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Comment by twodave | Hacker News Reader

About 10oz of coffee first thing in the morning. Then I let the world come to me ;) Being more of a maverick personality type, I don’t even entertain “methods” or “systems” to structure my life. I pretty much just follow whatever thread I’m on and do what seems best in the moment. At least this hasn’t failed me yet.

I do tend to struggle with a little ADHD, which the coffee helps with. Other than that I just try to have fun and blaze an interesting trail each day (though hardly ever consciously).

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Minus the coffee and ADHD this is what I do. I’ve always felt any method/system was pure overhead and just lost time in planning when I could be doing. That said, I’m not a complete animal. I keep a few post it’s with hand written todos. I can assess and prioritize in my head as well as estimate time. Check things of when done. Toss the post it in my desk drawer when finished as a record of work done.

It’s basically the same system I use out of work to remember what errands I’m running on the weekend, etc.

This has been my approach but I’m getting fed up with my consequent inability to manage my time, which is way more precious and easily wasted than money, and harder to budget well. There are a lot of things I want and need to do but find very hard to do consistently.

I want an app (for iOS) that helps me “budget my time” but I haven’t found one. It should help me with goals like “30 minutes daily housekeeping, 4 hours weekly woodworking”, etc.

I’m also getting assessed for ADHD. Reading about it is extremely interesting and seems to explain a lot of my life: fidgeting and leg bouncing, constant awful backlog of bills and paperwork and late fees, moving to new jobs and cities and countries, obsessively stimulated fascination with a series of interests, learning basically all the programming languages by age 16, having a “projects” folder littered with a hundred sad subfolders, struggles with grocery shopping, acute restlessness during cinema screenings, embarrassing and damaging failures to perform rather simple tasks in a timely manner, and so on.

>I want an app (for iOS) that helps me “budget my time” but I haven’t found one. It should help me with goals like “30 minutes daily housekeeping, 4 hours weekly woodworking”, etc.

Have you tried Habitica?

I’m trying it now, thanks. It seemed a bit too much when I considered it once but I can see the appeal.

As someone that likes the spirit behind Habitica and has tried it a few times – also contributed some bugfixes I desperately needed – I’m curious what you found a bit too much, since I felt the same way.

I’ve toyed in my head with the idea of making a similar app, still heavily-inspired by gaming but without diving deep into the 16-bit RPG pixel atmosphere and the baggage that carries.

It just seems a bit optimized for people who actually love RPGs in all their complexity with different items and stuff, when I might prefer something that has a game aspect while staying quite simple. I’m less motivated by the possibility of spending gold coins to buy a new hat for my avatar than I am by simple and beautiful app interactions and just managing to remember and track my real life duties and desires. But I’m giving Habitica a try, I never actually played it before. So far it seems fun.

You seem like me a bit. I also wanted app like this to track and improve habits. Habitica, while interesting, just took too much time and effort. I've since started using 'Loop habit tracker' for about a year now and I prefer it's simplicity much more.

I, too, follow the twodave method.

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