User blog:Taldin/A To-Do About To-Dos, and Do To, Do Toos, and Dues, Too - but not Tues Do

Or, "some notes on what I'm doing with Habits RPG, explained in detail."

One of the things I learned fairly early on from Merfy was that To-Dos do damage to bosses, and they also award you XP, GP, and MP on top of it -- and that is multiplied by every checklist item you complete. So I got into the habit (pun not intended) at times of great workload stress to microplanning my day.

It's All About The Checklists...


On the right you can see an actual pair of to-do checklists of what I did this week for work. Or rather, what I started doing and didn't quiiiite finish.

It's crunch week, which means everything is due into the build directory by Sunday, which means working over the weekend while working around my housemates, and during the week, there are lots of last minute QA meetings and group meetings to make sure all 11 of us in the department are getting everything in on time.

Even if I didn't get everything done, I still had the list of things I meant to do that day sitting there for when I got to work the next day, and instead of having to keep it all in my head, I put it down on the list as I thought of it. I could prioritize either that day's stuff or complete my previous day's stuff, but no matter what I had the reminders of what I hadn't done still hanging out and getting redder by the day.

This is different from my Productive Work daily, because my productive work tends to be made up of 'how many things can I juggle today'. Stuff sometimes gets stuffed in there ahead of everything else in the list, and since I've become a Habits user, I haven't dropped anything I put on my work checklists. And as long as I've checked off most of a checklist for a day, I consider it a win.

The thing about checklists is that they're like condensed individual to-dos. By making them a block of stuff rather than a lot of singles, is that I can see what kind of progress I'm making, and I try and do all the things I'd planned to do that day, rather than cherry picking from the ones I wanted to do. To wit: 'I don't get credit for doing anything until I do all of them.'

My rules are pretty stringent; 'Only put stuff on the list for a day that you think you can do for that day, reasonably so.'   It's the same idea as Dailies - I only put dailies on that I'm pretty sure I can reliably do.

If I really need motivation for something, I'll put it in a Streak ToDo - essentially a Checklist To Do that has x numbers on it, one for each day of a streak I'm doing. The day I made a 21 day commitment to an apple (or an orange or a pear) a day* for my nutrition rework plan, I put up a huge To Do, because while if you miss a Daily once, it does 1 point of damage and it's gone, and the streak resets, but a 21-day old checklist with 21 items on it was worth an entire level and then some**. I put up a 14 day one after it to see if I could keep it going another two weeks, and then a 7, and now, eh, it's a routine, so I don't double-reward myself anymore for what's become a nice healthy-for-me Daily Habit.

Speaking of Dailies....
Dailies are a commitment to persistence and excellence; I get a little obsessive about completing my dailies that are due on that day, and if I'm not sure I can do a daily on a given day, or in some cases, don't need to do it on any given day, I turn it off for that day rather than check it off. Some of my dailies are reminders to go out of my way to do things to better myself (Floss 2x a day, take my vitamins, eat more fruits and vegetables, and drink enough water), but there are some things I'm still too weak-willed to pull out of the Habits (Be in Bed by 2am, Exercise 1/2 Hour) enough to try to fit them into my chaotic day. (I use staying up Stupid Late to catch up on stuff, and these past couple of weeks I've been working 10-12 hour days.)

I'd like to say that it's had _some_ effect, I think, in that I'm keeping up healthier choices instead of doing what I used to do, which is forget to eat, rush off to work or crash in bed without flossing (my dentist kept getting on me about that), and eating junk food when I did eat, or not drinking enough water to stay hydrated.

One of the other things I thought about as my lists of Habits, Dailies, and To Dos got steadily bigger was 'when do you no longer need a Daily?'   I mean, if you're always going to wake up in the morning, have "Wake Up" as a daily seems like cheating of a sort, because you're guaranteed a click on that one for the XP and gold and minor boss damage.

But then there are still days where I looked at my list near bedtime and said, 'Damn, wait. I haven't drunk any glasses of water today and it's almost midnight. Oops.'   And I used to throw out bottles of stale, expired vitamins because I would never remember to take them in the morning. Now I have them sitting on my desk such that when I sign into Habits, the reminder is there, and so is the bottle, and even if I rush out the door in the morning,  it'll still be there as an unchecked Daily when I get home.

That's my secret, anyway. I can't skip a Daily. I can postpone a To Do and ignore a habit, but (as I mentioned in an earlier blog post) every Thursday is trash day, and if we miss it, we can't put the trash out again for a whole week. So it is an 'Every Thursday' daily,  and since I'm good about not damaging my party, I make sure it's done even if nobody else bothers to do it. (I even called the house while I was on vacation to make sure they got the trash out, because I was out of town, just so I could check off the 'Is the Trash Done?' daily.)

For the too long, didn't read version: Taldin (talk) 00:30, July 26, 2014 (UTC)
 * Habits are things you don't have a plan to do, but want to account for when you do them for good or for bad.
 * Dailies are things you must do on a certain day, Or Else.   It's a pledge to do something regularly.
 * To-Dos are the planning bits of our life.  We don't always know when we're going to do them, or how, but by gosh, we're going to say that we're going to.  A promise to a future that has yet to be.  And when we get it done, the more complex it was, the bigger the score.


 * I used to hate eating fruit.  It got my hands messy, was kinda pricey, inconvenient to go get and have around the house when it would go bad before anyone ate it, and I would consistently ignore doctor recommendations to eat more fruit.   But Habits has gotten me to eat fruit every single day for two months, including today.


 * A 21 day checklist "Eat Fruit" fully completed plus a bunch of other dailies with a Brutal Smash or two thrown in did over 230 points of damage to our party's Octothulu.   It reminded me of an episode of that old 80's G.I. Joe cartoon where they had to shoot a giant blob with apples to defeat it.    I guess I could really say that 'Gnawing is half the battle.'