Ask HN: How do you plan your personal work?
Not just projects. How do you ensure your work matters, that what you're doing next week rolls up to and expands what you are doing next year?
A concept alongside this is "small bets" with your time. I tend to make bets, and hope they pay off, and I see results.
Anyone have a really comprehensive way of doing this that doesn't create outsized overhead?
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 21.9 ms ] threadI have a todo flow in sparksnip.com and then i have todo.monthlies, todo.weeklies, todo.dailies for tracking.
Then I break down everything into extremely reasonable, managable, actionable chunks. Every day I choose a "big 3". I always have so many todos per day (which is unreasonable), but I choose a non-negotiable 3 to finish no matter what. If I finish those three, then the day is a success.
I’m glad you asked.
Here’s what works for me:
- don’t plan too far into the future, the further you do the less specific you should be
I like annual visions for each area of my life, so once a year reflect on each area and think where you’d like to be a year from now. My annual time capsule I call it, is coming up next week and I can’t wait!
- do monthly reflections
I have a google calendar reminder that links to a journal template. Here I briefly reflect once a month on what’s working and what’s not in each area
This is more tactical. Habits and things to help implement the vision
- ad hoc reflection
When struggling with something or needing to evaluate, I’ll just open a doc and type. Stream of conscious style to get it all out there.
Then read it and pluck out next steps. Sometimes this means pivoting, sometimes it’s just a deeper understanding of why the path I’m on is the right one.
Sorry for the sloppy writing here. I actually would like to write this up better when I’m not on mobile.
Hope it helps
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My "plans" typically start with a broad vision. These ideas/visions come to me in day dreams as I ponder current tech or things that are interesting to me presently. These visions of what could be are typically not very revolutionary, and mostly just what ifs. Recently I've been pondering geographically bound search engines aimed at getting people back into the real world (I think this is a product in search of customers, tbh.), or a language server and dev tools for an esoteric scripting language, or a HN clone that serves specifically to catalog AI stuff.
From a broad vision, I make a small bulleted list of what a finished MVP might look like.
After the MVP I make/stumble-into an assessment of my skills and the skills required to complete the project. In my current project -- the aforementioned HN clone -- I found that I knew almost nothing about ASPNET web projects, then I found that I knew nothing about SPA+ASPNET, then I found I knew nothing about user authentication/authorization, and so on. This step is "pay down your debt of ignorance". It's kind of grindy, but I've been enjoying learning as I go. I've restarted my coding project about 10 times as I attempt to reformulate based on some new thing I've learned.
And then wash, rinse, repeat until I check all the boxes for the MVP. Then deploy and advertise/tell people about it.
I like this approach.
It's hard to project far into the future, especially when you've not gotten started.
Set a rough target, move towards, and continually adjust as you learn more.