Initially I kept my ToDo in a text file and I'd just delete things when I did them. Nice clean list of what's remaining, but after a few weeks I felt AWFUL, the list grew faster than it shrank, and it felt like I never made headway.
Now I don't delete things. I put a little + at the start of the line for anything I did, a - for anything I decided not to do, and a / for anything I did partially but needs to be revisited. I write a new list each day, carrying-forward items that I feel are worth revisiting.
And what's huge is that I can scroll down and see previous lists, years worth, and read all the stuff I did. It's enormous compared to the remaining todos, and apparently that's psychologically important.
I've been doing a work-oriented "what I did today" list for ~25 years, and really like it. Originally it started because I needed to bill for my time, but when I went to my current job (over a decade ago) I kept doing it. In my iteration, it is a concise sentence about each thing I've worked on that day. At the end of the month I go back through and review it and write up a "Wins" list.
It's surprisingly useful; I share it with my coworkers and we often consult it if we notice something has been behaving differently starting at a certain date to see what was going on then.
I keep it in a simple text file, running in a tmux on a server, so I have connections to it from my laptop and my desktop. It's currently 19,509 lines.
Well, I haven't lost them in over a decade... So I have a pretty good track record. The system it's hosted on has had at least one, maybe two hardware failures over that time. A system isn't done being set up until it has backups up and running.
> It's surprisingly useful; I share it with my coworkers and we often consult it if we notice something has been behaving differently starting at a certain date to see what was going on then.
Not for everything, but things that I do have commit logs for it's a needle in a haystack problem of which repo the commit logs would be in. At work we have ~120 repos, at least a dozen of which I'm likely to have been in over a couple weeks. Other things are likely a ticket rather than a commit (running OS updates, switching to a new haproxy might be a commit from days or weeks earlier when done in staging but the commit log wouldn't show when it was activated in production).
It's very powerful having just a few sentences I can read about what was going on specifically on a given day.
> Maybe the most obvious con: a tada list forces you to have an accomplishment each day so you can write it down, and this added stress to my day.
Maybe it makes more sense to have a box per week instead of per day. Or even per month!
At least in my own life I've noticed that focusing on daily output tends to be demoralizing, whereas if I look back over the months I am often amazed by what has come out of me.
I can also imagine that you might need to change your definition of what an accomplishment is. I tend to think of it as something that has a measurable output, but difficult-to-measure progress towards an outcome is also something (despite what product managers might think)
I think weekly or bi-weekly is best since you're aligning yourself with the time scale that most workplaces tend to operate on.
I've actually had good conversations with nervous junior devs to help them see the value of their contributions this way. There's a lot less reason to stress out if you're working steadily and see that things are going according to plan.
I know devs can be focused on the literal tasks at hand, but the "10k ft view" is not just a cheesy thing people say and it should not be ignored. It gives perspective.
I have had many accomplishments, and I've forgotten them all. When it comes to interviewing, I've forgotten most things or can't do easy recall that I can't even speak to them. I have no desire to change though; as long as I made those accomplishments is all that matters, it's kind of like giving gifts - I don't bother remembering what I did for whom.
I have a spreadsheet where I keep track of excellent work that others do, things that surprised and delighted me, or difficult situations they handled with professionalism. Makes me smile just thinking of it. It will be useful during an upcoming review.
I kind of use my calendar to do this ... if I'm frazzled at the end of the week, it helps to see what I actually did as frazzle brain will have forgotten
that's a nice practice that I do from time to time. Like when my inner self critic starts being too critical ("I'm not doing enough" kind of stuff), or doing things gets harder for some reason, I incorporate the routine of writing done things at the end of the day, and when the situation normalizes I stop doing it. It's usually like a month or two
It kind of sounds like there is a part of you that is abusive and you are rewarding it with this practice, giving it what it wants. I would personally lean in the opposite direction!
What I mean is, you're reinforcing a mechanism of conditional self-approval. A Sisyphean endeavor by definition!
Giving yourself credit for what you've done is fine, but if it comes from a feeling of insufficiency, then at best it's symptom relief that helps you avoid the underlying issue.
I do agree that it's "bad" to need a reason to justify your existence and happiness, but that's totally separate from evaluating your performance at work. I think you're assuming too much.
nah that's actually a practice I learned while being in CBT therapy. I mean, it's not that you reward some bad part of yourself, it's that sometimes you stop noticing all the things you do, like get used to all the stuff and start devaluing it. And by journaling and explicitly stating them you make it clear for yourself that you, in fact, do a lot of things throughout the day. Like "I did nothing today except working and doing house chores, nothing too much, I do it almost everyday" but doing such things and doing it good still requires a lot of effort
I managed to do this for most of the first half of the year, and it was very rewarding indeed. Somehow it sort of dropped off, and something was lost, so I think definitely something to pick up again this coming year.
I think I see where you're coming from but, from personal experience, AI has not much to do with one's interest in learning how to paint or draw. I've picked up drawing again this year not only as a passion but it's something I can create with my own hands. It doesn't matter that AI can do it and can do it much better, it's that I can do it. For fun, for relaxing, for meditating, ...
In today's day and age I definitely would. That's my perspective though and we don't have to have the same expectations from the tada list.
"Today I meditated through drawing" is an accomplishment to me worth my personal tada list. Might not be for everyone though, I can understand that.
Someone else was making a good point that a daily tada list might be unnecessary pressure and a weekly one feels more balanced.
To add more color though, I personally would expect this to compound into an overall tada list similar to OP. At the end of the year I could amount to a lot of drawings and notice improvements over time. But again, AI has nothing to do with it.
If we give up on personal accomplishments because "AI can do it" we would go nowhere. But that's my 2c.
Multiplying two 100 digit numbers requires the application of a fixed algorithm which can be learned. If you don't know the algorithm it's challenging, if you do it's not.
But that is not true of painting. Painting requires choosing a subject (for its subjective qualities) and then translating what you _want_ to capture about that subject and how you want to represent it in paint on some medium. You will also be applying a theory of mind and perception about the audience of the painting since you probably want it to appeal to them. All of these choices and the skill to combine them into a painting that achieves what you want is vastly more challenging than multiplication.
Multiplication is akin to paint by numbers.
EDIT: it actually strikes me that this conversation gets to the crux of why AI art is so polarizing. It depends whether you view art predominantly as being about the thing that is created or the process of creation.
Initially I kept my ToDo in a text file and I'd just delete things when I did them. Nice clean list of what's remaining, but after a few weeks I felt AWFUL, the list grew faster than it shrank, and it felt like I never made headway.
Now I don't delete things. I put a little + at the start of the line for anything I did, a - for anything I decided not to do, and a / for anything I did partially but needs to be revisited. I write a new list each day, carrying-forward items that I feel are worth revisiting.
And what's huge is that I can scroll down and see previous lists, years worth, and read all the stuff I did. It's enormous compared to the remaining todos, and apparently that's psychologically important.
I've been doing a work-oriented "what I did today" list for ~25 years, and really like it. Originally it started because I needed to bill for my time, but when I went to my current job (over a decade ago) I kept doing it. In my iteration, it is a concise sentence about each thing I've worked on that day. At the end of the month I go back through and review it and write up a "Wins" list.
It's surprisingly useful; I share it with my coworkers and we often consult it if we notice something has been behaving differently starting at a certain date to see what was going on then.
I keep it in a simple text file, running in a tmux on a server, so I have connections to it from my laptop and my desktop. It's currently 19,509 lines.
I’m praying you have backups. That last paragraph gives me anxiety
Well, I haven't lost them in over a decade... So I have a pretty good track record. The system it's hosted on has had at least one, maybe two hardware failures over that time. A system isn't done being set up until it has backups up and running.
...and tested.
I only had to see one machine "that was being backed up" unable to restore from backup. Wasn't mine, but was enough to teach me to test them.
> It's surprisingly useful; I share it with my coworkers and we often consult it if we notice something has been behaving differently starting at a certain date to see what was going on then.
Don't you have commit logs for this??
Not for everything, but things that I do have commit logs for it's a needle in a haystack problem of which repo the commit logs would be in. At work we have ~120 repos, at least a dozen of which I'm likely to have been in over a couple weeks. Other things are likely a ticket rather than a commit (running OS updates, switching to a new haproxy might be a commit from days or weeks earlier when done in staging but the commit log wouldn't show when it was activated in production).
It's very powerful having just a few sentences I can read about what was going on specifically on a given day.
> Maybe the most obvious con: a tada list forces you to have an accomplishment each day so you can write it down, and this added stress to my day.
Maybe it makes more sense to have a box per week instead of per day. Or even per month!
At least in my own life I've noticed that focusing on daily output tends to be demoralizing, whereas if I look back over the months I am often amazed by what has come out of me.
I can also imagine that you might need to change your definition of what an accomplishment is. I tend to think of it as something that has a measurable output, but difficult-to-measure progress towards an outcome is also something (despite what product managers might think)
I think weekly or bi-weekly is best since you're aligning yourself with the time scale that most workplaces tend to operate on.
I've actually had good conversations with nervous junior devs to help them see the value of their contributions this way. There's a lot less reason to stress out if you're working steadily and see that things are going according to plan.
I know devs can be focused on the literal tasks at hand, but the "10k ft view" is not just a cheesy thing people say and it should not be ignored. It gives perspective.
I have had many accomplishments, and I've forgotten them all. When it comes to interviewing, I've forgotten most things or can't do easy recall that I can't even speak to them. I have no desire to change though; as long as I made those accomplishments is all that matters, it's kind of like giving gifts - I don't bother remembering what I did for whom.
> tada list
Ah I thought (and hoped) it was gonna be a list of epiphanies, interesting learnings, new sweetness. You know… taDA!
I have a spreadsheet where I keep track of excellent work that others do, things that surprised and delighted me, or difficult situations they handled with professionalism. Makes me smile just thinking of it. It will be useful during an upcoming review.
Love this, I’ll definitely give it a try for a while. I did something similar a while back but on a monthly basis
I kind of use my calendar to do this ... if I'm frazzled at the end of the week, it helps to see what I actually did as frazzle brain will have forgotten
Lovely paintings!
that's a nice practice that I do from time to time. Like when my inner self critic starts being too critical ("I'm not doing enough" kind of stuff), or doing things gets harder for some reason, I incorporate the routine of writing done things at the end of the day, and when the situation normalizes I stop doing it. It's usually like a month or two
It kind of sounds like there is a part of you that is abusive and you are rewarding it with this practice, giving it what it wants. I would personally lean in the opposite direction!
Shamefully bad advice. Journaling is common to aid the desribed issue.
What I mean is, you're reinforcing a mechanism of conditional self-approval. A Sisyphean endeavor by definition!
Giving yourself credit for what you've done is fine, but if it comes from a feeling of insufficiency, then at best it's symptom relief that helps you avoid the underlying issue.
I do agree that it's "bad" to need a reason to justify your existence and happiness, but that's totally separate from evaluating your performance at work. I think you're assuming too much.
nah that's actually a practice I learned while being in CBT therapy. I mean, it's not that you reward some bad part of yourself, it's that sometimes you stop noticing all the things you do, like get used to all the stuff and start devaluing it. And by journaling and explicitly stating them you make it clear for yourself that you, in fact, do a lot of things throughout the day. Like "I did nothing today except working and doing house chores, nothing too much, I do it almost everyday" but doing such things and doing it good still requires a lot of effort
I managed to do this for most of the first half of the year, and it was very rewarding indeed. Somehow it sort of dropped off, and something was lost, so I think definitely something to pick up again this coming year.
I am impressed that in this age of AI they still feel the drive to make watercolor paintings, to be honest.
Sadly, at this point I would not even call it a challenge, but I would consider it more a pastime.
I think I see where you're coming from but, from personal experience, AI has not much to do with one's interest in learning how to paint or draw. I've picked up drawing again this year not only as a passion but it's something I can create with my own hands. It doesn't matter that AI can do it and can do it much better, it's that I can do it. For fun, for relaxing, for meditating, ...
> For fun, for relaxing, for meditating, ...
Sure, but we're talking about a "tada list" here.
Would you write about relaxing and meditation on __your__ tada list?
In today's day and age I definitely would. That's my perspective though and we don't have to have the same expectations from the tada list.
"Today I meditated through drawing" is an accomplishment to me worth my personal tada list. Might not be for everyone though, I can understand that.
Someone else was making a good point that a daily tada list might be unnecessary pressure and a weekly one feels more balanced.
To add more color though, I personally would expect this to compound into an overall tada list similar to OP. At the end of the year I could amount to a lot of drawings and notice improvements over time. But again, AI has nothing to do with it.
If we give up on personal accomplishments because "AI can do it" we would go nowhere. But that's my 2c.
Why not? If one of your goals is to try to relax and/or meditate more, then I feel it’s a valid list entry.
It’s all a matter of perspective and personal goals, no?
Because if you read the conclusion, they say that having this list gives them more pressure.
How does the existence of AI make watercolor painting less of a challenge for a human?
Would you call multiplying two 100-decimal numbers a challenge?
I wouldn't because I would just use libgmp or sympy. And I would certainly not write about it on my "tada list" (if I had one).
Anyway, that's how you should read that comment.
Multiplying two 100 digit numbers requires the application of a fixed algorithm which can be learned. If you don't know the algorithm it's challenging, if you do it's not.
But that is not true of painting. Painting requires choosing a subject (for its subjective qualities) and then translating what you _want_ to capture about that subject and how you want to represent it in paint on some medium. You will also be applying a theory of mind and perception about the audience of the painting since you probably want it to appeal to them. All of these choices and the skill to combine them into a painting that achieves what you want is vastly more challenging than multiplication.
Multiplication is akin to paint by numbers.
EDIT: it actually strikes me that this conversation gets to the crux of why AI art is so polarizing. It depends whether you view art predominantly as being about the thing that is created or the process of creation.
It obviously doesn't, as otherwise the existence of other humans that are more skilled than you would have the same effect.
Ai can't do anything like a good water color painting. Also they're physical, like any painting, they look different in real life
Why is that impressive?