

Ask YC: Critique my side-project - nostrademons
http://www.whatshallidonow.net/

======
nostrademons
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.

~~~
akkartik
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.

------
jacobbijani
have you seen <http://nowdothis.com> ?

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

~~~
nostrademons
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...

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

~~~
jacobbijani
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>

~~~
nostrademons
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.

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

~~~
jrockway
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.

~~~
nostrademons
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.

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

