Awhile back, HN users rguzman, peng, and I (met on HN and) built http://idonethis.com based on the Seinfeld productivity secret and launched it on HN. We got some great feedback and kept moving forward with it.
[I]t is the consistent daily action that builds extraordinary outcomes... Skipping one day makes it easier to skip the next.
A recent New Yorker article quotes singer Tony Bennett on his practice regimen as saying "The first day you don't do the scales, you know. The second day, the musicians know. The third day, the audience knows."
I've heard this saying but in the context of martial arts. "The first day you don't practice, you know. The second day, your coach knows. Third day, your competitors know" I wonder what about origin of this saying.
I released it in January just thought it would be interesting to see the usage stats, I haven't checked in forever!
Goals Added: 17,642
Chains Added: 247,104
Kind of cool to see actual usage from someone other than me!
# of goals added is pretty obvious, but # of chains added probably bears a little explanation: Every day you do something is a chain - I probably should have called it a link in the stats system.
This technique works best if, for your particular goals, there exists an x such that "Doing x every day will help me meet my goals" is true. If you're a stand-up comedian, x is fairly clear. For many people (including me), it's not obvious that such an x exists. (It's still probably worth looking for it, though.)
There is one really important thing that needs to be brought-up: Being consistent is important. But it is more important to choose the right things to be consistent at.
Some of us are really consistent at watching our favorite sitcom. But how, exactly, does that help our businesses? Couldn't those precious minutes be spent doing something to help advance our businesses?
Well. There is yet another minimalist implementation of this - http://sein-cal.co.cc/ that works very well for "I (don't) want to do X" and check for each successful day.
In principle, it would be exactly like a full-year calendar on the wall.
Edit - This was our weekend hack some time ago. Feedback on the application is welcome.
Is there a way to abstract this into a service that has an api ?
You could setup your daily goals and the Tenacity API ( a name just invented http://declancostello.com/tenacity-api/ ) could be updated by different clients.
Tenacity could check an RSS feed to see if you've blogged every day ( like yahoo pipes )
It could parse an email sent to a custom address ( like idonethis )
Flashcard Software like anki could have a plugin that would access the API
twitter hastags, github checkins etc.
It would provide you with a dashboard of all the things you care enough about to be doing every day.
I'm not sure I'd like it to email me like facebook when I've missed some goals, but it might be a productive option.
I don't have the mojo to develop anything like this but would it interest other developers?
I wrote a free weight tracking web app based on this idea. You track your weight daily. It gives you some simple analytics on your weight over time. It's a small thing, but tracking your weight every day helps it drop over time and keep you accountable to your diet.
I'm 285 days in a row and I've lost right at 40 lbs. It works.
I've always found this productivity idea weak. I might set out 1 hour a day to accomplish a task, but if my heart isn't in it, it's just an hour of low-quality work--I may as well have not done it at all or waited for an optimal time.
However, I do see how this could be useful for tasks which aren't creative or need much thinking. Say for example, brushing teeth after lunch.
But at least you've done something. When you see it's not going well, you might stop early but it's still better than skipping it, because the next day, when you are ready, the stuff you were doing is one-day-fresh, not two-days-fresh. If you put it off until "an optimal time" you'll both make it easier to keep putting off and spend more time catching up to where you had previously been.
The grad student version of this advice, which I heard from several people and more or less followed, was "once you start your thesis, write every day, at least a sentence." It's good advice.
Seinfeld was a successful comic. The end goal for a lot of comedians is to parlay it into an acting career, which Seinfeld did. Forbes estimates his net worth at $800 million. If that isn't a successful comedic career, than I'm not sure what is.
Actually that's one of the things I like about HN. So easy for a community site to degenerate into a handful of long-running in-jokes, applied to the topic of the day.
Maybe he realized that he didn't want to be a comic. It would be a sad world indeed if we were all measured against goals we created when we were twenty.
We recently crossed 200,000 things done (http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/09/22/idonethis-announces-it...) and a bunch of people have told us that it's helped them tremendously.