[galleywest200]

>I think there are two strategies that would help a lot: 1) writing a spec (i.e. a plan) upfront, and 2) timeboxing the project by giving myself a deadline.

I would like to add another possible strategy: watching a number go up.

Recently I have started tracking the books I am reading. I track the page number I am currently on via a dashboard I made in Obsidian, which displays a %-read for each book. I have found that "number goes up" gives me just enough of a dopeamine hit to encourage me to pick the books up more frequently than I had before.

[reichertjalex]

Ooh I like that! I definitely feel that in some sense when I have a good streak of commits per day, where I don't want to break the streak. Or for workouts, it's suuuper motivating to see the number continue to go up.

But oftentimes when a project or essay is incomplete, it's hard for me to think of a good "number" to track that would be a good motivator (since i.e. lines of code, or the number of words in a draft, don't necessarily feel like a good proxy for progress all the time). I'm curious if there's a metric that would work better?