My recently achieved overriding goal took 32 years to accomplish! i worked on it as a side project all that time and it took me places i never expected. Very happy.
I recommend being less ambitious! Or be smarter than me!
Now my major goal is to complete the first tools in that area. it’s still challenging but I think the first version will have only taken 12 months. There is just a lot of newly settled stuff that I am getting fluent in.
12 months seems like a good length of time for a major goal.
Immediate goals are the closest challenging milestone. I.e. a necessary task that requires non-trivial design and/or implementation.
I think both major and immediate goals should be stretch goals with actual impact at different scales. 6-18 months and 2 to 8 weeks are typical ranges. But as my first paragraph notes, the major goal is the big thing that needs to be done, so however long that takes. It is inspiring to aim for significance, and it pushes me to not waste time on all scales of life.
And then I replot my path to the immediate goal. Usually takes under a minute. Mundane steps and questions to settle.
I recreate a the whole plan every morning like that. The repetition embeds the plan and goals into my conscious and subconscious minds.
And also keeps everything fluid.
Every morning, any new perspective can alter anything in the plan, including the goals if need be. Altering the immediate goal, or a better definition of the major goal.
Does that mean you sat down every work day for 32 years and wrote the same thing on the top of your notepad? I appreciate the consistency but it looks like you could've gotten it inscribed on a plaque at that point :)
Ha! No I didn’t write that goal down every day. Partly because it was a side project, and partly because it was engraved - on my brain!
I did write the goal down a lot, on working notes, and put it on my fridge, my whiteboard, my pin board, along with next steps and lists of tasks for each.
It was too hard to work on one next step, because there was so much I didn’t know, and it was impossible to know which step was going to cave in first.
That’s when I learned to clear my desk, whenever work hit a wall, and rewrite the goals and steps. To completely reset my mind so I could move forward in a clear alternate direction without pause.
Later I noticed doing that reset every morning helped even more.
I thought a lot about Don Quixote as time went by. I dreamt an impossible dream. Under a star. And then, one day, I got in!
Can you please write more about it? What was the goal? Also I love the Angela Merkel method - thinking what you can do in a day or a week is fruitless as the productivity might vary. Thinking in years is too long. Think about what you can achieve in 100 days.
> Thinking in years is too long. Think about what you can achieve in 100 days.
You are right that 100 days can mean a lot.
But if you are always thinking "What is the most important thing I could ever do, if I just did one thing?", sooner or later you may find something where time isn't an organizational issue, because your North Star has become so clear.
I don't try to guess how long anything will take in any serious way. I set targets, but those are to push myself, visualize success, not schedule anything.
I would assume the former is the 'actual' goal - implement the feature, fix the bug, etc.; the next step goal is the current burrow of rabbit hole, the refactoring, dependency upgrade, patch to third-party lib, unexpected other ticket, etc. that you had to do on the way.
I have had good success with the plans generated by https://github.com/obra/superpowers I also really like the Socratic method it uses to create the plans.
I feel like going to the source of an algorithm/implementation is a super power, as illustrated by this example.
Having used Graphviz for fairly complex visualizations I was initially shocked that someone would rewrite it themselves. Then I saw the breakdown of the algorithm and realized it may not be as complicated as I first thought.
All that being said, as a general rule it is hard to know what the hidden complexities may be until you are finished implementing the algorithm.
I haven’t explicitly recreated a template for an academic venue, but I have recreated a custom template to match and existing PDF. It was pretty straightforward to recreate it as the language and “standard library” (if you could call it that?) is well designed and has excellent documentation.
I love Typst! Currently rewriting my CV in Typst and it has been an excellent experience. One small hindrance is the inability to have multiple bibliographies.
In the past I have also used it to generates quotes (in terms of finances, invoice etc.). It was neat because all of the logic for adding up the subtotal was written in the language (and was fairly easy to understand). I can imagine trying to do that logic in LaTeX…
Agreed, to make it even more interesting Browser Company discontinued Arc earlier this year. So not only did they do all of the things OP listed, but also didn't have a current product when acquired.
That's very interesting. I downloaded arc because I saw it in some twitter screenshot and I thought the UI was neat, when I could have actually been looking for Zed instead of Arc.
Ironic that I wasn't familiar with this company or their products before today, and having read about both Arc and Dia, including reading this blog post you've linked, the product that makes me want to try it is the one they've stopped developing...
It's still worth trying and using. The developers consider it a "finished product" and I don't disagree. It does lots of small things well* that many browsers (even the self-confessed clones like Zen) don't do out of the box, if at all. Maybe in two years the browser will no longer be distributed or receive Chromium updates, but it exists and works fine now.
* For example, I get a lot of value from renaming my tabs and even replacing their favicons with emojis of my choice. Zen appears to have limited support for this.
Damn, I really appreciate the decision to do this in a new product. Arc is the best browser I've ever used, and I'd hate to see AI features forced upon me. Thanks Browser Company!
I agree. I think Arc was the biggest innovation in browser UI since Chrome.
I think you will eventually have to switch because it will lack behind given that it's not their priority anymore. Zen browser seems like viable alternative but I haven't used it enough yet to know how well polished it is.
It is impressive what a single person with a vision can achieve hacking away on Firefox, especially considering Mozilla's track record in recent years.
A bus factor of 1 is still a bit red flag on something as involved as browser maintenance. Hopefully a community can emerge around the project.
Yeah, this is the unfortunate part about products kept alive in maintenance mode in a rapidly evolving space.
I guess you could argue (as TBC did) it’s actually not rapidly evolving, and that gives it staying power. But eventually someone will reach parity and eventually eclipse the original product.
Hopefully Zen does that. I’m just tired of moving the same data to the effectively the same product run by a different team for no good reason.
Interesting to think about if finding a database dump of messages 30 years from now would bring back the same nostalgia. I would think that the tangible aspect would have a more profound impact.
I also think the format of letters lends itself a bit better to being re-read. A single message talking about the "last little while" rather than atomic thoughts and reactions. More context about the snapshot of life it describes. Like a page from a diary that was shared with someone.
I have been enamored with developing a second brain and other productivity hacks, but have recently been turned off to them, because I believe the benefits are over-promised. Similar to OP, I haven’t been able to achieve the clarity of mind and creative thoughts that are promised by a second brain.
While I do think that deleting the whole thing is extreme, I can imagine that there is a level of catharsis experienced by that.
Lately I have subscribed to Oliver Burkeman’s (author of “4,000 Weeks”) line of thinking where life, and subsequently thoughts, are more meant to be experience rather than optimized. For me, I have seen a negative drop in “life enjoyment” when I have tried to capture everything, and have yet to realize the results and even stick with it consistently (which may be the reason for not seeing the positives).
That's an idea... Make a fork, add a file at taxpayers/${SSN}.yaml describing your return in terms of income/deductions/circumstances, make sure it lints successfully, and then submit a PR for the IRS to review. If it's merged, CI/CD initiates a bank payment/withdrawal. If you get audited, resolve the conflicts and update the PR.
