Getting More Done

Today I purchased 59 Seconds, recommended by Jeff Atwood. I struggle with procrastination as much as anyone else so I’m willing to spend 10 bucks to try to get more done. The author recommends four things to attain a given goal:

plan well
reward yourself
focus on benefits
tell people

I’ve kinda slacked off with Open Source stuff the past year (see the graph at metacpan) and I’d like to remedy that.

Goal: Participate more

My overall goal is to participate more (more blogging, more patches/pull requests, more releases and bug fixes for my own modules, etc.)

The book recommends breaking the overall goal into five for fewer distinct subgoals that are measurable and whatnot, so here are my subgoals:

For example submit a patch or release a distribution. Pushing to github isn’t permanent :-)

I think this is pretty feasible. I have a huge backlog of things to do (which I’ll post, semi-prioritised at the end of this post) and I already set aside time on Mondays and Fridays to get stuff done.

To get this done I’ll work on stuff 2-3 hours on Monday night and 2-3 hours Friday night (assuming nothing is going on.) I also might do stuff Tuesday or Wednesday, but time is scarce with wedding planning. I’ll work on the most important things first, and after that’s done I’ll work on the most fun stuff; the idea being that I can get two things done in a week that way.

I’ll count this as achieved (though I don’t want to stop) after I’ve done two public things a week for two months straight. I’ll post weekly progress reports every Monday when I start hacking about the previous week.

My reward for finishing this is to buy myself a new car stereo.

Again, this sounds reasonable. I have a long list of half finished posts that I should just clean up and post. These should keep me busy for a while.

I’ll have a similar plan for this as I do for Subgoal 1; instead of Monday and Friday I’ll do Tuesday and Sunday. I’m a little nervous about those days as the are mostly booked for the foreseeable future, but what I hope to do is use remaining time on Mondays and Fridays to work on blogging.

I’ll count this as achieved after I’ve done two tech blog posts a week for eight weeks straight. Weekly progress shouldn’t be necesary :-)

My reward for finishing this is to buy myself new car speakers.

🔗 Subgoal 3: Get used to using some bug tracker for Open Source work

Currently I am not very good about using a bug tracker for anything other than work. I’ve used Google’s bug tracker, github’s issue tracker, RT, and am currently toying with ticgit. I need to pick something, get good at it, and stick with it.

I think I can do this. It mostly takes discipline to pull this off. I need to just add stuff to whatever bug tracker every time I am going to add a new feature, fix a bug, clean stuff up, whatever. I think I’m gonna use ticgit for now since I don’t want to write my own bug tracker yet.

I’ll count this achieved after every single one of the things from Subgoal 1 that are my own modules use the bugtracker I’ve chosen.

My reward for finishing this is to buy myself an amp for my car stereo.

🔗 Benefits

In the book he says you should state three benefits that you would get from finishing your goal. My three benefits are: I would be more respected in the community; my life would be easier as I’d have the things that I’ve been wanting for a while; and lastly, I could get more organized and more quickly ramp up on doing things.

TODO list

DBIx-Class-Helpers - Jnap’s stuff
DBIx-Class - Date Math stuff
~~Log-Contextual - subclassable importer~~
DBIx-Class-Helpers - StateHook
DBIx-Exceptions - Plan out remaining bits to get done
DBIx-Class-Shadow - Plan out remaining bits to get done
Git-Conversion-Book - Table of Contents
Git-Conversion-Book - Each Chapter (x10?)
Object-Exporter - Plan out remaining bits to get done
Log-Location - Plan out remaining bits to get done
HTML-Zoom-Widgets - Plan out remaining bits to get done
Catalyst-ActionRole-PseudoCache - Optionally use a real cache
DBIx-Class-Schema-Auth - Plan out remaining bits to get done
Net-Goodreads - Plan out remaining bits to get done
Data-Dumper-Concise - DwarnOnly
DBIx-Class - Logger Configuration
DBIx-Class - Logger Console Width
DBIx-Class - Non-Result based FilterColumn
DBIx-Class - Instance Based Relationship Helpers
DBIx-Class - Join Args
DBIx-Class - ResultSet Components
DBIx-Class-DeploymentHander - code cleanup
DBIx-Class-DeploymentHander - various doc patches
DBIx-Class-Helpers - Fix remove columns
DBIx-Class-Helpers - Work way to make SQLMaker helper
DBIx-Class-Helpers - ReadOnly
Log-Contextual - NullLogger ?
git-super-status - More Filters
git-super-status - More Sorts
git-super-status - Configurable Columns
git-super-status - Configurable Colors
git-super-fetch - get it started?
SQL-Translator - Finish SQL-Server cleanup
teatime - Convert 100% to REST
try-awesome - We have plenty exception generating frameworks, now we need a catching one
Log-Contextual-P6 - Port LC to P6
Log-Contextual-JS - Port LC to JS

Pending Blog Posts

~~Event Loops are better than while(1)~~
~~Powerful benchmarking with Perl and ab~~
Commercial Cross Platform Git
Alternatives to Sub::Exporter
Cool things you can do with Sub::Exporter
Why Exceptions are here to Stay
The Problem with Exceptions
Refactoring dispatch tables into objects
Emacs vs Vim
Simple Perl Proxy for Productivity
Sweet Code, thanks to Moose and Catalyst
Keep track of failing tests
Revised OpenID post (or not)
Write Code to be Cargo Culted
The Toolsmith: Vim, zsh, IRSSI, XMonad, etc etc
Filtering out things
On Syntactic Arcana

Posted Tue, Aug 2, 2011

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