I approximately "invented" this after reading tons of productivity blogs and stuff.<p>I keep an org-mode file with 3 headings:<p><pre><code> * week range
** day-in-week
*** major topic
</code></pre>
And then I log what I did in the day. It is unbelievable how much you <i>actually</i> do some days when you feel like you did nothing but yammer and poke small problems.<p>edit: I've done this for about 47 weeks now. I keep a single file, synced out to a backedup location periodically. Anything worth writing about goes in here. My hope is that any professional conversation and act is captured here, ready for later searching and review.<p>I also keep a high-level TODO list at the top of the file when I'm pondering priorities and direction.
Anti-Todo List... otherwise known as "Lab Notebook"? This process is commonplace (and often required!) in academic settings. I love looking through mine and reliving the discovery process!
I've started writing myself "work receipts" - slips of paper that are dated and recount what I did for whom. I stick them in my backpack and then transfer them to FreshBooks. I find it very satisfying to have a pile of small squares of paper that represent real progress and are worth <i>real money</i> at the end of the day.<p>I've considered using a logbook, something bound so that it's neater, but I have to say I just love having a single small slip of paper sitting there beside my computer as I work. It is a testament to focus - it is a physical talisman representative of singular focus.<p>It works really, really well.
Funny, I sort of did this yesterday and it worked. In the act of planning my current week, I took a look at my log of time spent last week. The log was much more detailed than usual because I was auditing my time pretty carefully. After adding it all up and listing how I spent my time and what I got done, I had quite a list, much to my surprise - and just the neurochemical reward suggested in the post.
I liked Marc's "Structured Procrastination" a lot better.<p><a href="http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-personal-productivity" rel="nofollow">http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-pers...</a>
>The more productive you are, the more likely you are to get down on yourself and think at the end of the day, “I wasn’t very productive today.”<p>Wow, that sounds like an incredibly unjustified relationship, with only the superficial support of its counter-intuitive nature. In my experience, the opposite happens, the more you do in a day, the more you recognize and remember that you accomplished that day, and consequentially, feel that you accomplished. Which by the way, is exactly what the anti-todo list is, except with a mental list of remembered accomplishments, rather than manually recorded ones. The latter act should only be necessary if an individual has a particular problem recognizing what they've accomplished in a day; I don't think this is some deep insight or universal principle.
We use iDoneThis and really like it. We tend to use it when the team is distributed. When we're all located in the same place, usage wanes (but it's cheap enough not to worry about). But during times that people are working remotely, it's the best way to keep everyone on the same page.
Nice product! Just started using it and realized it's far different than my Yammer and/or Wunderlist. This is especially good for writing simple daily recaps which I can then compress into weekly update to my investors.<p>It would be awesome if you could notice trends in things I write such as People, Companies, etc so I can search by popular tags.
Here's something I've been doing for the past 3 years ago since I've gone indie.<p>I have a text file which I keep open in vim, called "wip" which I have loose sections of content. Let's call them section 1, section 2 and section 3.<p>I list TODOs which I want to accomplish recently in section 3. When I start working on an item, I might expand on it and add additional sub-items, indented. I mark items I'm working on with a "@" and when they are finished, with a "<i>". Sometimes I'm on several items at the same time (too many is not a good sign), I will add a few @@@@ to the start of a line I'm </i>really* on, no biggie.<p>I mentally group my items into projects/types of activities like Project1, Project2. Each time I start working on Project1, I add a new line which says Project1 and the start time to section 2. When I stop working with Project1, I add the end time to that line.<p>Every morning, I run a little script which scans through section 2 in "wip" and extract out the time I spent on each project and inserts that at the bottom of section 2. I then copy section 2 and section 3 of "wip" into a new file giving yesterday's date as the filename. Then I go into "wip" and remove all the items marked with "<i>" as well as section 2 and then copy section 1 into section 3 as well. Section 3 contains things that I want to do daily, such as stretch myself in the morning or to manually check if a specific service is up (enough till I automate them or build a habit out of it).<p>A great side-effect — the files that are created everyday becomes my work log. I can run scripts to generate how much time I've spent on a specific project or how much time I've work in a given year.<p>My wip file looks like:<p>section 1 - template TODOs<p>section 2 - projects and their start-end time<p>section 3 - TODOs (each like might start with a @ or </i> and might be indented to various levels, seldom more than 2-3 levels). I don't keep the entire project here.
This idea is similar to a pet project I did a looong time ago while learning C#. It's still up at <a href="http://getmicromanager.com/" rel="nofollow">http://getmicromanager.com/</a> but honestly I'm not sure if it still works with the current version of .NET (it was written on .NET 1.1).
Productivity Level measured when going to sleep:<p><i>Overworked</i> - "I still haven't done XYZ..." (fall asleep and work in the dreams as well)<p><i>Great</i> - "I did so much today!"<p><i>Rhythmic</i> - "Everything went as per schedule"<p><i>Bored</i> - "Today was probably same as yesterday"<p><i>Lazy</i> - "What did I do today?"<p><i>Loafer</i> - " What is today?"
Happy user of idonethis here. Love it. My only complaint is that gmail now guesses my idonethis email instead of my gmail when I try to send myself a reminder to do something. Which might represent some weird pseudo-AI insight...
I do something like that in Trello, which is to retrospectively create spontaneous tasks and drag them straight to Done. (It's more satisfying to drag them across than just create them in the Done pile.)
You can be even more productive by not making any (Anti-)ToDo lists, thereby reducing management overhead and the time spent figuring out how to use, using and reviewing todo list techniques.
Started doing something similar on a private twitter account which follows no one, and no one follows it. Once I do something, I tweet. Benefits: Using twitter as a platform, keep description in 140 chars, search, timestamp etc.<p>However, I violated the first rule of using the organization tool i.e. <i>Trust your tool</i>. Yet another post on hackernews and I got distracted into trying Trello, and what not for a promise of increased productivity.
Shameless plug for a stupid little web-app I wrote for exactly this purpose... years ago. It was my first foray into Django, and it's open-source:<p><a href="http://finisht.com" rel="nofollow">http://finisht.com</a>
<a href="http://github.com/nicksergeant/finisht" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/nicksergeant/finisht</a>
I find Mark Forster's FV (Final Version) to be a great synthesis of structured procrastination as well as a way of creating the feeling that I got stuff done. Plus it's so minimalistic.<p><a href="http://markforster.squarespace.com/" rel="nofollow">http://markforster.squarespace.com/</a>
Can't you just have a regular todo list where you check off or cross out items when you're done with them? Doesn't every single todo list app/program/notepad already do this?
A friend of mine actually does this. He's an MS hire. No wonder he figured it out long ago :)<p><a href="http://coderuns.co.cc/" rel="nofollow">http://coderuns.co.cc/</a>
wutdo: <a href="http://sprunge.us/OhOS" rel="nofollow">http://sprunge.us/OhOS</a>
donewut: <a href="http://sprunge.us/OiAL" rel="nofollow">http://sprunge.us/OiAL</a><p>Two little scripts I just whipped up that'll help you record the things you do throughout the day. I'm definitely going to try to use these as much as possible, it's kind of like a personal micro-blog.