For my birthday for this round year of 2020 I decided to focus on improving myself. I quit my job and took a personal retreat in a cabin on the lake to investigate who I wanted to be. I followed the The Zen Founder Guide to Retreats. Here is what I discovered:
I’ve been focusing on exponentially increasing satisfaction in the world but I have been neglecting my own. Through much of this retreat I was focusing on my goals but I neglected to take a step back and look at what gives me satisfaction. After thinking it through, I feel most satisfied when I am creating tools that have an exponential positive impact for everyone. I like to find and solve root problems. I like to simplify improvement so it can feed future improvement. This may be so we can rest more, although it usually doesn’t lead to me resting more so far.
I think my new tagline and description will be:
Startup Prototypes and Mass Agreement. I create apps that help people make sense of the deluge of information, aspiring to exponentially improve billions of lives.
My current passion project aspires to build mass agreement on contentious issues. Gullibot helps you organize all the information about a contentious issue. Gullibot trusts everything you say and has no pre-existing biases or knowledge. As others join the dialogue Gullibot keeps all the information organized so you can easily see where you agree (and disagree) with the information provided so far.
More kind and generous Help others working on great projects to help everyone Prioritize quality over urgency (while still iterating) Be more intentional and less reactive Reduce reactions to negative emotions
I couldn’t tell if I was overloading myself and making sure I had time left for my priority tasks. I ended up making a spreadsheet allocating time per week including sleep and personal tasks. After all was said and done I have about 3 hours per day that is not allocated. Here are some interesting allocations:
| 8 | Learning new Tech |
| 16 | Reason Score/ Gullibot |
| 7 | Community (local and online) |
| 12 | Other Projects |
| 15 | Physical Health (exercise, yoga, etc.) |
| 11 | Mental Health (meditation, organizing tasks, etc.) |
I will be using Toggl to track my time. It doesn’t have a hierarchy of projects so I had to decide how I wanted the charts and reports to display. I ended up with just 4 main buckets (projects) I wanted to show on the charts. Business, Personal, Reason Score, and Learning. That will allow me to keep things balanced in my priorities easily. I added the hierarchy of my time allocation as tags so I could filter by each to see how much time I am spending to compare it to my time allocation chart and know when I need to switch to a different item.
I have 618 tasks in Todoist. I might switch over to OmniFocus because Todoist doesn’t allow me to hide tasks until later in the day or task counts and I find seeing too many tasks at a time stressful. 389 of those tasks are “bonus” which are just optional tasks. Of the remaining 229 real tasks 111 are “Active” which will be accomplished soon. I follow the Getting Things Done (GTD) method with a few changes. I can’t decide if that is too many tasks. I’m considering having a limit on the number of active tasks. Maybe 50 instead of the 111 that I have now.
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