Hooked

I've been reading a bunch of books lately. I have a little plastic zip top bag for snacks that I taped to the outside of my shower curtain liner, and I put my phone in it, and use the Kindle app to read while I shower. If you do this, make sure you put it high enough that it's not constantly getting splashed.

Most recently, I just finished Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products, by Nir Eyal. Recommended to me by Amazon after reading The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.

After a more in depth book like The Power of Habit, and my light study in psychology, Hooked felt really light on insight, and I didn't find the writing style to be particularly compelling. I think if I'd read them in the opposite order, I might have liked it better. Considering a target audience with no real reason to expect that they know anything about psychology, I could see it being a valuable introduction.

Each chapter closes with TL;DR bullet points and some exercises to help you design something. If you already know a little bit about habits and psychology, I'd recommend just reading those points first, maybe in a book store or something, and decide if any of it seems new to you before buying it.

I didn't do those exercises, because I'm an asshole, but I felt inspired last night to start a new project so I'll revisit them.

I've been sitting on this idea of a pomodoro timer tied to a kanban board for a while. Some of that sitting time was trying to figure out what to call it. Kanodoro? Pomoban? Pomban? I didn't love any of these. I also wasn't sure what the best approach would be for doing the backend.

The basic idea is you have cards that you're currently doing, but maybe the task is big and you'd normally waste time thinking about how hard it is, instead of taking some small action right away. So you come up with something you think you can do in 25 minutes, you write that step down, and start a pomodoro, and work on it. As you repeatedly do this, you have a documented record of all the steps you took, with chances to add notes, and you can use the pomodoro count in the future to estimate the amount of time a task like that takes if something like that comes up again.

I find that I'm generally more productive when I'm doing pomodoros and keeping notes on all the hitches that come up and how I solve them, or note that I'm punting or whatever. It gives me a strong sense of my current status that makes me more resilient to interruptions, which are inevitable.

Last night, I figured I could just use the Trello API for the backend (Trello is a popular kanban system from Fog Creek), and just whip together an Ember frontend, and it would save me a ton of work, and I'd have something I could use sooner. It would also let you collaborate with people who don't like the pomodoro technique. The best part would be that I could call it Pomello, which has clear roots in its components, and is close enough to another bulbous fruit (pomelo), such that I can make a shitty logo.