43 Crossed Things. Dear Interwebs, please build this for me.
Saturday, 21 November 2009 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daI want 43things.com crossed with a project-management tool. Crossed with delicious.com social-tagging. A crowd-sourced life coach.
Does anything like this exist already? Is the idea insane?
[The following won't make much sense if you haven't looked at 43things. Check 'm out; I'll wait here.]
What I'm picturing:
You're prompted for a goal you're working toward. (Such as "Learn Japanese.")
Then you're prompted to supply a list of things (sub-projects) you need to do before you can complete the goal. You can type in a list, and there is a pre-populated list aggregated from other people working toward the same goal; which you can tick "Need to do this" or "Already did this" (or, "what? this has nothing to do with my goal. Bury it.")
Then you go into each of the sub-projects, and fill in what you need to do to complete that goal. Also pre-populated with other peoples' suggestions. And so on, until you've mapped out a tree of the concrete details between where you are and your goal. Ideally, the terminal nodes are either already done, or "Next Actions" you could take right now (in the right environment; more on that in a bit).
Alternatively, you can start at the beginning, making a numbered list of steps. The site can present your project in either direction- detail-first or big-picture first. The problem with a numbered list of steps is it can artificially limit the order you do some tasks- so this site has to make it easy to rearrange tasks and look at your goal in many different ways. (Some folks do this with mind maps; I'd hope this system could switch from entirely text to a visual mind map as well).
A task might also need to specify a context in which it makes sense to do it; necessary conditions that are environmental, not items you do. ("At the office", "After September 1st".) With that addition, we've built something based on "Getting Things Done". But there's the social aspect, which is lacking from GTD, and a big part of my motivation for describing this.
Projects and sub-projects could have "testimonials" from people who successfully finished them,
as 43things.com currently has - such as "I did this and it was easier than I thought. The key thing was..." "achieving this made me feel ... " and "people who are doing this are also doing ..."
I like this idea, though it doesn't go far enough. Psychology tells us if you want to achieve something difficult, you will need to break it down. And the further you go into detail, the more likely you are to succeed. I saw this when I was making phone-calls for Obama: they had us ask "do you know when you're going to vote tomorrow? Do you have a plan for how you'll get there?" and the claim was that asking these questions would improve turnout by 25%. So, yeah. Motivating a task by breaking it down into little pieces is powerful.
But I want more. Once you have a recipe for achieving a big goal, not only could it build you a map to get you there; it could also aggregate for many people. As I said previously, it could suggest sub-projects from others. Things you hadn't fully thought out yet; an intervening step you missed; or different options for doing the same thing.
With aggregation, you can browse. Find out what other goals are made possible by your goal. This is a choose-your-own-adventure for REAL LIFE things people have done. And where that eventually got them. This is a powerful motivator, I think: in addition to breaking down your project into sub-projects, it's a step-by-step story of other peoples' successes.
So. Finding patterns. One example: if you spent a bit of time checking off things you've done, it could list you some easy "new projects" characterized by few additional steps. Sure, lots of them won't appeal; but I imagine some could be inspiring surprises. And building the list of accomplishments could make you feel pretty good about things you've done and forgotten, or mentally discounted as unimportant.
Some large amount of 43things seems to involve doing something repetitive, like "go to the gym three times a week." For that, the social motivator could be a little calendar where you tick off the days you met your goal, and show a little public "43 weeks successful at goal" progress-marker. There are certainly lots of tasks that just involve bearing down and doing it; perhaps all those websites to track peoples' progress at exercise or whatever are relevant here.
A bit about how realistic this is. It's possible the aggregation would be impossible. At least there are these gotchas: how to accurately match up the same goal with slightly different text; and whether all goals with the same text are actually the same goal. Perhaps the matching is made on both the text of the goal, and what kinds of sub-goals it has- it can track and differentiate multiple goals with the same text, depending on whether aggregates of people pick certain sub-goals. (I'm thinking of "Proposal to Partner." Either you toss the sub-tasks "get on one knee" and "buy a ring" or you toss "determine full spec" and "book conference-room." Maybe that works?... At least it gives the user an amusing moment when they see the suggestions.)
[Edit to add: I forgot something important. Many steps aren't binary "did this" or "have to do this." There has to be a state of "working on this." So you can see a view of "what am I currently working on?" This isn't exactly the same as "this is a sub-project with sub-items and some are done." Maybe it's close, though. Perhaps if you ticked "I started this" and there aren't any sub-items, it could warn you after some period of time with no change, "are you sure there aren't any sub-items you need to identify?"
I also didn't mention "I am not going to do this." Which is a valid and useful thing to acknowledge about projects you changed your mind on.]
So... yeah. Can you build this for me, dearest interwebs? Thanks!
I would consider prototyping this in some web 2.0 language, coming up with a clever name, and seeing what happens, but I have enough experience with my idea-backlog to say that I'm perfectly happy if the idea is just out there for somebody to take if it sounds good to them.
I'm curious what you think, even if it's "why would anybody bother?"
Does anything like this exist already? Is the idea insane?
[The following won't make much sense if you haven't looked at 43things. Check 'm out; I'll wait here.]
What I'm picturing:
You're prompted for a goal you're working toward. (Such as "Learn Japanese.")
Then you're prompted to supply a list of things (sub-projects) you need to do before you can complete the goal. You can type in a list, and there is a pre-populated list aggregated from other people working toward the same goal; which you can tick "Need to do this" or "Already did this" (or, "what? this has nothing to do with my goal. Bury it.")
Then you go into each of the sub-projects, and fill in what you need to do to complete that goal. Also pre-populated with other peoples' suggestions. And so on, until you've mapped out a tree of the concrete details between where you are and your goal. Ideally, the terminal nodes are either already done, or "Next Actions" you could take right now (in the right environment; more on that in a bit).
Alternatively, you can start at the beginning, making a numbered list of steps. The site can present your project in either direction- detail-first or big-picture first. The problem with a numbered list of steps is it can artificially limit the order you do some tasks- so this site has to make it easy to rearrange tasks and look at your goal in many different ways. (Some folks do this with mind maps; I'd hope this system could switch from entirely text to a visual mind map as well).
A task might also need to specify a context in which it makes sense to do it; necessary conditions that are environmental, not items you do. ("At the office", "After September 1st".) With that addition, we've built something based on "Getting Things Done". But there's the social aspect, which is lacking from GTD, and a big part of my motivation for describing this.
Projects and sub-projects could have "testimonials" from people who successfully finished them,
as 43things.com currently has - such as "I did this and it was easier than I thought. The key thing was..." "achieving this made me feel ... " and "people who are doing this are also doing ..."
I like this idea, though it doesn't go far enough. Psychology tells us if you want to achieve something difficult, you will need to break it down. And the further you go into detail, the more likely you are to succeed. I saw this when I was making phone-calls for Obama: they had us ask "do you know when you're going to vote tomorrow? Do you have a plan for how you'll get there?" and the claim was that asking these questions would improve turnout by 25%. So, yeah. Motivating a task by breaking it down into little pieces is powerful.
But I want more. Once you have a recipe for achieving a big goal, not only could it build you a map to get you there; it could also aggregate for many people. As I said previously, it could suggest sub-projects from others. Things you hadn't fully thought out yet; an intervening step you missed; or different options for doing the same thing.
With aggregation, you can browse. Find out what other goals are made possible by your goal. This is a choose-your-own-adventure for REAL LIFE things people have done. And where that eventually got them. This is a powerful motivator, I think: in addition to breaking down your project into sub-projects, it's a step-by-step story of other peoples' successes.
So. Finding patterns. One example: if you spent a bit of time checking off things you've done, it could list you some easy "new projects" characterized by few additional steps. Sure, lots of them won't appeal; but I imagine some could be inspiring surprises. And building the list of accomplishments could make you feel pretty good about things you've done and forgotten, or mentally discounted as unimportant.
Some large amount of 43things seems to involve doing something repetitive, like "go to the gym three times a week." For that, the social motivator could be a little calendar where you tick off the days you met your goal, and show a little public "43 weeks successful at goal" progress-marker. There are certainly lots of tasks that just involve bearing down and doing it; perhaps all those websites to track peoples' progress at exercise or whatever are relevant here.
A bit about how realistic this is. It's possible the aggregation would be impossible. At least there are these gotchas: how to accurately match up the same goal with slightly different text; and whether all goals with the same text are actually the same goal. Perhaps the matching is made on both the text of the goal, and what kinds of sub-goals it has- it can track and differentiate multiple goals with the same text, depending on whether aggregates of people pick certain sub-goals. (I'm thinking of "Proposal to Partner." Either you toss the sub-tasks "get on one knee" and "buy a ring" or you toss "determine full spec" and "book conference-room." Maybe that works?... At least it gives the user an amusing moment when they see the suggestions.)
[Edit to add: I forgot something important. Many steps aren't binary "did this" or "have to do this." There has to be a state of "working on this." So you can see a view of "what am I currently working on?" This isn't exactly the same as "this is a sub-project with sub-items and some are done." Maybe it's close, though. Perhaps if you ticked "I started this" and there aren't any sub-items, it could warn you after some period of time with no change, "are you sure there aren't any sub-items you need to identify?"
I also didn't mention "I am not going to do this." Which is a valid and useful thing to acknowledge about projects you changed your mind on.]
So... yeah. Can you build this for me, dearest interwebs? Thanks!
I would consider prototyping this in some web 2.0 language, coming up with a clever name, and seeing what happens, but I have enough experience with my idea-backlog to say that I'm perfectly happy if the idea is just out there for somebody to take if it sounds good to them.
I'm curious what you think, even if it's "why would anybody bother?"
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: Saturday, 21 November 2009 11:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, 22 November 2009 12:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, 22 November 2009 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, 22 November 2009 05:17 am (UTC)Sounds like a great idea! That would reassure me that I'm not overlooking anything that should be on my list.
no subject
Date: Sunday, 22 November 2009 08:15 am (UTC)I created an account on Spark People (http://www.sparkpeople.com) which theoretically has some intersection with this idea. The main problem was the rapidly overwhelming nature of the site. Too many things to do, lots of reminds which of course are necessary for these types of things but are also really annoying. So I gave up on that--it became the chipper, over-selling CSR at the chain gyms that drive me away.
On the other hand, it's easy to drop off on less intrusive stuff. Remember The Milk I've started using twice and then dropped off using it for no real reason but failing to remember to keep it updated.
I'm not sure how you achieve balance between those two problems. Maybe the answer is that online organizational tools are only useful to me in theory, but never in practice.
no subject
Date: Sunday, 22 November 2009 08:05 pm (UTC)A facebook friend said "Ravelry" does the same top-down idea, but for knitting. Health, and Knitting. Hm.
...I also have a Remember the Milk account that I don't use, but it's likely I would if I didn't already use task manager I like. And the only reason I stuck with my task manager is GTD, which works for me; I expect if I didn't sit in front of a computer all day, I'd use 3x5 index cards for my lists. It's the process of "clearing the mind of lists" that works for me.
(& the tough part with all of this is making the tool not get in the way of the process...)
no subject
Date: Monday, 23 November 2009 03:30 am (UTC)The closest I found was niid.to, which only lacks hierarchical tasks. Oh, and users. Oh, and active blog updates- (sadly they seem to have fallen off a cliff in April).
The most promising site I found is diddit.com, boasting "500,000 experiences in over 20 interest channels" and a fair bit of advertising. Much on the social, less so on the structured to-do list.
I will post to lifehacker.com and see what comes of that.
niid.to
Date: Wednesday, 25 November 2009 02:57 pm (UTC)My name's Tom, I'm co-founder of niid.to - thought I'd post our response to your email here for the sake of anyone else who may also be interested.
niid.to is indeed pretty close to what you're describing here. To cut a lengthy story short, we put it into private beta in March, got quite a high level of interest / publicity, then rapidly discovered there were some great things about what we'd built, and some other things that needed improvement.
James and I (James is the other co-founder) left our jobs to have a go at making niid.to work, but to pay the bills in the meantime we took on client work. You can probably guess the rest. Client work took over and continues to take up about 90% of our time.
However we still believe in niid.to and are committed to making it work. We've mapped out exactly what our testers told us needed to be done and will be relaunching in the new year.
We read your blog post with great interest - it brought back the enthusiasm we had for the project when we first started the build.
If anyone is interested in taking a look at the current version - warts and all - then by all means drop an email to hello@niid.to or a tweet to @tomcavill or @jameswykes and we can send you an invite code.
Thanks for your email Daniel.
Tom