motivation and disipline for the unmotivated & undisciplined

I find this article inspiring.The link seems misleading but i assure you it's not.

http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/money_mouth.htm

Soudns like handy advice lucid.

[quote:10u57h45]and then BLAM right there in midthought, I see my browser opened up

LOL, yes I know that feeling. Sometimes I open the browser and forget what I was suppose to be doing which only further makes things worse.

looking at pony pictures

Curse those adorable equines!

Anyway, would there happen to be an open source alternative or some such of that Assembla.com organizer?

Maybe todoist might be good? http://todoist.com/

When I saw this thread come up again I thought I would add the list program I found some time ago, and I see others have added some aswell!

I must say though that this one is quite nice, has helped me organise my project better.

http://www.dextronet.com/task-list-guru

there are quite a few. I have to leave to work soon, so I can't look through all these yet, but there's quite a few, and I'm sure at least some of them are as good as they say and support subtasks. there's a bunch linked to in these threads:

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questi ... h-subtasks

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questi ... -list-apps

and I started reading the link dravenx, and i will finish later. definitely seems relevant, thank you.

and thanks everyone else for the todo list links. I think I'll migrate my list over to one of the free ones. I don't feel like paying even a few bucks if there are free alternatives, and it turns out the svn part of assembla is free I think. it's the projectmanagement stuff that has the monthly fee.

Todo Plug

heh, ok app should be doable tho....

Wow I thought I was alone in the universe being that lazy, maybe it's the productive people who are wrong !!

Seriously, my major issue is that I can't get anything done. I have like trillions of projects scattered around my 3 PCs and I never finished them. That's not entirely true since I got some things finished when people were asking me to do them. I found me remedy but unfortunately, I can't do it alone.

I need PRESSURE!! Gimme a deadline with a clear task and you'll get that sooner that expected and in higher quality. Problem is that I can't give myself some deadline because it's too easy to push them back and in the end, forget about them.

That's mainly why I'm trying to get involve in community stuff like Contest and Community project, because other people expect me to do something, then I do something..

And I solved my general laziness in daily tasks by getting a girlfriend that makes sure to remind me what I gotta do.

Just registered to Toodledo by the way. But I'm pretty sure I'll never visit my account to check my task...I should make a post-it to remind that to me, and make a task to remind me to check my post-it.

So I think http://workflowy.com is the best one I've found, its absolutely perfect for me, its already helping me so much. Has a fantastic UI, and all the features I need.

So I think http://workflowy.com is the best one I've found, its absolutely perfect for me, its already helping me so much. Has a fantastic UI, and all the features I need.

thanks alspal. this is the one I'm going to go with as well. there's no way I can do time estimates and due dates at this point. I do like being able to prioritize, but the simplicity here is key, superminimalist. Also, none of the other sites worked well on my android phone, and the ones that had apps that synced with them had apps that were inexcusably annoying to use, where the whole time I'm just struggling to get it to do something simple because of buggy horrific ui. This one works like a charm on android, all features, and has the first mobile version of a page I don't have to scoff at and quickly change to the desktop version

thanks again. now I'm back to having everything free. which is just about what I can afford right now

One of the main hurdles I run into is knowing what I need to work on. I am at a stage in my project that I have never reached before, and as such I really don't know what I should be working on to progress, sometimes I don't know how to achieve what I want, and even worse is not knowing what I need to be trying to figure out how to achieve.

I have a feeling that once I finish off one project, when I have a more complete idea of the 'whole' of game making that I will be a lot better off.

Yeah, steven, that's one of the great things about these todo lists. I've quit around that stage many times before. Just brainstorm what's keeping your game from feeling complete, put all these steps down on workflowy.com(or whichever). each one that can't be finished in a single sitting, think of all the steps to complete it, and put those as substeps, if one of those is too large break it down again into substeps. Even if the step is "ask on scirra forum how to do whatever. When you sit down to work, choose from your toplist which you'd like to work on next to work on.. Even when you think you have a clear idea in your head about how to proceed, getting it out of your head and onto a list you can trust to be around when you need it frees up your concentration, and helps you to focus more thoroughly on the next task at hand

Looks like I'll be adopting that workflowy as well! Sweet simplicity.

Awesome awesome thread. I've been using a version of the two minute rule for the past 3 years and it's amazing. If it takes less than two minutes, do it now. With everything in your life. If I have a million little things to do (calling credit card companies, gassing up the car, replying to an important e-mail, etc.) I can't focus on my project. But if all those things are done, my brain is clear and geared to work.

I totally relate to the topic, I ran into same motivation problems over the last two years, having your own company is a thrill, but the contract-less periods were killing me, slowly making you addicted into web-browsing, retro tv streaming, indie games and other work-consuming related topics... and that is very hard to get out from once clients are knocking on the door.

I looked around for motivation tools, and found the pomodoro technique. Principle is a to do list per day, with a side list where you write down all tasks that carry out from one day to another. Then you break down each task in kitchen timer units (25 minutes each) and estimate how long each task will take. Each unit cannot be divided, if you get interrupted by yourself (a sudden need to browse a game development forum, for example) or someone else (phone call) you indicate that got carried away from the task at hands and void the unit running to start it again.

Basically, at the end of the day, you have a to-do list filled with units completed and interruptions, indicating how many 'real' 25 minutes you dedicated fully to the task, and how many times you got interrupted by yourself or others doing so.

Bad points: you need to be honest with yourself, and that's not easy at start.

Good points: you actually have after some days an accurate timesheet of all your activities (in my case, I use this for billing and evaluating). You actually get some work done during these 25 minutes and don't feel guilty not working when taking a break. Having a real kitchen timer and paper worksheet actually felt more tangible than any software app tracking time, it worked better for me, and actually slowly indicated people around not to interrupt before the ring!

this: http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

(I'm not selling anything here, all downloadable content is free. You can order your kitchen timer from them if you feel like giving back, though)