Maniac Mornings in the Month of May

I would like to join but I don’t see step 1, step 2, step 3 etc…

I have mostly 2 monitors and I’m okay to work with the terminal.

@bcool, did you see the notes here on how to setup the screenshots, etc?

1 Like

@whackedspinach yes.

Collecting the screenshots through option 1 or 2 is possible for me I think. After that (commands for terminal) are too “unknown territory” for me. So I would be stuck with screenshots, but I want the full package: music + video.

Idea: I share a dropbox directory and someone else creates video / sound?

@bcool

If you can provide a dropbox directory with images and a sound file you want to use, I’ll give it a shot.

3 Likes

To at least get a silent video, Zeitraffer is what I’m using now. It has a pretty simple interface; I guess the downside is that it took a while to run, but it works. Then you just have to add music. I used iMovie for music to add the soundtrack, which there should be a lot of tutorials for.

2 Likes

I hereby tentatively indicate an intention to sort of mostly do this, with writing… I did two hours of writing yesterday (technically, by the clock, “today”, but yesterday for me) and two hours of writing today, but there are several days in May during which I simply don’t want to prioritize work.

I’m toying with the idea of working ahead to earn those days off, in proper Beeminder style, versus just accepting the fact that my video will be a little shorter than y’all’s.

My goal is mostly to try out a more flexible and creative approach to “writing time” – instead of going to a cabin in the woods for three weeks without a phone, can I clear away distractions to turn all the long bus rides of my regular life into useful time? You will have an answer in video from on June 1.

1 Like

I’ve used this before for all my of my timelapses, and found it a lot faster despite the fact that I know how to do video editing.

And @aaronpk made a little app that will do the screenshots AND give you the clock that’s easy to download if you’re on a mac. https://github.com/aaronpk/Maniac-Clock/releases

2 Likes

I’m planning to do work on research and writing for two solid hours for at least the first two weeks of May. For the two weeks after that, I’ll be traveling, so I’ll do what I can but I won’t commit. I’m on a Windows machine, so I’ve found things for the screenshots and camera, but I may or may not find time to find a program to stitch them together at the end.

1 Like

(I’m repeating myself from the daily beemail and we’re also planning to rush out a blog post about this today!)

Bee (@bee) and I have now completed the first 2 days of Maniac “Mornings” in Month of May. We call the 2-hour chunks of time our Maniac Morsels. Aaron Parecki (@aaronpk) is actually publishing his as he goes if you want a taste of the mania:

https://aaronparecki.com/2017/05/01/12/

Yesterday I worked on a Beeminder + Project Euler integration (attn @insti!) and today I worked on properly importing all the ancient UVIs from Twitter to beeminder.com/changelog (hosted on my new favorite toy, Glitch). Bee’s working on replacing our hideous API docs with something pretty.

These are not the most pressing things but we thought we’d pick something fun and/or relaxing for our maniac time.

PS: It’s totally not too late to dive in with us! Here are the rules:

  1. Mornings are great but you should pick a 2-hour chunk of time when you’re most awake. Any time before midnight. (If it’s after midnight then it counts as morning of the next day.)
  2. You just need 60 total hours in the month so you get one freebie day. If you haven’t started yet, that would be yesterday!

Hmm, now I’m excited about properly packaging up the hodgepodge of scripts and tools into something non-nerds can use and also adding Beeminder integration so you can hard-commit to some amount of maniac time per week indefinitely instead of resorting to elaborate publicity stunts to get yourself to do it.

PPS: The prize for actually doing this (or helping other people do it – thank you @whackedspinach and @oulfis!) is… Beeminder stickers. Also glory.

1 Like

I’m in. Starting right now once I figure out the camera but will typically be doing my two hours between about 1 PM - 3 PM. I’ll be working on an important project for my business, which I’m calling my “Master Audit File Template” in a program called CaseWare. I guess you could say it involves a small amount of programming. Cheers and good luck to everyone!

2 Likes

Hi guys

Thanks for sharing your experiences with this technique, just starting today my beeminder experience.

Right now I am setting up everything to start my own maniac mornings trying to finish my Master’s thesis, but I didn’t find any Windows programs equivalent to your OS widgets, if you can recommend me please at least a decent always on clock I would be happy(I downloaded-installed-uninstalled a lot of clock garbage apps) or maybe a good capture screen-camera app.

Thanks.

2 Likes

Sup guys! I’m joining in late – first night is tonight. I’ll be working on an overdue paper just for tonight. Starting tomorrow, I’ll figure out a series of coding projects to work on. And I might just get my homepage rolling again – we’ll see.

I have an overall direction I want these projects to take me: getting up a good coding portfolio --with an emphasis on iOS, Swift, and JS-- so I can find and take up remote work. I have never managed to get together a decent portfolio before. (If you have any suggestions, feel free to message me directly!)

My schedule is slightly different day-to-day. But I am aiming for 60 hours by midnight May 31!

2 Likes

Hey, the Electron Maniac Clock shows “Sun May 0” today. Any idea what might cause the date error?

EDIT:
In index.html, this line:

  document.getElementById('day').innerText = days[today.getDay()]+", "+months[today.getMonth()]+" "+today.getDay();

Should be replaced with:

  document.getElementById('day').innerText = days[today.getDay()]+", "+months[today.getMonth()]+" "+today.getDate();
3 Likes

Thanks @whackedspinach! I turned it into a pull request for @aaronpk

2 Likes

Here’s my timelapse!

Thanks to @aaronpkhttp://100.aaronparecki.com – for the soundtrack!

Btw, I accidentally used the original Maniac Clock with the bug some days so it seems to jump around but is in fact in order, 2 hours every day from May 1 to May 30!

2 Likes

I did more days than I skipped, and definitely spent more time writing than I would have done without Maniac May, but will need a bit of time for video post-processing! I’ll have something up here before June 7.

1 Like

ok… I finally compiled the timelapse. It’s really hard to remember all the sensitive things that I have to keep out of view. There were like two days in there where I had a diff sitting in the corner of one terminal showing production keys for something. GRR.

3 Likes

Hah, more than a month later, I do, at last, have a timelapse video!

Looking back at this, I am still pleased with how much I managed to get done, but I think I gave myself a little too much mental credit for the days where I “worked really hard” to carve out writing time (i.e., writing on the bus/train, some of those late nights after a long day of other work)… I didn’t realise I took twelve “well-earned days off”, and I bet I could have found ways to write for two of three of those without really sacrificing things that mattered to me.

The screen-recording continues to be an incredibly motivating tool for focus, for me. And I particularly liked the way that a two-hour stretch felt, shoved into the margins of my life on the road – it was a small enough stretch of time that I didn’t feel overwhelmed by the idea of finding time to do it, but a large enough stretch of time that once I sat down to work I could get some real thinking done.

I’d be keen to try something like this again, especially during a month that I’m not living out of a suitcase!

4 Likes

@oulfis, thanks for sharing this with us. I liked how you managed to carve the quality writing time into traveling etc. This is always a huge problem for me - I can (kinda) propel myself to a level of productivity at my normal routine but once I am somewhere other than at my working table, I get stuck. I will try to use your example as an inspiration, as I really ought to be doing some writing this summer semester even though I am technically away from the university.

1 Like

Fantastic! Though you could have worn a GoPro to the wedding, I bet you could have gotten some great time lapse of the dance floor :smiley:

1 Like