How do you manage / plan your life?

I also think the ideas in Extreme Ownership are useful to stay motivated.

I think the most important principle for me has been to make sure that I capture new tasks or ideas immediately. If I do that, I end up interacting with my todo list so much, that prioritization falls out kind of naturally.

[0] https://taskwarrior.org/

Before I got lucky, all my plans were essentially useless - But on 12 Jul 2017 at 12:35 PM I got very lucky and now good things keep happening to me.

Making plans and being good at something is not that useful. As Woody Allen would say "I'd rather be lucky than good."

When tomorrow rolls around, I divide my work into periods with a minor variant of the Pomodoro technique, using a tool that locks my screen every 25 minutes.

This has really helped constrain my tendency to become distracted by Interesting Things. It’s a bi-hourly opportunity to mentally review what I’ve just achieved, and consider what I’m doing in the next timeslot.

This has proved incredibly valuable over the course of a working day. Since adopting it, my productivity has been consistently improved an order-of-magnitude w.r.t. my intentions.

I’m also better hydrated.

Tech: I use an open-source knowledge graph system, Semantic Synchrony: https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/wiki It uses Neo4j, so it's fast and it scales enormously; it offers a true graph, not a tree; it offers full-text boolean search via Apache Lucene; it lets you connect public and private notes in the same graph, and lets you merge (some or all of) your graph with someone else's.

Choice: I believe in introspection and sharing, and not willpower. If I feel like I have to force myself to do something, it is because I am at war with myself. Instead I meditate, journal (using SmSn), do "knowledge gardening" of the earlier things I've journaled (using SmSn), try to talk to different kinds of friends, for different kinds of perspectives.

I studied economics, and it changed my life, and I recommend it to everybody. It's hard to make good decisions in the labor market, for example, without a deep understanding of it. But econ is not just about money; it's about constrained optimization generally, and applies to time management, reading, travel, love, literally everything we do.

It follows that if you keep your priorities straight, most of your efforts will be directed toward those priorities and won't be in vain. However, that is a neverending struggle against the desires of other people, society, and, ultimately, entropy.

Personally, I never used any pomodoro, GTDs etc., and I have been pretty successful in my personal and professional life. I think keeping your priorities straight is difficult enough and I trust that if I am successful there, everything else will fall into, more or less, the right place.

Let me add an example. Sports and physical activity have always been very important to me, in part because of my personality and in part because I believe prowess in both physical and intellectual activities make the person I aspire to be every single day. It means that, apart from once-a-year exceptions, 6 pm Mondays and Wednesdays are training time. Conflicts? I know where my priorities are and everything else will fall into place.

Then you build the tactics from there. The specifics should match your personal quirks and needs.

Doesn't work like that for me though. I'd just be unhappy if I'd constantly be setting big life goals and not reaching them when planned, or at all. I don't do much long term planning at all. I just let things happen as they come by and manage fine with just shorter term planning (e.g. 'next week I'll work on that, week after that maybe on that'). I never planned for a job or a certain hobby or a girlfriend or a house. Yet I do have all of that. A lot of it due to mere coincidence. I thought of those things, of course, but never actively took up any long term plans to steer my life into some direction. That feels too limiting for me, I like to keep possibilities open. Which leads to me now doing and liking things I couldn't even imagine doing even a couple of years ago. No idea if that's a causal effect, but I also don't really care. And by society's measures I'm succesful. Though a bit weird.

Winnowing your commitments in this way creates the space you need to learn, grow and try new things. Most of those new things will turn out not to be valuable and you'll drop them, but some may turn out to be immensely valuable. When you see people that appear to be very lucky, often they have a way of increasing their chances of discovering things they find valuable. Intentionally stopping things that fall below a certain threshold of value/importance is a great way to give yourself room to discover things that are above the threshold.

I have my own system for food tracking, TODO list management, pomodoros, chore reminders, clothing and stuff management, contact tracking, a mini-Wiki, link management, and many others. They all connect to and cross-reference each other in helpful ways. If you are a good coder and have a simple web framework, it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to build a new widget, and in principle the benefit will accrue for years.

My theory is that off-the-shelf life-logging and productivity tools don't work very well because people actually have very different lifestyles, work habits, and so on. So to actually boost productivity you need something very closely tailored to your own life.

Shouldn't your purpose have a meaning per se? You don't want to be Don Quixote.

Once you know what gives/takes energy, create a mock schedule that provides balance between the two. Then, play with the numbers to create an ideal balance.

For me, work is an energy-taker, but it's essential so I can do things that give me energy, like play games, volunteer, work out, etc. I've found that when I work 50-60 hours per week, I really just need about a solid day where I can just do things that give me energy, so Saturdays I keep free to play, hang out, and only do things that give me energy. Sundays I balance my time with things that give me energy (like watching football) and things that take energy (like chores).

That's sort of the high-level planning I do. On the micro-level, whenever I do something that gives me energy, I devote as much time to it at once, in bulk. This allows me enough time to become bored with it (if it's video games or working out), and make me _want_ to spend my energy that I've accumulated.

When doing something that takes energy, I do the pomodoro technique, where I spend 25 minutes working, 5 minutes off. I do email, get some water, stretch during that 5 minutes, and then immediately get back to work. That essentially gives me 16-20 "buckets" of time to work on my projects (8-10 hours), so I break my work out into those buckets, and plan accordingly.

I'm an accountant, so this may be different. I know some people love their work and work gives them energy, so they could have a totally different style. But I'm happy :)

It's almost so literally applicable to everything that it seems like a fundamental principle.

By gardening, I mean something like... tending lovingly to a system of interconnected complex tree-like structures.

Is personal life anything like that? Yeah, because friends and loved ones are plants with roots and offshoots, subterraneously connected to one another yet also independent life forms, dependent on light, warmth, and nutrition to stimulate their growing complexity.

Is work anything like that? Well, look at GitHub and say it isn't a garden of interdependent tree structures.

There's growth but also death and decay, and both are necessary. My little palm tree always has a couple of leaves that are dying, and for its health, I have to rip them off. Programs too need pruning—and relationships too.

Life is both long and short. Live long enough, headed in the right direction, and you'll get where you want to be. But life can also end suddenly, unexpectedly. And will some day. So be happy on the path... because ultimately, you will live your entire life on your own path... and then die. Make sure you are enjoying the journey.

If more knowledge was the answer, then all the super smart people of the world would have everything. But it's often total idiots who end up having the most fun.

But we're all idiots, nobody knows what they are doing.

All knowledge has a thread which goes back through history. For example, all this Bitcoin stuff is new and nobody knows what's going to happen with it. But the whole is made up of pieces which have a long thread of history. Each of these threads themselves contains key pieces and key people. Rather than reading that new best selling book, look at the sources and read those sources instead. Then follow the trail of sources to find the keys to the subject. Ignore all the surrounding noise.

Your brain can do maybe 4-ish hours of hard work and in maybe 1.5 hour-ish bursts. You will likely have a few times per day where your energy is high. Your day of productivity is that quiet burst in the morning. You only get one of those each day. You probably get another nice high productivity chunk in the evening. Maybe you get another in between. Make those periods your most brilliant creative periods. Take some time to play. Take some time to read from that key list you put together from the last point. Then fill remaining time with whatever.

Once you get the effort and the creative part right, then it's luck which does much of the rest. That's why idiots who create, play and put in the effort are able to have so much fun, they get lucky too.

You don't get lucky unless you fully jump in and just start trying things.

Constraints are good. Read into people who have done well with debilitating injuries. Read about people who have done well with lots of kids. If you are single and have a difficult time managing 16 hours of your day, imagine yourself as only having 4 hours per day.

Much of the problem with moving forward in the face of overwhelming information is just picking something. How many threads have you read in which someone is asking about Ruby vs Python. Months later this same person hasn't done anything because he or she still hasn't been able to make a decision. We can't move forward because we're afraid of committing. We instead might spend time on low commitment actions such as browsing news. The key is that it doesn't matter and that you should just get moving. The most important information isn't what you are looking at when you are trying to decide, but that information which comes when you are on the road. A heavy effort is a far better gain in life tokens than you lose by making the wrong decision. You will make wrong choices all the time, but you will overcome those decisions with a solid and consistent effort.

Just choose. Get moving. And have fun.

GDocs:

* Sheets for finances.

Trying notion soon!

I tried managing and bringing order to it etc but it takes a lot of work and the outcome is the same anyway.

This doesn't stop you from achieving goals which is important.

Not defining a metric for success is important. Be happy with the small steps, not the large leaps.