" for my work forces myself to schedule and plan my days better, resulting in higher quality work all around!

When did you find yourself getting most of your coding done? Mornings? I'd love to try something like this, but it will probably mean writing code at like 6 am..

Personally I like to do my side coding project in the evenings. I find that if I do it in the morning it's too "all consuming" (I'll end up working on it to the exclusion of my main work.) For me morning/early afternoon is my prime coding time so it feels right to devote those hours to my job. I concede that the weekday side project code won't be the most amazing ever, but it's something and it's moving me forward.

How do you define meaningful code? I feel like I'd quickly run out of approachable ideas without reinventing some wheel. I'm also not to the point that I can write Node/Python/other packages and have them be useful or unique.

Pick something in your domain and write something useful.

"This "don't break the chain" approach has worked extremely well for me".

I believe you are certainly not the only one. Changing "tasks" into habits greatly helps to achieve your goals. I recently read an excellent book about habits called "The Power of Habit" from Charles Duhigg. I sincerely recommend reading it.

And for the OP, thanks for posting and sharing your ideas. I can relate to many of the things mentioned in the post. Especially for the anxiety part. It does not matter what you are coding, as long as you code something. I've solved some problem's from Project Euler and after each exercise I've felt a sense of accomplishment and restful.

Seinfeld did not invent this "don't break the chain" method and even called it "dumb" [1].

1. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ujvrg/jerry_seinfeld_...

Parent said that Seinfeld used it. That reddit post is Seinfeld declining credir for an idea which he considers a non-idea. He called it a "dumb non-idea" in the sense of "runjake's running program: put your shoes on evey day, so you are ready to go for a run when you have time." It's a "dumb non-idea" because it's so basic, but it's still something some people do.

When the so called Seinfeld technique really takes off, you forget to even mark the calender, then get the gratifying experience of going back and marking a big block of days after the fact.

I guess that's the threshold of the internalised habit.

In the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron she talks about "morning pages". Every morning write 3 pages of anything. Works for me and it is a nice daily meditation exercise.

There's actually a site called http://dontbreakthechain.com/ which serves as a bit of motivation for getting personal development work done. I've had issues with remembering to check the site everyday even if the work gets done, but perhaps making it the homepage would help.

I use Lift for that (https://lift.do/). Works great for me

+1. I've been using Joe's Goals [1] to track my daily goals since I learned about it on Life Hacker years ago. Can't recommend enough.

[1] http://www.joesgoals.com/index.cfm

HabitRPG works much the same way, tracking activities to form habits.

https://habitrpg.com/

I use something called Lift, but HabitRPG seems more appealing with its game theme.

Does "dont break the chain" work equally well if you split your goals out by week as by day?

For my personal situation I can't guarantee I would get time to do coding every evening but 2 session a week seems feasible.

Works for me for jogging, but I don't run every day.

I run every two days. The chain is still a chain, but it's just a slight more distributed one.

I printed a calendar and stuck it on my wall. Then I just mark it off with a big circle when I finish a run, or a cross when I fail.

But what if you don't have some skill to work on? /:

Then you could make finding what you want to do with yourself a daily practice. Could be meditating, or a period of isolation -- walk in the woods, time in quite reflection...

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