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by welanes 3466 days ago
This is good. Especially this:

> A review of your “ideal you,” your ideal future, your major goals and desires in life.

One 'problem' with many task management methods is that when you slip (which most of us do) there's an aversion to opening up your Wunderlist/Excel/moleskin months later and seeing how far your current self is behind your aspirational self.

Task managers are good at atomizing goals into objectives but overlook motivations and outcomes. They lack a 'remind me again what's in it for future-me?' feature.

I'm currently attempting to code such a feature into my app. By way of example, take learning French as a goal:

* Tasks: the usual list of todos. Go to evening classes; Watch 5 hours of TV5Monde each week. etc.

* Resources: links to Youtube videos, uploaded language podcasts, communities on the web.

* Inspiration: images of French cities you want to visit, scenes from a favorite French film, quotes, a mini journal-entry about that French girl or guy you met that one time. Snippets of things the French-speaking-you will appreciate.

* Insights: how much time you're dedicating to the goal, hours already spent and estimated completion date based on your current rate of productivity.

So your task manager serves not only as a checklist but also as a control-room (or if you like, moodboard) for that goal. Tasks, tools, motivation and a feedback loop all in one place.

4 comments

Take a look at Beeminder [1] Each goal includes an open text "fine print" where can put anything like what you describe above.

[1] https://www.beeminder.com/

Thank you so much for that plug! The author of the article, alexvermeer, is also a longtime Beeminder fan! See https://alexvermeer.com/beeminder/
I've been using Complice [0] for a couple of months now and it does something akin to what you're describing.

[0] https://complice.co

I use it too, and it's been shockingly effective for something so simple. I find the prompt to _think_ about what I _really_ want to do incredibly inspiring

It's also inspiring in another way, as a solopreneur-hacker-bootstrap success story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11999757

eta: the creator has also posted in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13251497

Love the inspirational stream...they could be global and shared between users; I often think about this for giving up smoking, ever time I get a craving I want to be reminded that it'll pass, that going outside to take a breather is okay and that spending your life worrying about getting ill is very repetitive.
You're definately on to something here. Not sure if "Inspiration" is the right wording. Perhaps this could be configurable.

I personally do not need "Resources" or dairy features in my tasklist system. (Then again, this is typically you get 1001 opinions when asking 1000 people).