Comments on: Tracking

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || The Paradox of Self-Discipline || January || 2010

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 06:35:56 +0000

[...] daily situps and pushups, hitting the gym regularly and blogging. Others have success by using a game of sorts where badges are earned for performing the desired behaviors, but I have trouble taking such games [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Drive, by Daniel Pink || January || 2010

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:45:15 +0000

[...] sentence helps you define your purpose, each day is an opportunity to move closer to that purpose. Having a daily check-in forces us to question every day whether we’re making progress towards our goals. Or to put it [...]

By: PB

PB — Wed, 27 May 2009 08:51:16 +0000

Joe’s Goals looks like an excellent link — thanks! I like to think that acquiring new habits becomes easier the more you do it. Right now it takes more than a month for any good habit to become second-nature, but I’m hoping that the time frame compresses as I become more confident about my ability to change my own habits.

By: [M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og » Blog Archive » I am “Foundations of Differentiable Manifolds and Lie Groups.”

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 05:47:00 +0000

[...] A small and curious obsession with metrics and tracking has been starting to spring up in my head. (If you want to improve something, you need to measure it so that you know that it’s actually getting better.) It’s nice to know I’m not the only one. [...]

By: Quincy

Quincy — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:24:26 +0000

What got me flossing was scoring a boyfriend who flosses. It seems only fair!

By: Dan K.

Dan K. — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:55:01 +0000

By: Bats

Bats — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:32:36 +0000

Cool stuff…. the feedback/measurement having an effect totally makes sense.

But to go to the totally trivial side, for flossing, I am a huge proponent of the Reach Access Flosser–it’s a floss-on-a-stick instrument. Makes it so easy and slobber-free to floss that it becomes the default action.

By: seppo

seppo — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:34:18 +0000

I’m sure that Scrum has some sort of other tangible benefits, with all the little task cards and what not, but IMO, its primary benefit are the daily standups. When those happened with all the participants on a daily basis, things went well. When they didn’t, everything went to crap.

The process of getting everyone in a room and forcing them to remember what they did yesterday, and know what they were doing today, and having everyone hear that info, was tremendously helpful. In part because it forces you to think about what you’re doing, but also because everyone hears it, and so if someone else is doing something relevant, they can speak up immediately.

It was that bouncing around of ideas that made the difference, IMO, but definitely having to stand up in front of a crowd and say, “I did nothing of note yesterday,” forces you to examine exactly *why*…