
How Jeff Atwood works - bussetta
http://lifehacker.com/5950386/im-jeff-atwood-founder-of-stack-exchange-and-this-is-how-i-work
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columbo

    		Do not under any circumstances keep to-do lists or use to-do apps. 
    		If you can't remember the most important things you need to do every 
    		day, you should work on that. And if you can't remember something 
    		you "need" to do, it's probably not worth doing in the 
    		first place.
    

Wow. This is terrible advice. Sure it may work for some people who only have a
small handful of tasks but for others who have a set of hectic projects (fix
this, rewrite that, call her, email him) or even life goals (write a book,
make a video game, learn to speak russian, teach daughter how to fight a bear)
todo lists and goalsetting is incredibly important.

~~~
frou_dh
Atwood seems to have a penchant for stating half-baked opinions very
forcefully.

Todo systems are not just for important things. They're also for mundane
things. A few examples from my own:

\- Get the share of that £xxx bill from a housemate.

\- Every Tuesday and Friday: Move trash kerbside.

\- At least weekly: Process any unopened postal mail I have sitting around.

\- At least monthly: Check my online bank and scan for any unexpected
transactions.

Why on earth shouldn't things like these be stored and optionally teed up by a
system?

~~~
jsdalton
The counterargument is that all of these tasks are better suited for a
calendar rather than an open-ended to-do list.

~~~
kamaal
A calendar is basically a meta to-do list with reminders and deadlines.

Most people using calendars for this purpose don't realize that they are
actually using to-do lists.

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onosendai
_No operating system I know of, no matter how many gigabytes of memory you
have, can remember more than one copied item at a time. That's ridiculous!_

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the functionality he's talking about, but hasn't
KDE's Klipper (<http://userbase.kde.org/Klipper>) and GNOME's Glipper
(<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glipper>) solved this problem long ago? I'm
sure there are other clipboard managers for other OS'es as well.

~~~
mikeevans
I think he means built-in to the OS. He probably uses something like the ones
you mentioned, as he claims that the "only must-have app I need is a global
clipboard history application."

~~~
larsberg
Yeah, I had a similar reaction. I had been using the dual Office/VS clipboard
ring since back in ~2002, but I forgot that it was only for applications with
Office integration and not OS-wide.

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rohamg
I'm the biggest advocate for plowing through every day like a tank but even I
would be incredibly handicapped without a proper framework. My system is
designed to keep all tasks and tactics out of my head so I can focus on
strategy, vision, and execution. Folks who think they don't need a system are
lucky, foolish, not all that ambitious, or have others worrying about the big
picture of their lives/ companies/ industries.

~~~
rohamg
Ok- I would add "focused" to that list. If you're a 20 year old working on
your first startup 100 hours a week then you may not need a to-do list for
life (although you should certainly use one for your development!). For the
rest of us, there is way too much that can possibly be done every day - and
some framework for prioritization / tracking becomes essential.

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objclxt
Did the title for the submission not have enough room, or is there some other
reason "Cofounder", which is what the original LifeHacker title reads, got
replaced with "founder" here?

~~~
bostonpete
The link itself includes "founder", not "cofounder". Maybe he later updated
the title...

~~~
lucisferre
I really hate the prolific use of the term cofounder around here. Everyone who
"cofounds" a business is a "founder". Otherwise you're the "sole founder" if
you honestly feel like making a big deal about it. A founder is a founder,
whether there is one or many.

~~~
MattSayar
Exactly, nobody calls America's Founding Fathers the "Cofounding Fathers" of
the nation.

~~~
corin_
But you also wouldn't call any one of them "the founder of the nation", it
works because the inclusion of "fathers" already states that they are a group.

~~~
MattSayar
Of course you wouldn't say THE founder, you'd say A founder

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DominikR
Interesting how polarizing Jeff Atwoods views about to-do lists are.

I believe that to-do lists are just a symptom of a different problem:

Working on something you do not really care about. (sadly, most people have to
do this)

If you cared about the product or whatever you are creating, and the
communication between you and your customer/boss/team is good, your goals
would be aligned (in most cases), thus making it very hard to miss a really
important task.

Probably it would have been better for Jeff to give the advice to try working
on stuff you really care about.

~~~
acconrad
> If you cared about the product or whatever you are creating, and the
> communication between you and your customer/boss/team is good, your goals
> would be aligned (in most cases), thus making it very hard to miss a really
> important task.

Ugh, this irks me to no end. What if you really care about your product, but
there are so many exciting things for you to work on that you simply can't
keep track of them all? It's like he's got blinders on to people who don't
have the best memory.

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helper-method
I was really disappointed after reading the article. It was far too short, and
contained no useful information. Actually, what is the point of such articles
anyhow?

~~~
EnderMB
To push their ads. These articles are perfect for sites like these and sites
like LifeHacker probably make a tidy sum of money from the Reddit/HN and
previously Digg crowd.

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pinchyfingers
Why doesn't he at least give a nod to Trello when asked about to-do lists?
Give your co-founder a plug!

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ojbyrne
Where's the bias lighting? <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/11/bias-
lighting.html>

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dysoco
Great, now I'm excited about that "awesome next big thing".

~~~
corford
Can't find the post now (think it was on HN or Ars Technica a few months back)
but I'm fairly certain "the next big thing" Jeff's working on is re-imagining
how a web forum should work.

I hope he cracks it - vbulletin and friends need to die!

~~~
malyk
Jeff posted a question in the Programmers Symposium of the Ars Technica forum
asking how the members there felt about forum software.

Personally, I think the ars forum works perfectly. I can't stand newsgroups,
for instance...i'd be in heaven if everything were vbulletin.

But maybe Jeff has something neat up his sleave!

~~~
TillE
Hopefully. I've been looking into options for fostering a small community
around a new videogame, and I hate them all. Traditional forum software is
much too heavy (registration, navigation), Vanilla is just strange, a
subreddit is an inappropriate format (voting and the lack of long-term threads
are a turnoff), and there's really not much else.

It's something that's long overdue for a shakeup.

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bashzor
Disappointingly uninteresting answers :(

~~~
somesaba
Agreed

