
Ask HN: How do you manage your life? - zabana
Do you have a process for managing your finances, health, fitness, learning new skills etc ?
======
hoopladler
I've suffered under a complete allergy to any form of organization for my
whole life, having almost no native abillity to form even the most basic
habits, remember things, or plan ahead. By habits, I even mean things like
smoking (which I did on and off, liked it, but found it challenging to keep
cigarettes on my person). By memory problems, I mean I am completely incapable
of remembering stuff like the pin number on my credit card, my phone number,
and so on.

So, to cover these deficiencies, I've resorted to technology. I use:

\- Taskwarrior. It's a good todo list, fairly straightforward. I organize
everything onto different projects.

\- A python script that tells me what I'm supposed to be doing at any given
time (it even asks taskwarrior if it has any todo items that are planned for
the timeslot). It notifies me, and plays a sound every time I'm supposed to be
doing something else, like eating lunch.

-Emacs org-mode. Just started with this. It's pretty fun, and covers some of the gaps that the other two don't fill.

I'm not the biggest fan of smartphones, since I inevitably either lose the
charger, forget to charge it, or lose the phone - but I'm hoping that a cheap,
long-battery life one will come out at some point.

With taskwarrior, I basically add items to any number of lists for different
projects, like 'household', or 'work', or 'hobby', or 'learning german', and
so on. Then I set out in my timetable how many hours per week I'm going to
devote to each project. Then my computer tells me what I'm supposed to be
doing at a given time. This is nice, because it means you can do something
like devote 1hr per week to something like learning about vector calculus, and
you don't forget you meant to do it, then feel guilty after a month has
passed.

~~~
prrls
I don't think I suffer from a disorder like you seem to have, but I, too,
can't keep any habit, regardless of my motivation. The most annoying 'habit'
that I can't keep is sleeping. I never fall asleep and wake up at the same
times. Trying too hard to setup a sleeping schedule only worsen the issue.

This is kind of frustrating when you see all those self-improvement books and
people saying they 'achieve success' by twisting their will and forming the
right habits.

I also use taskwarrior, this is really a wonderful to-do list manager. Along
with Khal[0] to plan things (even if I can't stick to what I schedule, this is
still stimulating to layout tasks in a calendar), it gives enough confidence
to keep the head high and not sink under all the work that awaits me everyday.

The last sentence sum it up for me, these tools just help me to accumulate
confidence and get things going.

[0]: [https://github.com/pimutils/khal](https://github.com/pimutils/khal)

------
grawprog
One day at a time.

