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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

  Catchy title?  Check.
  Appropiate topic?  Check.
  Interesting story?  Check.
  Sympathetic people?  Check.
  Real world problems?  Check.
  Common sense approach?  Check.
  Actionable advice?  Check.

They why do I hate this post so much?

Because it's so 1990s.

Waiting until the end of the day to evaluate it is way too late. What once took days now takes hours, even minutes. You need to be doing the recommendations in this post all day long, dymamically, as you go. If you're looking back, you already lost.

Then what should you actually be doing with the last 5 minutes of your 2011 day?

Make a "list" of the #1 thing that you must complete tomorrow.

This one little item will probably have more impact on tomorrow's success that anything you could possibly do about today's.

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Im sorry, but this seems like a terrible, short-sighted bit of lunacy. Yes, you should be noting things all day, but taking the time to review your notes as a cohesive whole seems to be the point. It will let you see bigger patterns. It will help you deduce what you could be doing tomorrow for your "#1 task".

Think of it like an optimization problem, small tweaks based on limited feedback will get you caught in a local maximum -- seriously, what you described is basically a genetic algorithm. When you step back and notice general trends, things that turn into inefficient tweak loops and so on, there is a lot of good that can come from it.

GO! GO! GO! is not a sane mentality, and has never helped me do much but get work done. This is useful, excepting of course those situations where the work itself isn't useful but I can't see that because I don't look back and analyze. Looking back on today and this week is a nice way to keep perspective, get some peace and have big picture understanding of what is going well and isn't.

    > Waiting until the end of the day to evaluate it is way too late.
    > What once took days now takes hours, even minutes.

To put this into practice, set a timer to go off every 60 seconds. At the end of this period, reflect back over the previous 60 seconds. By the end of the day you'll have become so good at reflecting that whenever you stay still in public long enough, random women will use you to apply their makeup.

You can't reflect on the same level, with the same depth, by analyzing your day constantly, as opposed to looking back at the end of the day. If you could, nothing would ever go wrong, because you would have thought about it when you were doing it.

I contend that thinking about how everything is going constantly is more likely to stress you out and cause you to make bad decisions than simply reflecting for half an hour at the end of each day.

The day-trader approach to life vs. the value investor approach.

Relevant: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/lawlib/lexlibris/BenFranklinsDay.jpg... case that is a little hard to read: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2537/3779169741_a1f678caea.jp... )

This should be:

1. Think about mistakes you've made today 2. Make a "list" of the #1 thing that you must complete tomorrow

I wonder if this post qualifies.

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