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My cool-headed long-term-thinking self wants to "eat well, go for a run", but my saturday morning self just wants to sleep in and have a donut. Some of us need

My cool-headed long-term-thinking self wants to "eat well, go for a run", but my saturday morning self just wants to sleep in and have a donut. Some of us need some form of accountability structure to help our rational selves prevail over our self-sabotaging hedonist selves.

quickthrower2 6y ago
Habit forming works better. That’s why you don’t need a teeth brushing OKR. Or a dog walking OKR. Check out tiny habits. I find performance metrics tiresome these days, especially at work. As a programmer you are doing creative and fairly reactive work, yet you are trying to please some performance metric written 2 months ago for the quarter, which with new information is BS so now you need to negotiate to ignore the metric. I probably have metric fatigue.
- barrucadu 6y ago
  > That’s why you don’t need a teeth brushing OKR. I do have a teeth-brushing OKR because I forget to do it otherwise, to the point where I've had to have two teeth removed.
- wpietri 6y ago
  I don't think those things are opposites. I don't exactly do personal OKRs, but I'm definitely working towards goals. To hit some of those goals, I build habits. And to build those habits, I carefully track how well I'm doing on that. E.g., I had a goal of being more fit. I wanted a habit of daily exercise, so I set a target of 10k steps/day. My current streak is 33 days, but I'd say the habit is still forming. I'm going to shoot for 2 months and see how strong the habit feels then. I do agree that bad metrics are terrible, though. My sympathies!
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    Be careful with streaks. There’s another thread on today (about phone addiction) that goes into more depth how streaks can be harmful, but as an anecdote, I had a 500+ day streak on my Apple Watch fitness rings until the watch developed a fault intra day and I didn’t notice til the end of the day, breaking the streak. There’s no way to reset that, or show me new streak information. So I gave up entirely. The pandemic didn’t start for another 3-4 months, by which time I’d given up already.
    - wpietri 6y ago
      Fair point. Luckily, for me streaks become boring. They're just a tool for getting into a habit. Once I have the habit, I'll drop tracking the formal tracking of that particular metric. I really can only track so many things at once, and so I'll set some other goal.

quickthrower2 6y ago

Habit forming works better. That’s why you don’t need a teeth brushing OKR. Or a dog walking OKR. Check out tiny habits. I find performance metrics tiresome these days, especially at work. As a programmer you are doing creative and fairly reactive work, yet you are trying to please some performance metric written 2 months ago for the quarter, which with new information is BS so now you need to negotiate to ignore the metric. I probably have metric fatigue.

barrucadu 6y ago
> That’s why you don’t need a teeth brushing OKR. I do have a teeth-brushing OKR because I forget to do it otherwise, to the point where I've had to have two teeth removed.
wpietri 6y ago
I don't think those things are opposites. I don't exactly do personal OKRs, but I'm definitely working towards goals. To hit some of those goals, I build habits. And to build those habits, I carefully track how well I'm doing on that. E.g., I had a goal of being more fit. I wanted a habit of daily exercise, so I set a target of 10k steps/day. My current streak is 33 days, but I'd say the habit is still forming. I'm going to shoot for 2 months and see how strong the habit feels then. I do agree that bad metrics are terrible, though. My sympathies!
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  Be careful with streaks. There’s another thread on today (about phone addiction) that goes into more depth how streaks can be harmful, but as an anecdote, I had a 500+ day streak on my Apple Watch fitness rings until the watch developed a fault intra day and I didn’t notice til the end of the day, breaking the streak. There’s no way to reset that, or show me new streak information. So I gave up entirely. The pandemic didn’t start for another 3-4 months, by which time I’d given up already.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Fair point. Luckily, for me streaks become boring. They're just a tool for getting into a habit. Once I have the habit, I'll drop tracking the formal tracking of that particular metric. I really can only track so many things at once, and so I'll set some other goal.