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Ask HN: Alternatives to track life progress apart from a daily stand-up?

7 points| wxce | 2 years ago

I'm thinking what the the most optimal way might be for this purpose. I'm thinking of implementing a daily stand-up doc of all the things I did on X day and what could be done better, and a value plan for the next day.

7 comments

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kkoncevicius|2 years ago

> daily stand-up doc of all the things I did on X day and what could be done better, and a value plan for the next day

Did you come up with this yourself, or did you copy it from somewhere else? Because I would like to know more. This sounds like a very good approach.

> I'm thinking what the the most optimal way might be

From my experience - don't even go looking for "most optimal ways" in this journey. The simpler, the more unstructured - the better. Otherwise maintaining the whole setup will take more than give.

wxce|2 years ago

> Did you come up with this yourself, or did you copy it from somewhere else? Because I would like to know more. This sounds like a very good approach.

I came up with the thought, but the exact term Value Plan, I've read somewhere, Andy Grove (maybe, unsure, I'll try to find a source).

wxce|2 years ago

> From my experience - don't even go looking for "most optimal ways" in this journey. The simpler, the more unstructured - the better. Otherwise maintaining the whole setup will take more than give.

That makes sense actually.

gardenhedge|2 years ago

The concept of a daily "stand-up" is that the team gets aligned with each other. Unfortunately it's mostly implemented via the famous 3 questions. This, along with a task board, essentially leads the meeting to be a status update. This is less helpful because team members become focused on just their own update. After 5 - 10 years of daily stand-ups, it gets pretty tedious.

Your idea sounds like a retrospective but done daily. I think the benefit of retrospectives are that there's time to see the impact of things and learn from them. Daily is too often.

Ezra|2 years ago

We write away the status part of our syncs. Just write it down, we don’t need to hear it.

One thing we used at the last two companies I worked at was what we call SWATH—something I invented for reasons of corporate judo.

It’s 5 simple true or false questions that gives you a score. Answer them in order, atop when you answer false. Your score is the number if true answers.

It takes most people 2 seconds to do, and is a kind of health check. They’re very basic questions.

Other than that, we have a shared agenda that people can add items they want to talk about to. Work related or not.

bjorn2run|2 years ago

Can you expand on what the questions were? What would a high or low score indicate or trigger?

ATMLOTTOBEER|2 years ago

Have u considered getting a pencil and writing on a sheet of paper every day? This is commonly referred to as “a journal”