project management

Akrasia
1

What is your experience with beeminder and project management in the MBA sense?

I’d like to make my 5 year plan happen. So it should be under formal project management, enforced by beeminder.

What autodata integration support is out there? People with experience, can you tell your story, please? Beeminder founders, how do you do software project management?

(Scott Adams points out that projects are a recipe for failure in self development land. My ways around that limitation: I’ll copy a lot of ideas from (agile) software development to stage-gate re-planning. Project scope is building systems, habits, automatisms, mentorships – in short, things that economize willpower.)

2 Likes
2

I’m not sure how exactly one defines “project management in the MBA sense”, but i’ve found in the past year that the best way to successfully manage a project is through continuous, daily progress. The Beeminder folks for example have their goal of daily delivering (e.g. focus on output) something (fix or feature) visible to their users.

What is progress is something you need to determine by trial and error. You will often find that choosing a metric of success changes how do you things. This might mean that it turns out satisfying the metric isn’t really moving you forward your goal. A solution is to have multiple metrics (for example, both time spent reading and number of pages read), trying to corner the result.

As for automation, there is
a) RescueTime (measuring input = how much time you spend on your project)
b) Trello & Habitica (measuring output = number of to-dos finished)
c) everything you can connect via IFTTT and Zapier

2 Likes
3

Seconded! Your 5-year plan isn’t going to survive contact with reality (or changing priorities), so the thing to beemind is whether you’re making progress that’s consistent with the current version of the plan, not setting out the milestones in advance or anything.

For bursts of specific focus, you could try applying the hard-soon method.

I’d also add a meta-goal to make sure that you’re keeping the plan and related tasks current. e.g. beemind conducting a weekly review.

2 Likes
4

I think Complice + Beeminder is exactly what you need, although it might
not be exactly what you’re asking for :slight_smile:

2 Likes
5

Thank you everybody for your insights. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t ask how to hook up MS Project with Beeminder, or a similarily narrow question.

Apolyton, I’ll steal your idea: to simultaneously test multiple metrics of daily progress.

Philip, my milestones include re-planning. (At work, I’d probably also have to come up with a way to quanitfy how much re-planning …)

Adamwolf, great you gave it a name. I’ve been using Beeminder increasingly like that - goals that say 1 point for honest effort.

4 Likes