If you have many things to do and you are wasting time, then you should number those things from 1 to n and assign n+1 to wasting time and then use http://random.org to generate a random number between 1 and n+1 (1 and n+1 included) to decide what you should do. This adds some excitement and often works.
I thought I’d share my pick-thing-to-do-at-random app that helps somewhat. You just add things and then it shows you them at random. You can click to commit to do something for a while, or just flick to another thing if you can’t do that now. I’ve added hundreds of both timewasters and productive activities there and it’s quite cool to do this kind of lottery to determine what to do now.
Obviously it won’t work if you just keep flicking until you happen upon a favorite timewaster, nor when you have something that needs to be done now. It’s also essential to have clearly defined activities, even if it’s just “think really hard about what to do about and make that a new activity” or whatever. Tell me what you think.
http://things-be-done.appspot.com/ (google login needed for persistent storage, but you can play without logging in, data will be associated with a cookie left in your browser (and will be transferred once you do login))
i used it for a few hours then it broke, and now all it will do is give me an error dump with this last line: ’BadRequestError: cannot get more than 1000 keys in a single call”
It should work now, please test. Sorry about that problem.
I needed to change the method to pick a random entity—no easy feat in app engine, apparently. As a side effect, there might be some apparent nonuniformity in sampling when you have few todos. It will smooth out as you start/stop them and add more.
If you have many things to do and you are wasting time, then you should number those things from 1 to n and assign n+1 to wasting time and then use http://random.org to generate a random number between 1 and n+1 (1 and n+1 included) to decide what you should do. This adds some excitement and often works.
I thought I’d share my pick-thing-to-do-at-random app that helps somewhat. You just add things and then it shows you them at random. You can click to commit to do something for a while, or just flick to another thing if you can’t do that now. I’ve added hundreds of both timewasters and productive activities there and it’s quite cool to do this kind of lottery to determine what to do now.
Obviously it won’t work if you just keep flicking until you happen upon a favorite timewaster, nor when you have something that needs to be done now. It’s also essential to have clearly defined activities, even if it’s just “think really hard about what to do about and make that a new activity” or whatever. Tell me what you think.
http://things-be-done.appspot.com/ (google login needed for persistent storage, but you can play without logging in, data will be associated with a cookie left in your browser (and will be transferred once you do login))
i used it for a few hours then it broke, and now all it will do is give me an error dump with this last line: ’BadRequestError: cannot get more than 1000 keys in a single call”
It should work now, please test. Sorry about that problem.
I needed to change the method to pick a random entity—no easy feat in app engine, apparently. As a side effect, there might be some apparent nonuniformity in sampling when you have few todos. It will smooth out as you start/stop them and add more.
Thanks for the report! I’ll look into it.
Pretty neat. Thanks!