I have been juggling an idea that is close to this -- making a personal radio that cycles through favourite playlists from youtube. Interested in seeing how this is implemented.
PS: on a second thought - artist/track name optional display would be good -- I liked a track but now i dont know what it was :)
Big fan for a very long time and still appreciate his work. His domain changed to follow his life choices.[1]
Later in life, I realize that too much reliance on tools is not something I’m fond of. DSri’s tools (printables) are good and I usually do it when I’m helping out team members, and others looking for guardrails for their productivity. For me now, the tools are too tool-focused and I no longer need them. I have printed and used them for product groups, and even a few times for my daughter’s projects with her friends.
These look great for people who like to plan their tasks. I found that when I plan my tasks and plan my day and plan my time bubbles, I spend so much time planning that I don't have time left for doing. This planner explicitly encourages having only three planned tasks for the day. What's wrong with just doing those tasks without writing them down?
I ask in full seriousness, as someone struggling decades with how to plan and then do personal and professional tasks. I ask as a question, not as a criticism.
Writing down is a sign-post for you to stay in your lane.
Otherwise, you were working on a task and something fail in your terminal; by evening you realize you spent the last 4 hours fixing your entire dotfiles, fixing environment, shell, and what-not to move easily between machines smoothly (you also realized you are not moving machines anytime soon).
The Frog to Eat that you wrote down yesterday for today, and the other tasks that has to be done today is there for you to see - bright, and clear - helps you steer back when your minds starts to wander, phone distracts, and HN is tempting for more comments.
> Writing down is a sign-post for you to stay in your lane.
I think I get it now. When I'm developing a feature, I'll first write a commented git commit message. I'll refer back to it every so often to ensure that whatever that commit message says, that's what I'm doing. Everything else that I want to do should go into an Org mode file that is not committed.
> #git commit -m "Foo the bar"
Is what I'm debugging now directly related to fooing the bar? If not, write it down and get back to fooing the bar.
As we have come this far, here is another POV for writing things down, when it comes to “NO” or “Not Now!” items that get streamed in our lives.
You are working on something, but a cool/new/interesting thing pops into your brain or someone pings/calls/texts to tell you about something; your default is to do that first lest you forget about it. No, Don’t Do That. Instead, write it down so you don’t forget, but no need to worry for now. Empathetically, if that item was from someone (even in person), seeing you writing it down suggests to the person that you care about it and will definitely come back to it.
At the end of your day, during your break, or after your task-at-hand is complete, visit and “decide” when/how you want to do it, whether you need to do it, or if it has solved on its own in the time you have ignored.
I do use Project Managers, Calendars, Apple Notes/Obsidian, Phone Apps, etc., but if I use that as “defaults” (not on physical pen/paper), I might get tempted to finish something else along with it. That note-taking in the same format as my primary work will likely tempt me to do more and make it look like work or productivity.
With a physical pen/paper, it is a clean, minimal, simple UX that never distracts. That is how it is. I’m still learning and experimenting, but so far I write as usual in a notebook and kinda bullet-journal[1] backwards (mine is simplified), starting from the last page of the same notebook for tasks and to-dos. That one notebook is the one that I carry around.
Neat! I think I've done a similar thing in Jujutsu VCS, which enables you to start a new commit and add a message (description) to it well before you make any actual changes. As you described, it's a really useful way of keeping on track.
I feel like the entire productivity thing is broscience. There's no study for it (the 'three items' idea), it just feels like the right thing to do.
Quite often the people making these tools are not particularly productive themselves. And nobody I know has ever stuck to one productivity system for very long outside of "todo list text file"
The idea is not about One Perfect/Right solution/tool. Explore them and modify them to how you react and which ones work for you. Use multiple tools (plain-text as default, another App with the team, Notebooks for yourself), etc. For someone struggling with too many options, perhaps a little nudge to some direction is what they needed. At the end of the day, It Depends. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/it-depends/
Do it while you’re doing something else. You can plan when you have your morning coffee, or while you commute or walk isn’t Apple voice memos and then copy the transcript and paste it into ChatGPT and have it make you a todo list from that messy memo
It shouldn’t take you any additional time if you don’t want it to.
Not OP but I used to be totally into productivity hacks and being on top of things, goal setting, habit tracking, everything.
I stopped when I realized I could just... Not, and still thrive in my life. Simplify my systems.
I set myself a goal to workout every morning. Sometimes I miss it because my infant daughter decides to wake up at 4am instead of 5am. I give myself grace.
We eat largely the same meals every day. Some cooked protein, some cooked veggies, and a grain (rice or pasta).
And I just have a regular routine at work where I work on work and also do explorative education for myself during breaks. Look into different frameworks, patterns, etc.
I didn't need to meticulously plan out every second of my day, month, year. I just needed systems that made things predictable. Sometimes I drop the ball and it's fine. I get back on the horse when I can.
Yahoo Mail had (has?) a feature that allowed you to set an alternative email address while keeping your original email address intact.
you could be first_last@yahoo.com but also have rando_waldo@yahoo.com or ymail.com receive emails in same mailbox. And you could choose the "From" address form a drop-down when sending outbound emails or replies.
Not trying to counter your post but this reminded me of this --
"Have you ever noticed that everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, and everyone who drives faster than you is a maniac?"
Though I agree there are some folks who resist change while others who seem to jump into new things without enough care about hard lessons of the past. And sometimes you are the one trying to keep things sane and mitigate risks while majority of your team seem to treat you as a joyless guy who always sees risks and drawbacks.
With the aggressive push of LLMs and Generative AI ..i am expecting a lot of OCR features to become "smarter" by default, namely go beyond mechanical OCR and start inserting hallucinations and sematically/contextually "more correct" information in OCR output
It's not hard to imagine some powerful LLMs being able to undo some light redactions that are deducible based on context
interesting -- but i am not sure one would want to build an entire presentation with a lot of 3D effects and animations
IMO this would be a good tool to have among many -- to use judiciously only when needed. -- Maybe if we could somehow integrate this capability into existing tools (not sure how).
(I think MS Powerpoint has some 3D objects and animations -- but I dont see it used much in business. I used it once for a fancy presentation and it worked fine. It does support "Morph" transition so you can copy a slide 1it ha 3D object and move / scale / rotate it in 3D ... and powerpoint will interpolate it for you. you can also animate the objects - like apply a 3D rotation.)
I have been juggling an idea that is close to this -- making a personal radio that cycles through favourite playlists from youtube. Interested in seeing how this is implemented.
PS: on a second thought - artist/track name optional display would be good -- I liked a track but now i dont know what it was :)
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