5 ms·

I have to mention that this is one of the top 3 tools in my personal stack. See some comments below regarding various things I saw in this thread. Stability: B

by tomgs 6y ago

I have to mention that this is one of the top 3 tools in my personal stack. See some comments below regarding various things I saw in this thread. Stability: Been running it for 2+ years now (or is it 3+ already?), no problems whatsoever. I update when the mood strikes - never had to roll back because something wasn't working. Why: As someone who considers himself terrible at remembering things, this little piece of software made all the difference re keeping up with people. The e-mail notifications is a killer feature - so simple, yet I've never done it before in my personal inbox. I think the fact that it's an external service and not inside your inbox matters from a UX perspective. I have this other place where I define the logic, and then receive it in the screen I look at every morning. Originally came to know of the project years back through https://sive.rs/hundreds https://sive.rs/hundreds, and while he's a bit better (a lot better) at it than I am, I can confidently say I've stayed in touch with dozens of people thanks to Monica. His notion of "ranked lists" also makes sense, at least to me, as a mental framework for managing personal contacts. Shameless plug (for the creators!): I 100% recommend Monica, have contributed to it, and am a big big supporter of https://github.com/djaiss https://github.com/djaiss (Regis), https://github.com/asbiin https://github.com/asbiin (Alexis), et al. They're actively working on something new now, so if that helps them somehow - link incoming: https://www.officelife.io/ https://www.officelife.io/ A personal comment: There's a (repeating) notion in this thread that keeping up with people is somehow linked to how much you care about them. I care deeply about many people I meet, personally, but I don't think the two are necessarily correlated. Example: Say I met someone years ago at school, and I thought she was pretty cool. I added her to Monica and I reach out to her once in a while to see what's up. We talk about work, exchange some personal stories, and go our separate ways. I might not think about her for months at a time, but then - quite intentionally - I think about her when the email notification comes up. It makes me happy that this person is somehow in my life. Is that impersonal? Is it wrong in some way? It's my own very, very private way of keeping people in my life. I don't see it as not genuine or fake. If it works, right?

terpimost 6y ago
I wonder what are another 2 tools in your stack?
- Throwaway1771 6y ago
  Guessing something like NextCloud/Gitea.
  - jstummbillig 6y ago
    That is... an oddly random guess.
    - privong 6y ago
      I'm not sure. It seems like a fairly normal combination of things for people who self-host. My stack is pretty much the same, except I use gogs instead of gitea, and I'd add `Lychee` for photo sharing.
- tomgs 6y ago
  Ah, personal stacks. What a wonderful topic to spend a late night writing session on. I am not really into self-hosting and homelabs, in the sense that I never got too deep into the proper architecture of it all and the "right" way of doing things. I find that when I'm creating tooling (or setting up tooling, for that matter) for myself, the only thing that matters is speed of setup and ease of use. Hosted is fine for many things if it's decoupled in a sensible way from your public identity or does not actually reveal anything that interesting about you, IMHO, but I assume that would be an unpopular opinion. A corollary from this "proposition" is that I leave the world of software often. For things that I have yet to find proper software for, but are indeed great needs that I have in my day to day life, I find my ways. Going back to your question, I'll admit the other two tools are a bit underwhelming. I'm a religious nail biter, and the only thing that ever made me stop was jotting in a pad every time I want to bite. I usually keep a small pad (as in a mini-notebook) in my backpack and draw hashtags and lines in it when I'm seeing the habit return. I'm now going through something a bit difficult personally, and while I'm constantly biting right now I know that when it will really bother me I can pull up the pad and stop biting again. It's stupid, I know, but again - it works for me. I got the idea from a book, btw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Habit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Habit). The other one is the Hacker's Diet Online (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html) - it's a weight watching tool by the guy who built AutoCad. I lost ±24 pounds after reading his book (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/) and have been tracking my weight ever since (±2 years). One recurring thing in my stack, as you noticed, is tracking. I am an AVID tracker of many things, and generally speaking advise anyone who is in a loop over something to do the same. It simply... works. If anyone wants to talk personal tracking, it's not hard to find me on the internets (TomGranot in most places except here). I have a plethora of ideas & opinions on the subject.
brtkdotse 6y ago
> There's a (repeating) notion in this thread that keeping up with people is somehow linked to how much you care about them. I care deeply about many people I meet, personally, but I don't think the two are necessarily correlated. I wholeheartedly agree. There’s a similar resistance towards books like “How to win friends...”, like you’re a sleazy car salesman for trying to improve your social skills. It’s like harping on people going to the gym and watching their diet for not being “naturally” fit.
- wh-uws 6y ago
  I figured out how to deal with cognitive dissonance people are feeling about this years ago. I would rather make a calendar invite / use <insert your fav software> and remember to call <valued loved one or friend> and feel bad about having to do that... Then forget to call and feel worse about forgetting.
  - tomgs 6y ago
    > Then forget to call and feel bad about forgetting. This. I feel really, really guilty if I hear something great or awful happened to someone I used to be in touch with, but the relationship faded away into the flow of life. Why wasn't I there? What? It's been 3 years since we last talked? How did that happen? So, no to all that jazz. Enter Monica. :)
- tomgs 6y ago
  > It’s like harping on people going to the gym and watching their diet for not being “naturally” fit. Exactly. I have this thing that I'm not good at. I have this tool I use to be better at it. Everybody wins. One might say that computers in general are tools for computational work, since people are not as good at crunching numbers in their head at a consistent, repetitive and deterministic fashion over time. One might even be right. :)
- ath92 6y ago
  I think the resistance towards that particular book is because the full title is "How to win friends and influence people". The last part in particular is what makes it sound sleazy. It would be very different if the book had just been called "How to make friends".
bengale 6y ago
> Is that impersonal? Is it wrong in some way? It's my own very, very private way of keeping people in my life. I don't see it as not genuine or fake. I agree with you, I do something like this on a much smaller scale to try and keep up with who I have and haven't spoken to recently. I have a lot going on and time seems to slip past me, I can easily go weeks without talking to people and it feel like no time at all. Making a deliberate effort to maintain those relationships doesn't seem like its fake to me.
- tomgs 6y ago
  > Making a deliberate effort to maintain those relationships doesn't seem like its fake to me. I actually think it's more genuine to care enough to write down to call somebody instead of letting it slip by you. Being determined to build the tooling to be good at something doesn't have to stay within the professional realm - it should extend to personal life as well.
Deivuh 6y ago
I also started using this tool a couple of years back, when it was posted on product hunt, and I found it pretty useful. I can say it had saved me time and frustration whenever I forgot a name or a detail about an acquaintance. I had completely forgotten about this, in fact I had been using the notes field on the contacts app, but thanks to this post I’m going back to it again. What are the other top two of your personal stack?
- tomgs 6y ago
  Then I have done my job as a member of Monica's community right. Happy to see you with us! Re your question, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25283008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25283008.
meonkeys 6y ago
When you use Monica, do you add and change data directly in Monica (manually)? Or in some scripted/automated fashion? I looked through the docs and didn't find anything about integrating/importing/exporting. I found lots of open feature requests for integrations. I've carefully curated contacts and meetings in my Nextcloud instance, so of course I'd like to leverage all that work. I added my thumbs-up to https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/1444 https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/1444
- tomgs 6y ago
  There was this notion of a mobile app for a minute there - https://github.com/monicahq/chandler https://github.com/monicahq/chandler - which I think might've been super duper awesome, but open source is hard. I would 100% use that over the desktop app if it was stable. Re automated / scripted vs. manual - manual all the way. I keep on mentioning to folks this study I read years ago about teachers who had a student tracking system in their school. The key point from the study was that the teachers who found the system useful are not the ones who got the most detailed or relevant reports, but the ones who actually INTERACTED with the tracking process. Some sort of "obligation" feeling or something drove them to look at the data and then utilize the learnings from it, IIRC. If anyone remembers such a study I'd be happy to get a link to it.

by tomgs 6y ago

terpimost 6y ago

I wonder what are another 2 tools in your stack?

Throwaway1771 6y ago
Guessing something like NextCloud/Gitea.
- jstummbillig 6y ago
  That is... an oddly random guess.
  - privong 6y ago
    I'm not sure. It seems like a fairly normal combination of things for people who self-host. My stack is pretty much the same, except I use gogs instead of gitea, and I'd add `Lychee` for photo sharing.
tomgs 6y ago
Ah, personal stacks. What a wonderful topic to spend a late night writing session on. I am not really into self-hosting and homelabs, in the sense that I never got too deep into the proper architecture of it all and the "right" way of doing things. I find that when I'm creating tooling (or setting up tooling, for that matter) for myself, the only thing that matters is speed of setup and ease of use. Hosted is fine for many things if it's decoupled in a sensible way from your public identity or does not actually reveal anything that interesting about you, IMHO, but I assume that would be an unpopular opinion. A corollary from this "proposition" is that I leave the world of software often. For things that I have yet to find proper software for, but are indeed great needs that I have in my day to day life, I find my ways. Going back to your question, I'll admit the other two tools are a bit underwhelming. I'm a religious nail biter, and the only thing that ever made me stop was jotting in a pad every time I want to bite. I usually keep a small pad (as in a mini-notebook) in my backpack and draw hashtags and lines in it when I'm seeing the habit return. I'm now going through something a bit difficult personally, and while I'm constantly biting right now I know that when it will really bother me I can pull up the pad and stop biting again. It's stupid, I know, but again - it works for me. I got the idea from a book, btw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Habit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Habit). The other one is the Hacker's Diet Online (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html) - it's a weight watching tool by the guy who built AutoCad. I lost ±24 pounds after reading his book (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/) and have been tracking my weight ever since (±2 years). One recurring thing in my stack, as you noticed, is tracking. I am an AVID tracker of many things, and generally speaking advise anyone who is in a loop over something to do the same. It simply... works. If anyone wants to talk personal tracking, it's not hard to find me on the internets (TomGranot in most places except here). I have a plethora of ideas & opinions on the subject.

brtkdotse 6y ago

> There's a (repeating) notion in this thread that keeping up with people is somehow linked to how much you care about them. I care deeply about many people I meet, personally, but I don't think the two are necessarily correlated. I wholeheartedly agree. There’s a similar resistance towards books like “How to win friends...”, like you’re a sleazy car salesman for trying to improve your social skills. It’s like harping on people going to the gym and watching their diet for not being “naturally” fit.

wh-uws 6y ago
I figured out how to deal with cognitive dissonance people are feeling about this years ago. I would rather make a calendar invite / use <insert your fav software> and remember to call <valued loved one or friend> and feel bad about having to do that... Then forget to call and feel worse about forgetting.
- tomgs 6y ago
  > Then forget to call and feel bad about forgetting. This. I feel really, really guilty if I hear something great or awful happened to someone I used to be in touch with, but the relationship faded away into the flow of life. Why wasn't I there? What? It's been 3 years since we last talked? How did that happen? So, no to all that jazz. Enter Monica. :)
tomgs 6y ago
> It’s like harping on people going to the gym and watching their diet for not being “naturally” fit. Exactly. I have this thing that I'm not good at. I have this tool I use to be better at it. Everybody wins. One might say that computers in general are tools for computational work, since people are not as good at crunching numbers in their head at a consistent, repetitive and deterministic fashion over time. One might even be right. :)
ath92 6y ago
I think the resistance towards that particular book is because the full title is "How to win friends and influence people". The last part in particular is what makes it sound sleazy. It would be very different if the book had just been called "How to make friends".

bengale 6y ago

> Is that impersonal? Is it wrong in some way? It's my own very, very private way of keeping people in my life. I don't see it as not genuine or fake. I agree with you, I do something like this on a much smaller scale to try and keep up with who I have and haven't spoken to recently. I have a lot going on and time seems to slip past me, I can easily go weeks without talking to people and it feel like no time at all. Making a deliberate effort to maintain those relationships doesn't seem like its fake to me.

tomgs 6y ago
> Making a deliberate effort to maintain those relationships doesn't seem like its fake to me. I actually think it's more genuine to care enough to write down to call somebody instead of letting it slip by you. Being determined to build the tooling to be good at something doesn't have to stay within the professional realm - it should extend to personal life as well.

Deivuh 6y ago

I also started using this tool a couple of years back, when it was posted on product hunt, and I found it pretty useful. I can say it had saved me time and frustration whenever I forgot a name or a detail about an acquaintance. I had completely forgotten about this, in fact I had been using the notes field on the contacts app, but thanks to this post I’m going back to it again. What are the other top two of your personal stack?

tomgs 6y ago
Then I have done my job as a member of Monica's community right. Happy to see you with us! Re your question, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25283008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25283008.

meonkeys 6y ago

When you use Monica, do you add and change data directly in Monica (manually)? Or in some scripted/automated fashion? I looked through the docs and didn't find anything about integrating/importing/exporting. I found lots of open feature requests for integrations. I've carefully curated contacts and meetings in my Nextcloud instance, so of course I'd like to leverage all that work. I added my thumbs-up to https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/1444 https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/1444

tomgs 6y ago
There was this notion of a mobile app for a minute there - https://github.com/monicahq/chandler https://github.com/monicahq/chandler - which I think might've been super duper awesome, but open source is hard. I would 100% use that over the desktop app if it was stable. Re automated / scripted vs. manual - manual all the way. I keep on mentioning to folks this study I read years ago about teachers who had a student tracking system in their school. The key point from the study was that the teachers who found the system useful are not the ones who got the most detailed or relevant reports, but the ones who actually INTERACTED with the tracking process. Some sort of "obligation" feeling or something drove them to look at the data and then utilize the learnings from it, IIRC. If anyone remembers such a study I'd be happy to get a link to it.