Day 119: Planning Better

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Once in a while, I wake up and think, “Holy crap, there’s so much to do.” Today was one of those days.

Normally, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that I need to start working on everything ASAP and skip my morning routine, but today, I managed to pause and meditate and do yoga before starting work. While meditating, it was much easier to see how this pressure was entirely self-created, but my mind still got lost in planning mode for long stretches of time. I think part of this is wanting to make sure that I don’t forget all the little tasks swirling around in my head. Here’s my attempt at writing them down:

  • Hide Likes

    • Update Hide Likes to support the new Facebook UI

      • The codebase for Hide Likes feels hella old since I’ve significantly improved how scripts and styles are injected and asking for permissions in Hide Feed and Intention, but I’m not sure I want to invest the time to bring it up to speed

  • Hide Feed

  • Intention

    • Finish feature that displays visits, unlocks, and time saved in Intention and release an update

    • Figure out whether I should create a monolithic extension that brings together Intention, Hide Feed, and Hide Likes into one product where I offer a comprehensive Web experience designed for people’s well-being

      • Bringing in the content blocking functionality into Intention would introduce additional product complexity, and I’m not sure I want to do that

        • Example: I might want to hide the feed but not have Intention stop me from using it (e.g. Gmail). Does that mean there are two lists — one for distracting sites and one for specially supported sites?
        • Adding site specific logic and integrations makes maintaining the extension much more difficult

    • Decide what platform to use for the Intention Community and invite everyone who signed up

    • Triage all the new feature requests and bug reports that have come in

  • Marketing

  • Road to Ramen

    • Write my April review, which I started 3 days ago

  • Show & Tell

    • Clean up existing Slack channel
    • Decide on and invite new members for new cohort starting on May 11

  • Personal

    • Respond to emails and other messages from friends (I often go days without checking my email, texts, Messenger, etc. and it piles up)

Wow. Writing it out kind of helped because now I know what I’m dealing with, but damn, it’s still quite a lot.

The realization that I had today was that I’d benefit from planning things out a bit more. Up until now, I’ve just woken up every day and worked on whatever came to mind. This prioritizes urgent items at the expense of important ones, and I’d like to introduce a bit more structure.

My marketing week experiment showed that setting an intention for the week really helps me stick to it (even if I don’t accomplish as much as I’d like).

I’m going to bring back something I used to do back at Google: weekly snippets.

Once a week (probably Sundays), I’ll reflect on what I had planned to do the past week, what I actually did, and plan out the upcoming week’s work. I think this will help me reflect more regularly and help me prioritize work that’s important but not necessarily urgent.

I like the idea of assigning numbers to my weeks for future reference, so I’ll do it according to when I started Road to Ramen (which feels somewhat dissatisfying because it’s not when I actually started working on my projects and is also close but not really aligned with the start of th year, but oh well). According to R2R time, I’ve just finished week 17 and am about to start week 18.

Oh wait, if I only care about having a unique identifier, I can just do something like 5w1 to indicate the first week of May. Err, maybe that’s too confusing. Eh, I’ll just go with R2R time.

Week 18 Plan

Last week

  • N/A
  • (I did a lot of tiny things but nothing really worth mentioning. Goes to show that I can really benefit from planning!)

This week

  • Hide Likes

    • Update Hide Likes to support Facebook’s new UI

  • Hide Feed

    • Update Hide Feed to support launching with a friend’s productivity newsletter

  • Intention

    • Finish feature that displays visits, unlocks, and time saved in Intention and release an update
    • Set up Intention community

  • Show & Tell

    • Clean up existing Slack channel to prepare for new cohort
    • Decide on and invite new members for new cohort starting on May 11

I was going to add either reading Traction or watching Blogging for Business, but I don’t want to be too aggressive in what I try to do. This already feels like quite a lot but let’s give it a go!