Mambo Taxi

I 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?"

I'm trying to devote a bit of energy to being more intentional about how I spend my time. Partly inspired by other friends who've talked about the same- cutting back on things that gradually have taken over- partly from pointed questions from my sweetie- and partly because it is so so easy for me to lose a few hours in the blink of an eye, and not feel like I could say much about how it was spent.

Not that there's anything wrong with wasting time- but wasting too much time feels like a fairly serious mistake to me.

So, this last Saturday I made a mistake that might have positive results in the end.

...I donated a large box of stuff from this summer's closet clean-out to a benefit garage sale on campus, and Saturday morning I went to check out the beginning of the sale. I was about to leave when my eye caught sight of a box of D&D stuff. "Huh," I thought, "that's in fairly good shape." It turned out to be a complete basic D&D set, plus a D&D expert set, plus a standalone module. From selling dan's old AD&D on ebay, I figured it was probably worth about $75 to somebody. It was stickered at $10.

Yeah. So. Maybe you can guess what happened, and that was my first mistake. Second mistake: it took me about 3 hours to set up the ebay auctions, where a good chunk of the time was taking many photos and figuring out shipping, 'cause it seems it's awfully expensive to ship from Canada to the US. And it really wanted to be three auctions, not one, 'cause that seems to be the way these things are done. Grczh. Why did I think this would be fun?...

At some point I flipped a "don't care any more" bit and just listed the damn things with a 3-day auction so they'd be out of the house before dan got home. And the first one sold in 2 hours to a Quebecois guy at my asking price of $35 plus shipping, and it was out the door the next morning with another hour to box and print postage via paypal and ship.

The standalone module sold to someone in Texas for $.01 because I didn't bother setting a reserve price, and I basically broke even on shipping. (hm, actually I made $2). But I still had to drop it off, and I guess it cost me half an hour of time that I was slightly grumpy about spending.

Fortunately, the Expert Set didn't sell, which means I can freecycle it and save some time. (Hey- does it have your name on it? Let me know and it's yours!)

Total time spent for these two items, maybe 5 hours. It's loads of fun to get stuff out of the house into the hands of people who are happier for having gotten it, but while I think I'm fairly good at writing up an auction, it's really really not worth my time to do so. And apparently this weekend I thought my time was worth $7/hr (and I suppose, in the end, good feelings for getting this Quebecois guy's kid a D&D set to play with.)

To show for my time, I now know that paypal makes it quite easy to print postage (domestic and international); ebay has gotten more annoying for dealing with international shipping.

And I really need to pay closer attention to the difference between, "it would be cool if somebody did this" and "I should do this!"

I think this is, as they say, one of my growing edges.

I finished the audio-book version of Stumbling on Happiness on the drive back from my parents' place.

I wrote about Daniel Gilbert last August when he was interviewed on Tapestry, the CBC radio program on faith and spirituality (and so did d., which I link to from that post). Re-reading my impressions at the time, I conclude his book made a much better impression on me than it appears his radio-interview and TED lecture did. In no small part because he was able to set out his arguments completely, not constrained to 30 or 20 minutes. (Good gawd, he sounds strident and pressed for time in the TED talk.)

I took out of the library both his book and the unabridged audio version (read by Gilbert). The book copy was recalled so I only read a few chapters in print. I recommend either, or both. It made a fine accompaniment to driving many hours on the 401.

The book is pleasantly engaging, with a very accessible style that I only occasionally wish had been more terse. He mixes in with his psychology research a smattering of jokes I actually found funny- occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

I'm torn on how much I'd like to say about the content. Others will have written better than I can. I think Gilbert writes most effectively about unexpected psych research results. For example (and this isn't an exhaustive list of the good stuff, it's just off the top of my head) :

* People overestimate their emotional reactions to future events. Our psychological "immune system" kicks in when awful things happen, making them feel... bad, but not as bad as you'd expect them to.

* However, the psychological immune system won't kick in under a certain threshhold. So a slightly bad event can fester in your mind worse than a really bad event.

* We, obviously, edit our memories; and we do so in a way to self-validate our beliefs. The fascinating thing to me is that we also edit our predictions of our feelings from before-hand, so we can self-validate the way we ended up feeling. "We remember feeling the way we thought we would feel, whether we felt like that or not." We're really a mess when it comes to accurately remembering feelings, and Gilbert mentions a few "emotional blind-spots" which consistently trip us up.

I liked this interview with him; it gives a fair sense of his writing style.

Something else I appreciate: when I got to the end, I wished I had a study group to help hash out my thoughts on the book. It turns out, and I think I read this last year, that Gilbert posted a study guide to go along with the Harvard frosh class he teaches based on the book. I can probably get access to most of the articles he cites.

So I'm pondering whether to try and find a dozen other people who just read this book and see what we might do with it.