Unstructured projects are hard. It usually boils down to putting in the time and trusting the process.
I found this article helpful. Task Tension: A Productivity System For Creators
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I used to use Complice’s Beeminder integration for this as well as Toggl. I felt a bit too constrained so I stopped all that, but maybe it’ll give you ideas 
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Those work for me to get started, but I can spend 100+ hours on a personal project and have 0 deliverables. The amount of things I want to do/dig into, and my insecurity over not having done them, expand to fill the time alotted
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My issue with complice is that everything is a bit too fresh every day. I usually just click through my reviews too, which doesn’t help. But what do you review when you haven’t gotten anything important done? Note to self: that is a bs excuse to not do it
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The thing is: coming up with a system is itself and unstructured project. What technologies to use? Any?
How can we compare two systems we haven’t implemented yet?
Whenever I have doubts about the current system, it becomes yet again another unstructured task
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Reviews are indeed hard to do; you need to put effort into it to produce a valuable outcome. The goal of reviews should be to produce a list of potential changes that you can make IMO. In my experience, this requires:
- undistracted time
- willingness to make changes
- actually reading what you did every day for the last week/month/quarter (I often find out that my view of time is super distorted!)
- gradually investing into those changes (for me, my mind underestimates the reward of “meta changes” – changing medication, starting a new beeminder goal – all the stuff that will really matter to support other goals)
So, that’s hard focused time. The kind that you would put into your craft, not the kind that you spend watching an anime episode. Beeminder can help for the “applying changes I’ve decided for myself” part.
(That’s just from my experience though; maybe others don’t need as much investment to get benefits from this practice)
Done is better than nothing!
Analysis paralysis doesn’t get you anywhere. On the other hand, a simple “reflect” goal that forces you to think hard about the mistakes you made today and potential solutions, for 10mn, and write it in a journal is already probably going to get you dramatical changes.
My point is: be pragmatic. What is the end result for review practices for you specifically? For me, it’s both tracking what I do with my life and producing life changes way sooner than I would without reviewing and journaling. With this lens, writing becomes easier. Sometimes I stray away from this and end up summing up my week; but what I really want is to “rewrite myself”
Haha, I feel this. I’ve wasted tons of customer money early in my career because of this vice.
The solution seems to be to decide to do stuff that brings value first. The book that made me change is The Lean Startup and I can find a lot of this (perhaps even better) in Shape Up that I’m currently reading. I highly recommend the latter since it gives you strategies to cope with this specific problem.
Another way to tell it: if you are producing software, deliver from day 1. Don’t build thousands of lines of codes for software with tons of features but won’t really work because it wasn’t really focused on the right stuff.
For instance, on a personnal project, I’ve decided to onboard a customer. This will allow me to focus on what’s really important and not get lost into what my mind wants to do. Of course, there is nothing wrong in loosing yourself in rabbit holes, but it must be done with moderation (I’m literally in a position where I’m on the fence about building my own Chromium version; but the pragmatism that I’ve built made me able to avoid this. On the other hand, I’m missing out on valuable experience – but when does learning stops and actually building something useful starts? For me, building something useful seemed to never start. A life of learning is the dream, but a life where you have no creation that stands by itself is not desirable either. At least for me.)
ANOTHER example is making music. Making short loops and demos is fine, but the skill set required to make an entire track is different. So you have to force yourself to put out full tracks instead of 20s samples on SoundCloud; even if they sound super bad at first because you don’t know anything about song structures
(I’m roasting myself a lot in this message, sorry to hijack your thread 
)
Just my 2cents! I hope that I motivated you to make a change somewhere, like you did for me a few months ago 
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It’s silly because I do have a couples goal for 10 minutes or less: beetuning & journal review.
The thing is that I really want something like a 2x a week goal, and not 10 minutes a day. Can metaminding bridge this gap now?
ANOTHER example is making music. Making short loops and demos is fine, but the skill set required to make an entire track is different. So you have to force yourself to put out full tracks instead of 20s samples on SoundCloud; even if they sound super bad at first because you don’t know anything about song structures
You have no idea how much I relate to this. My life is a bunch of unfinished songs that I know, in essence, are quite good. But they are not what I imagine them to be - a song with no flaws. I mean the production is terrible because I can’t do that, but I have friends who can do the production.
I’m literally in a position where I’m on the fence about building my own Chromium version; but the pragmatism that I’ve built made me able to avoid this.
That’s awesome that you’ve gotten there. I know I can get there too. I know after I go through it enough times, I’ll develop that habit instead of being stuck here:
For me, building something useful seemed to never start. A life of learning is the dream, but a life where you have no creation that stands by itself is not desirable either
I know this because used to be much more reserved and socially anxious, until a bit over a year ago I went on a solo trip abroad and forced myself to stay in hostels with a bunch of people.
It was an excruciating first 3-4 days, then I noticed it getting better by the start of week 2. After that I stopped thinking about it all.
Much like my personal project, I knew I wasn’t, like, bad at socializing. I’ve always been well-liked by people.
There was just this sense that I was well-liked so-far, and that there was this one thing or another that was wrong, and I would come across poorly. This one thing (maybe knowing how to salsa dance or being good at a sport) could be fixed conceivably quickly, and therefore I had to fix it…but I don’t have to right now.
Thus, anxiety delayed, dopamine awarded to myself for thinking about doing something that would make my anxiety go away.
(I’m roasting myself a lot in this message, sorry to hijack your thread
Please, don’t apologize for hijacking my thread! Your thought process is relatable to me, don’t hesitate to ramble
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I used taskratchet this week to get me over the hump (the very hard initial part of starting a thing) for the set of 2nd language flashcards. Now its only a matter of repeating w/ beeminder. kinda helped that the penalty was 90$ but i still pushed it to last minute which shows how resistant I was and how much it just wasnt going to get done if i wasnt destined to find taskratchet. what probably also helped was losing 30bucks the first time i failed it 
still hurts
now i have focusmate integrated w/ beeminder so the next steps are reviewing flashcards on my focusmate sessions till i have memorized them.
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Lol, we might be twin brothers at this point! I relate to your answer a lot too. Or we might all be autistic on this forum 
. In any case, no biggie, we’re going to make it!!
To sum it up: we know how to be good specifically but have trouble with the eagle view or on the long term?
I do this using auto-ratchet and binary goals for certain stuff that must be done periodically. You can use metaminding with the cap1 aggregation method to create a binary goal that is 1 when you spent at least 1 minute on the task. You can also do 10 minutes each time you enter red? And get a buffer?
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True, I usually try to avoid manual goals whenever possible. Manual time-related or binary goals especially.
One-minute goals also don’t work for me. If I’m super avoidant, I’ll do it for one minute and stop, no problem
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Although, I will say it does make it more likely to set up a better goal, eventually, so they’re not entirely a waste of time
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Another way to tell it: if you are producing software, deliver from day 1. Don’t build thousands of lines of codes for software with tons of features but won’t really work because it wasn’t really focused on the right stuff.
I took your advice and literally did this! I deployed the minimum viable Streamlit app that I could and shared it with some people I know will be able to use it! It feels great.
I wanted to add all these other features. I still do! But I can just…add them after releasing it.
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Congrats! This motivates me to ship stuff haha
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Caught myself getting into a loop of spending time on something without pushing through the blocker today, hopefully I can get the next bit done.
Trying not to lose momentum - don’t know quite how to beemind this yet.
But setting a higher number of complice stakes each morning has been productive - usually, I can knock those things out much quicker.
Now, I could be a bit more deliberate about how I set those up.
I have a bunch of goals set up with morning deadlines, somewhat staggered. (11am, 11:30, 12pm). Stakes should be the last thing - after I’ve reviewed my journal entries/notes.
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Ok, just pushed some new features to my streamlit app. I also had somebody reach out to me to use one of the charts in a blog post - good stuff IMO
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I need to do this, I forgot I had asked about it:
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Trying to figure this out, but I think I can accomplish the same goal with IFTTT?
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I tried experiment with using toggl tags instead of projects, since I found some stuff like refresh-time or journalreview` didn’t have a clear demarcation. But this ended up with me doing a little of both and tagging the entire time slot. So I’m switching back to a project based system for a new goal to journal
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This has been a good call so far. I’ve separated some out into:
- mind dump: just write stream of consciousness
- morning reflection: answer some structured questions I’ve got written down in obsidian
- values writing: why am I doing what I’m doing today. Should probably up this a bit
New intervention is using beescheduler to increase those commitments on Mondays, specifically.
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I think there is a disconnect between people who look at their graphs and me, who doesn’t. I just edge skate. I wonder if the edge-skating is due, in part, to not looking at the graphs
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