I've found that methods like this don't actually help me avoid procrastinating. The key for me is to remove the psychological barriers to starting a particular task.
I think Getting Things Done has a good approach by dedicating time to figuring out what the Next Actions are for any given task / project. The idea is that it is way easier to start on a task if what's listed is a concrete action. For example, you might add an item to your Inbox like:
"Add better search for project X".
You might avoid a task like this indefinitely. With GTD, you take regular time out of your day (it's how I start every morning), and you take your Inbox items like above and figure out what the literal next step should be to achieve the goal. So the above item might become:
"Search google for adding search to a django project"
There is something about taking the mental task of figuring out what the Next Actions are, and putting it into its own process that removes a lot of the hurdles for me.
> The key for me is to remove the psychological barriers to starting a particular task.
Agreed. And one solution is, as you say, writing down a concrete action. The task is suddenly something you can hold in your head, and easily completely mentally.
Procrastination, at least for me, happens whenever I can't see an end to the task, usually because I haven't properly defined the task. As soon as there is a well defined set of steps to take, it suddenly becomes much easier to not procrastinate.
Procrastination is my brain's way of telling me it's not happy with the plan I've made, and that the goals I've set need to be re-written to be more achievable (in particular, more SMART [1]).
That said, projects like this are great, and definitely help with enumerating and planning!
For me, it's less that figuring out the Next Action removes hurdles, in that it gains momentum. Now I want to do the next action, and of course that action exposes additional ones...
I really love the idea. I use pomodoro timing for my work, but I always have to decide on the spot what I want to do for that 25 minutes. If I'm working on one task, that's easy, but after I'm at a good stopping point with that task it's hard. I like the idea of mindfully making the todo list every day or week.
Three pieces of feedback:
1) I have to click "done" after editing anything and if I forget and click on something else it undoes my edit. I'd prefer edits to be saved automatically.
2) I think the defaults should be 6 hours or 8 hours available for each weekday.
3) It wasn't immediately clear to me how to proceed after planning. I edited the url to go back to the root and then saw the timing functionality. Maybe something that helps first time users find the "Today" button top-left.
"Give breaks" is broken as implemented. As somebody who uses pomodoro: a task is 4 hours or 8 pomodoro sessions; it's an estimate that includes my breaks. Don't make me do the math and don't make me have weird 2 number estimates for no reason.
e.g. If a plan is about 4 hours I need to enter 4 hours - 8 x 5 breaks or 3 hours and 20 minutes. Estimates of 3h20m seem really exact when it's really how you represent "about 4 hours" in your app.
If I start the plan and realize it's really going to be more like 6 hours I have to do that all over again and change two numbers again.
Other issues:
1) Same as the OC. e.g. changed all the times on the hours per day but didn't click any of the dones, 7 changes lost. UX principle: don't require confirmation on easy to correct changes.
2) No keyboard navigation.
3) I have to double or triple click all the time. e.g. change name of "untitled plan" is 3 clicks. Change number of hours in a plan 2 clicks
And I second the issue with clicking Done - I wanted to set up a work week, and clicked Monday's time slot, started typing (keystrokes didn't go anywhere), clicked the hour time entry, then could enter 8 hours. Repeated for each work day, then clicked Done for Friday, and saw that it lost all the other day entries, and I had to go back through the process of setting up times on M-Th...
I don't see how this differs from a normal calender in terms of killing procrastination? The problem I have is not that I haven't planned correctly, it's that I do not follow my plan.
> I haven't planned correctly, it's that I do not follow my plan.
I use Any.do (which I like the UX off a great deal) with Reminders for this, at first it felt like it was nagging the hell out of me since I was snoozing so much stuff but then a strange thing happened, I stopped snoozing stuff and started doing it so I could kill the task if it was a quick task.
On the UX side something like that has to be so effortless for me to use (ymmv on what effortless is) that it becomes a habit otherwise I just forget to enter stuff as it occurs to me.
What I'd really like is an unobtrusive bluetooth like headset with natural language processing (think miniaturized persistent Alexa) that didn't need to sync through my phone but could sync with it periodically.
"Hal, task: remind me to buy cat litter, tomorrow morning, 10am, remind me again at 1pm"
"Hal, remind me, Monday morning, 10am, task: check I answered email from FooClient"
Then at 10am Monday morning audibly "You have a task: check you answered email from FooClient" "I've done that"
"Hal: Snooze all notifications for 2 hours" (for when you don't want to be disturbed) and have it cue up anything in that period.
"Hal: while I was snoozing, you missed the following tasks" etc.
Most of the pain of using a phone for task management is that typing stuff in is still annoying, on the technology side we are pretty much in that direction already I've even considered buying an Echo and seeing how far I can get with it's API.
I think you're talking at cross purposes. I sounds like your main problem is that you knew what to do, but forgot to do it. This is different from knowing what to do, but doing something else instead (an issue I am quite familiar with myself, my sympathies to GP).
Todo list apps work great for remembering what to do, but don't solve GP's problem one bit.
There's integrated time tracking. If you don't follow through in a day (say you only did 30 minutes of an hour allocated), you can reschedule very easily and down to the minute.
Procrastination is a psychological problem, not a planning problem. Seems like you solve a problem in a wrong way, or you promote your product in a wrong direction.
You can say it is a combination of kanban, time tracker, project management or even habitica...blahblahblah, but it is just combination of functions not solving any procrastination problem at all.
Yes it is, but some planning tools can help you to break out of it as long as you don't end up using your planning as procrastination.
I've known a few people that were chronic procrastinators I even had some issues with that myself, I eventually outgrew it by using a bit of additional organization but without "religious" adherence to any method.
For some a more strict method which they follow daily works, for others I've seen it can make things worse they use 2-3 planners/organizers and just spend the time they would normally be wasting on procrastination by procrastinating via planning.
>Procrastination is a psychological problem, not a planning problem.
This is one of those "circular cause and consequence" things.. our psychological state is a function with side effects changing the events in our lives, which are themselves functions with side effects changing our psychological state.
In other words, psychological problems can also be viewed as symptoms or consequences of something happening in the lives we live in the physical world which are shaped by the way we plan them.
If it is indeed circular, the question becomes not which one came first but which one is easiest to change and what you can make of both. This is akin to postponing the chicken/egg question, making poached eggs and chicken thighs for lunch, and thinking about the question while you eat.
Not only that, but I find scheduling too much kills the pleasure of doing things on a whim as well as feeding a growing angst when you keep on postponing stuff.
Maybe we should stop trying to live in the future so desperately and just enjoy the present moment.
[...] and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it.
I started scheduling "every minute of my life" after reading Deep Work, and I must say it works wonders.
> I find scheduling too much kills the pleasure of doing things on a whim as well as feeding a growing angst when you keep on postponing stuff.
I felt that way too, but then I discovered the problem is in the way I understood calendars. I thought they're meant to be used as commitment devices. I don't think that anymore. Instead, I treat my calendar as an optimistic planning tool. I schedule the way I think it would be best to spend my time, then dynamically adjust it as the day goes. Calendar entries are suggestions, defaults, "do this unless you have a better thing to do". This approach - which is pretty much 100% function of my attitude - gives me benefits of scheduling, while leaving me free to ignore the calendar at any time I like, to do something completely on a whim.
In that way you'd never be able to get any real work done... Planning is absolutely fundamental in keeping track of long-term tasks. Even just planning for a week helps a lot.
> The problem I have is not that I haven't planned correctly, it's that I do not follow my plan.
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if you don't follow the plan, you haven't planned correctly. a good plan has built-in mechanisms to make you follow it. OP's project tries to give you one potential mechanism for that.
>> if you don't follow the plan, you haven't planned correctly.
Nope. Procrastination is a psychological problem, not a planning problem. You can create the most perfect plan, but if you don't have the mental discipline to ignore distractions, combined with mechanisms to manage those you can't ignore, your plan will be worthless.
Sometimes, not following the plan is exactly the right thing to (not) do. Remember: you always have more information now than when you made those plans.
I like to think of plans as sane defaults - "do this, unless you have a good reason to do something else". Just having a default improves my time management significantly.
I'm training hard for algorithm contests (mostly on CodeForces.com and acm.timus.ru). It requires very intense focus without any distractions. Also, it's very energy consuming (at least for me) and can be frustrating if you get stuck.
But I have a problem with procrastination. To solve that, I agreed with myself that I will work on my algorithm stuff only when I turn on timer for 15, 30, 60 or 120 minutes. But if timer is turned on, I must work without any distractions at all (in complete silence, non-stop).
The key idea is that it's much easier to convince myself not to be distracted for specific time frame.
If it's hard for me to start working non-stop for 120 minutes, I start with 15 minute timer, after that I usually warm up and can setup timer for 30, 60 or 120 minutes with less psychological resistance.
Another key idea is that in order to start working hard, it's easier to convince myself to work hard only for 15 minutes. Then after that, you become warmed up for longer work.
I also record all my time to a journal. So I know exactly how much time I spent on algorithms last day, week or month.
I like simplicity and keep my journal in plain text.
I also wrote very simple program (C + X11 Xlib) to display histogram.
A list is made. Some items are starred. Other items might be double starred, or marked in different ways. An estimate is made for the time each item will take. Eventually, items get crossed off, or 'commented out'.
I do this all in a text file. It works great. I used to delete completed items, but I found it robbed me of a sense of accomplishment I kinda value. If I don't finish the list (which happens often), at least I know what I didn't do, and have a good idea why I decided I didn't feel like it.
Of course, now I have a folder with 12 mostly-completed lists, the last items on which I keep dodging. There are no perfect answers in the continuing battle with one's self. Honestly, this app looks pretty cool, and if I was younger and more optimistic, I'd probably give it a go. I just feel like I know myself well enough (or have accepted my many faults enough) at this point that I'm pretty sure it wouldn't get me to do much more than I already am.
> I used to delete completed items, but I found it robbed me
> of a sense of accomplishment I kinda value.
This contains the key to ending procrastination -- crafting one's psychological relationship to the intended task, and also to the pastimes one uses to procrastinate. You can't fit work that in an app, though. It's more like internal marketing, management, or propaganda than scheduling.
> There are no perfect answers in the continuing battle with one's self.
Indeed, it's not just about getting things done. It's about creating meaning through our actions.
Only we, individually, can define what's meaningful to us, and even then, that process of understanding and evolving our desires, values, purpose etc is a constant, ongoing struggle (called life).
Most 'productivity' systems and plans become out of date as soon as we learn something new. Which is always the goal anyways.
I thought that way too about deleting done tasks. I stopped doing it, and soon I've ended up with unmanageable todo lists - just too many done stuff (with notes!) to scroll through.
Now I archive done tasks once a week during weekly review. It gives me the sense of "wow, just look at how much I've done over the past week" without bloating my todo lists.
This looks interesting, but how does it deal with tasks that don't have an expected finish time?
Eg, what i like about Pomodoro is that i am not planning anything more. I simply chug away at my (hopefully micro optimized) task list, and take breaks when the Pomodoro says so.
This looks nifty, but i have no clue how long most of my tasks are going to take. Limiting them to 25m or w/e seems like it would induce more stress and uncertainty.
I assume i have the product slightly wrong. Thoughts?
I love this idea. I don't know how many weeks I have drawn out on graph paper to accomplish the same thing. Thanks for sharing it. That said, here's some cold feedback of my first 10 minutes:
First Screen
- "How much time do you think you have on an average weekday," and all days of the week are displayed.
- No indication of what to do. Decide to hold my breath and start clicking.
- Animations prior to signing up show +/- controls to alter values. But I discover I have to type numbers into these fields.
Plan Screen
- I click on the + to add a plan, and then click in the Untitled Plan field. Placeholder text remains, where I expected it to disappear on focus or keydown.
- In creating a new plan, I enter Time to Complete and Minimum Session values. I then click "give breaks" and those values are reset to default.
- Values reset to defaults when choosing a new color, as well.
- The color option should differ from previously selected colors. (Though it is nice that previously selected colors are indicated by a white dot in the palate.)
- I just realized you have to click the "done" button. Maybe the values could be stored on blur?
- It's not clear what follows creating plans. In fact, I was stopped in my tracks at this point and was about to give up until I started clicking in the day columns.
- I could swear I said I had 2hrs on each weekday in the first screen. Yet I only have 1hr allotted to each day in plan allocation mode.
- My plan minimum time does not seem to be honored when I click on the + button. Indeed, looking at the plan it has reverted to defaults. Maybe I didn't hit the "done" button when configuring this attribute? In fact, the time to complete also reverted. This is too much work for me right now.
This is great idea, just because it lets your prioritize what you actually want to do with your time and manages conflicts explicitly.
I think you may have picked the wrong title. I am sure people are going to be confused and wonder what this has to do with procrastination, and it it really is the best tool against that and how it compares with other tools etc.
I think if you changed the title to "explicitly manage constraints", or "trade-off calendar for your time", you might get more takers.
The "TimeInput_singleton" up and down arrows don't work in Firefox on Windows 10. Actually the down arrow does work if you try to find the right cursor position, but the up arrow seems to be impossible to click on.
Also, as elsherbini has mentioned, clicking "Done" on every item, e.g. if you set your daily defaults, is slightly annoying and I lost all of my values the first time I put them in because I forgot to do so before switching pages.
Also if you currently don't plan on monetization anyways why not make it open source. This way everybody benefits. The current functionalities are way too limited. The biggest problem is the limited number of plans, which makes no sense. Planning is only useful when it's divided into small chunks. Lumping everything together into a big term does nothing at all. The current way it's set up, even after I finish a small task I can't free its color up for other plans to use. What's the point if all the finished tasks prevent new tasks from being added? Then I can no longer add new tasks if I don't remove any record about my past activities first? This looks absurd.
Note that the page is completely blank when Javascript is turned off. The front page doesn't looks like it should need Javascript, it's some text and a few gifs.
I generally prefer simpler, bullet point, plain text lists. The more complex my to-do list system is, the more I actually end up procrastinating (by spending so much time focused on the list itself). I remember a story from the Frog and Toad children's book about Toad losing his list and being unable to get anything done the rest of the day because he couldn't remember if it was on the list or not.
Very minor quibble with the copy on the front page, it should read "It's likely your long-term tasks are being shunted to the side", not "shunned". Like a train, not a shame.
My issue with this method and most other methods, is that I have no good idea on how much time I need to actually allocate to each project/goal.
I work in research, when I start a project I have no really good idea on how many hours I'll have to put into it in order to complete it.
Same goes for some of my personal projects. Let's say, I want to learn Data Analysis in Python... I can't really come up with a good idea about how much time that will take me.
What I actually feel the need (as a procrastinator, which is the target of this product) is to keep tabs that I'm working on something (productively) every day.
Pomodoro method helps me a bit with this, although just as a metric, not really as a day scheduling tool as it was intended.
I would actually like to hear some thoughts about people that also struggle with this and how do they manage to stay productive (productive on their personal point of view).
Personally the only method I've ever found that reliably works for me is to have a rough idea of what I want to tackle the next day, then first thing in the morning after a good cup of coffee I open up notepad and attempt to plan out the things I need to do for the rest of the day. I try as hard as I can to break them up into as many individual tasks as possible. Then through the rest of the day I implement them.
Those first few hours in the morning are typically when I'm at my most mentally able to come up with good solutions for whatever I'm doing and the rest of the day I find it relatively easy to follow the plan.
In terms of pomodoro I use the opposite method, I don't time myself when I'm working on individual tasks from the list, instead as soon as I finish one I give myself 10 mins before starting the next.
My mind absolutely refuses to change context too quickly, it's almost as if I have to go defocus my mind on reddit or HN/youtube for 10 mins before it'll suddenly snap back to the next task.
But I'm a lifelong chronic procrastinator, I sometimes think I'm the equivalent of a runner who's trying to run a marathon in 100 meter sprints...
I'm productive enough in my own terms :) I get things done and mostly meet deadlines.
This is a really interesting time management concept I hadn't seen implemented before- Starting with "# hours needed" and "Deadline" and then working backwards to schedule individual days is a great idea. I always have way too many projects happening simultaneously with no clear conception of how long it'll actually take to accomplish everything and without a decent way to establish reasonable deadlines.
I've always been using Google Calendar for planning. Guess this could be an improved version of Google Calendar if everything goes well, and I'll definitely give it a try. Don't think this necessarily have much to do with procrastination, but rather general planning which still is absolutely essential to getting things done.
I'm not sure what the intent is for how much time per day to manage with this. When it asked me how much time I have per day, I wanted to at first say 24hrs (duh). I figured that was probably wrong (because it's asking), so I said 16 hours, since that's more my usable time window given 8 hours of sleep. This app is obviously not meant to fill 16 hours. So I think I've missed the point here. Is this for people with 9-5 jobs and set schedules to manage their "free time" with side projects? I just don't understand what the intended audience and use case is.
I like this, but a nice idea might be to add an unknown time to completion. For example I like to get myself to have at least an hour a day working on studying. So it'd be nice to just put this as 2 chunks instead of "50*5+however much I want for the weekend".
Really good idea. I have a feeling it will not work for me, here is why:
I learned that to make things work, you need to schedule them, put them on calendar. However hard this is for me, I do that. Most of the time, I have to spill over a lot of things I would think I can do in a day over 3 day period. Majority of the time, even 3 days are not enough. So it keeps me honest.
At every second, I know exactly what I need to do, and what I am avoiding to do.
It took me a while to get into that system. I suspect others have their own and it would be hard for them to get into this new one.
Having said that, I wish you best and will keep an eye.
I manage a similar workflow using Trello boards, one master board with my current projects, goals etc, another that serves as a weekly template, from which I create a copy for each week. I try to visualize what I'd like to accomplish with cards placed across the days I plan on spending time on it. A daily todo card has the number of 25 minute blocks I'd like to spend towards each.
So I see the value in this product, the challenge is being in a silo without necessarily having the resources to be as flexible and available cross-platform as Trello.
It'd be cool if it divided the day into 30 minute blocks and you could just allocate the tasks to the blocks. Like a type of paint interface, where you just color the blocks.
I'm sure it would be helpful for many people, but for me personally once I miss a scheduled event like " At 3PM practice drawing for 2 hours, then do progrmaming from 4-5pm". If I start drawing at 3:15 and finish at 4:15, everything gets messed up. Fixed scheduling just isn't for me. I'd rather have a checklist like "draw for 2 hours" and "program for 1 hour", which I can check off daily and is flexible to my schedule.
I reschedule my "time boxes" during the day, and also keep them flexible. I found having them anchored to a specific time during the day (even if I get to move them around several times) to be very helpful - if I don't do that, I often find myself thinking "oh crap, I don't have 2 hours left today to practice drawing", etc.
Great idea. Was thinking less about procrastinating and more about how it keeps ongoing projects steady. It's really buggy though.
Is there an opt-in mailing list I can sign into to get updates on it? This isn't usable for me right now but I can see it being sufficiently useable in the future.
I love.love.love. this. I'll try this out for the entire month of November, I promise. I love trying out new productivity apps and software. I like how I can easily look back and see if I've been productive.
I really don't like some of the UI so I crafted my own Stylish css script to override yours, makes it look a bit more professional, currently it looks like it's for middle-schoolers. Sorry.
The following CSS code basically does this: Less kindergarten-buttons, more minimal out-of-the-way UI, smaller headers, more space for content, full width support now stretches and adjusts to browser width, removes rounded borders for non-clickable objects.
I've tried a number of time-tracking/scheduling services, and I'll give this a shot. It has a pretty high bar to beat in terms of flexibility and user interface though compared to what I'm using right now, a pen and notebook.
Login doesn't work and fails silently if you don't accept third-party cookies by default. I had to muck around in dev tools to figure out what was wrong and sign-in.
Nice webapp and UI. (to the author) To state the obvious.. You'll see a lot more people adopt it and stick with it if you layout your vision in a few page tutorial.
Ok m saving this link so i can plan later my schedule to tackle my procrastination just going to keep watching netflix for just a couple of more minutes...
It's on the roadmap, but there would be a ton of API calls to make; one of the main features is the ease of rescheduling things. Also, the idea is you can spread your task out over a day, because it's mainly a plannable timer, so any calendar integration would just be in the "day" field.
I've been using it since I was developing it, and it's as effective as you make of it. Imagine a pomodoro timer, but you plan your pomodoros with extreme ease. It adds a lot more structure to your day too.
I've thought about it, and it's ultimately not really the idea here, because your time spent would be predetermined. If you really want to, you can use the mirror mode and hit every weekday.
Over the years I've tried many planning methods, with very low success.
I tried GTD (https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produ...) for 7 years before declaring it a failure. It does have some good ideas that I still use, but the TODO management didn't work for me. I think it'll work only for people who have fewer goals than I do. It doesn't handle large lists very well.
Some things I kept from it:
1. Filing cabinet - Instantly useful from day 1.
2. Calendars are only for hard deadlines. Don't put stuff in there that you merely want to do. I know this is the opposite of the submission here. For me, planning everything in the calendar, including things I could ignore, led to a mess. Keep it for things you really cannot ignore.
In general, any obsessive time based planning like this submission fails for me. GTD is not time based. I prefer planning my tasks for the week, not for the hour.
I like the idea behind Kanban, but I do not think it fits most of our personal lives. Very good for certain work environments, though.
Pomodoro technique: It's good, but not really for task management. It's just a good technique to stay focused. Worked for a few months until I got used to it. Now it does not keep me focused and I can easily get distracted by the web, etc.
I think it works better than GTD, and fills the gaps in it. If you do not want to buy the book, a condensed, down to Earth version is available as the 1 Minute Todo List:
Personally, I feel the book is better than the PDF at explaining the rationale behind the 1 minute todo list. Reading it was very calming. It explained all the problems I had had with GTD and similar techniques.
Basic ideas:
1. If you cannot examine your todo list inside of a minute, it is too long. So spend a lot of effort ensuring your daily todo list is not long.
2. Urgency and importance are not the same. We're hard wired for focusing on urgency, so do not try to make a TODO list purely based on importance.
3. Every week, identify everything that must be done in the next 10 days and put it on your list that you'll examine daily. Things you decide not to do in the next 10 days, keep in your "list to examine weekly".
4. Every day, multiple times of the day, look at the short list and do tasks from among them. If new tasks come in, add them, but keep the list short (no more than 20-25 items). If your list is getting too long, identify things to move to the "list to examine weekly" and get them out of the way.
5. If something needs to be done today, put it on the top of your list!
6. You'll also have "the list to examine monthly" as well as quarterly.
Very simple idea - works a bit better than GTD.
I think my biggest problem is that I need to reduce the goals in my life and focus on only a few. I have more goals than time in my life, and I keep jumping from one to the other. No task management system will work until I do this. Tough decisions need to be made!
I think Getting Things Done has a good approach by dedicating time to figuring out what the Next Actions are for any given task / project. The idea is that it is way easier to start on a task if what's listed is a concrete action. For example, you might add an item to your Inbox like:
"Add better search for project X".
You might avoid a task like this indefinitely. With GTD, you take regular time out of your day (it's how I start every morning), and you take your Inbox items like above and figure out what the literal next step should be to achieve the goal. So the above item might become:
"Search google for adding search to a django project"
There is something about taking the mental task of figuring out what the Next Actions are, and putting it into its own process that removes a lot of the hurdles for me.