Now I don't delete things. I put a little + at the start of the line for anything I did, a - for anything I decided not to do, and a / for anything I did partially but needs to be revisited. I write a new list each day, carrying-forward items that I feel are worth revisiting.
And what's huge is that I can scroll down and see previous lists, years worth, and read all the stuff I did. It's enormous compared to the remaining todos, and apparently that's psychologically important.
If I have 50 pages of things I spent time on, I must actually be doing something!
It's surprisingly useful; I share it with my coworkers and we often consult it if we notice something has been behaving differently starting at a certain date to see what was going on then.
I keep it in a simple text file, running in a tmux on a server, so I have connections to it from my laptop and my desktop. It's currently 19,509 lines.
I only had to see one machine "that was being backed up" unable to restore from backup. Wasn't mine, but was enough to teach me to test them.
However, that said, over ~3 decades I've found that having a successful rsync exit code and alerting when that is not true, along with periodic "full" rsync checksum runs, is effectively a failsafe way of ensuing a good backup.
For our less critical systems, this plus "spot checking" by regularly going in and looking at "what did this file look like a few weeks ago" (something we commonly use backups for), has proven pretty effective while also being low work.
For critical systems, definitely do test recoveries. Our database server, for example, every week recovers the production database into our staging and dev environments, so backup problems tend to get noticed pretty quickly.
Don't you have commit logs for this??
It's very powerful having just a few sentences I can read about what was going on specifically on a given day.
Maybe it makes more sense to have a box per week instead of per day. Or even per month!
At least in my own life I've noticed that focusing on daily output tends to be demoralizing, whereas if I look back over the months I am often amazed by what has come out of me.
+ Get out of bed before sundown
I've actually had good conversations with nervous junior devs to help them see the value of their contributions this way. There's a lot less reason to stress out if you're working steadily and see that things are going according to plan.
I know devs can be focused on the literal tasks at hand, but the "10k ft view" is not just a cheesy thing people say and it should not be ignored. It gives perspective.
Sounds like the weekly report most of my bosses have demanded.
The problem here is that they think it forces you to have an accomplishment. Just write what you did in short form. IT can be "Was very stressed and couldn't get anything substantial done, attended the monthly developer meeting and did some work on documentation".
I do this as well to better remember what I have done at work, to quickly be able to document my value towards the company, and to have some "tabs" to show if there are any questions regarding what I did a day.
Example: day before Christmas eve - the last workday in this region I found myself standing in line to a car wash. There was just one guy ahead of me, but those who were already soaping up their vehicles didn't seem to be in a hurry and it was already 4pm, so sundown over here and I still had other errands run that day.
I turned around and the car is currently still dirty, but it'll remain so until I can make time for that, so in 2026.
I'm curious about a few things:
1. How do you handle things that carry over multiple days? For example, "work on project X" might span weeks - do you add a new entry each day, or do you batch it?
2. Do you track time estimates or actual time spent? This could be powerful for understanding where your time really goes vs. where you think it goes.
3. What's your retention/archival strategy? 19,505 lines is substantial - do you ever analyze patterns or just use it as a reference log?
4. Have you noticed any behavior changes from keeping this list? Does it make you more or less productive, or just more aware?
5. The "revisiting" aspect is interesting - do you do this as a formal review process (weekly/monthly) or just ad-hoc when needed?
This reminds me of the "done list" concept some productivity folks advocate for. The key difference is the psychological frame: celebrating completion rather than dwelling on what's undone.
Extra word there
Ah I thought (and hoped) it was gonna be a list of epiphanies, interesting learnings, new sweetness. You know… taDA!
10 PRINT "You didn't do enough! Scum! Do more!"
20 GOTO 10
Worse, by trying to argue, the loop strengthens. It's inside your brain, it's a cognitive behaviour, apparently somehow you learned it as an important message to remind yourself of. Arguing back that you did enough isn't "hearing the important message" so the message gets more insistent, louder - HEY! LISTEN! you DID NOT do enough! SCUM! DO MORE!
The cognitive behaviour to change is the judging, not the response to the judging. Where did I learn to beat myself up about productivity with that addict's loop? Why am I holding on to it when it hurts and makes me feel bad? What desirable behaviour or values is it trying to achieve that makes me unable to drop it? How can I uphold the same values and encourage the same positive behaviours in a positive-reinforcement way instead of a negative-reinforcement way so I can let go of that and feel less shitty?
> "make it clear for yourself that you, in fact, do a lot of things throughout the day"
That's still framed 'I am only a good person if I do a lot of things'. It's you who controls your definition of a good person. You who holds the definition so high that you feel you don't live up to it. You who creates the bad feelings when you judge that you don't live up to the definition you control. Which is a sitcom farce of a way to live. The missing bit is that you didn't consciously set it, you accidentally learned it from childhood or society or religion or osmosis, and don't know that you can change it; it feels immutable and obviously correct.[1]
Either way it's the same chore of making of your bed, but in one multiverse you feel negatively compelled to do it, you feel bad while doing it and dreadful if you miss it. In another multiverse you choose to do it, feel good while doing it, and if you miss it that's fine. In one multiverse you're imagining future-you having a nice bed to climb into tonight so you're feeling mild positive emotions (satisfied, pleased, helpful, kind, useful). And if you miss doing it then future-you can forgive you because it's not a big deal and you're feeling neutral. In another multiverse you do it while imagining your tyrant grandmother scowling at you. However much effort you put into making the bed, it's never enough. If you imagine missing it, she's screaming at you-aged-6 about how you're the laziest child she's ever known and you'll end up homeless and destitute, an embarassment to her, a disgrace to your family, and she's going to smack some obedience into you[2]. So you do it while feeling mild to strong negative emotions (anxious, afraid, bad, scared, shaking, panicky). And you're probably aware as an adult how unfair this is so add in some (angry, resentful, unfairly treated, bitter) and if you can't easily get away from it some (frustration, contempt of yourself, envy of/inferior to people who don't live like this). There's no way to win in this multiverse - there's no way to get positive emotions. The best case is doing it promptly and thoroughly and trying to minimize the negative emotions by whirlwinding through and not thinking about it.
You can't list all the days of your life that you made your bed and show them to imaginary-tyrant-grandma hoping she will approve and you can feel good forever. She isn't real, she's a "10 SCOWL; 20 GOTO 10" loop stuck in your head. That mocking image of her will never be proud of you, never be satisfied. Nor can you try to say "she might not be happy but I can be happy about all the times I did this" because she's in your head so that you can't be happy and because that unhappiness drives you to put more effort in, which is the behaviour she wanted to instill. Reinforced by the nagging almost sub-conscious image of lying in a ditch with your mother disowning you, which gets stronger the more you try to be happy, and weaker every time you are scared and work harder.
The tyrant-grandma-loop is the cognitive behaviour that needs a mechanic, and all the related lifetime of images/ideas/behaviours that are feeding into it, or fed by it. Back to the article, after an entire year of tada-list, the author writes "forces you to have an accomplishment each day so you can write it down, and this added stress to my day". Hmm.
[1] (Then you think that if someone says 'you can change it', they must be saying 'it is easy to change'. Then you either feel bad that you haven't succeeded at something easy so you must be stupid, or you dismiss them by saying "thanks I'm cured" because you "tried" ignoring it and that didn't work so they must be stupid)
[2] Which, sadly, she probably felt was absolutely true, handed down from her mother or father, a torment she also lived under her whole life.
Plus by noticing things you are doing it already makes inner critic quieter, and this is THE practice to get rid of it
This is the claim I don't believe, and wrote all that to argue the case against it.
How long until you get rid of it? If the answer is "hopefully it just magically goes away in a few years" that isn't an effective method.
Giving yourself credit for what you've done is fine, but if it comes from a feeling of insufficiency, then at best it's symptom relief that helps you avoid the underlying issue.
Sadly, at this point I would not even call it a challenge, but I would consider it more a pastime.
Sure, but we're talking about a "tada list" here.
Would you write about relaxing and meditation on __your__ tada list?
"Today I meditated through drawing" is an accomplishment to me worth my personal tada list. Might not be for everyone though, I can understand that.
Someone else was making a good point that a daily tada list might be unnecessary pressure and a weekly one feels more balanced.
To add more color though, I personally would expect this to compound into an overall tada list similar to OP. At the end of the year I could amount to a lot of drawings and notice improvements over time. But again, AI has nothing to do with it.
If we give up on personal accomplishments because "AI can do it" we would go nowhere. But that's my 2c.
It’s all a matter of perspective and personal goals, no?
I wouldn't because I would just use libgmp or sympy. And I would certainly not write about it on my "tada list" (if I had one).
Anyway, that's how you should read that comment.
But that is not true of painting. Painting requires choosing a subject (for its subjective qualities) and then translating what you _want_ to capture about that subject and how you want to represent it in paint on some medium. You will also be applying a theory of mind and perception about the audience of the painting since you probably want it to appeal to them. All of these choices and the skill to combine them into a painting that achieves what you want is vastly more challenging than multiplication.
Multiplication is akin to paint by numbers.
EDIT: it actually strikes me that this conversation gets to the crux of why AI art is so polarizing. It depends whether you view art predominantly as being about the thing that is created or the process of creation.
How is this analogous to painting?