I started to think how my last post was not so much about personal growth, but more about gaining instrumental value by using the tools I've learned to use so far. Should that side be side of Hacked Man at all, or should this blog be just about thinking up and testing new tools and for end in itself self improvement?

I ended up wondering if it was somehow banal or mundane to use Hacked Man as a way to gain practical benefits (like shinier shoes). Still, you have to take into account a couple of things:

1) As Paulo Coelho has said, the shoes are the mirror of your soul. Vis:

Therefore all effort spend on your shoes is always a brilliant idea and an investment into your personal growth and happiness.

2) And more seriously, practicing the use of tools is also important. In theory, using Timely to plan and track time spent on stuff is an effective and useful tool. In practice, I always seem to forget to put the timer on or stop it when I finish and stick to the stuff I have planned on doing. On the other hand, I'm starting to be pretty good at Beeminder already. I have managed to graft it into my daily routine and reliably remember to track stuff in it.

The difference is mostly practice. I get way more mileage out of Beeminder at this moment than from Timely. Beeminder might end up being a better tool for me after all possible training, but it's difficult to really say without giving Timely a proper try. For example, doing reality checks never just happened, even though I spent months on it and used Beeminder and thought hooks and everything imaginable to make it happen. Only after practicing for longer, can I say if Timely is reality checks or Beeminder for me.

There's doing and there's planning. In any development project you need both. Planning the perfect daily routine and the optimal macronutrient intake is all well and good, but then you get a stomach flu and manage to eat only noodles for a week or try to go cold turkey with all sugar and end up killing up a random stranger in mad rage or something. Just doing fun stuff in a random manner would be nearly as bad.

After all this, I think that next I'll need to do some more planning and lay down a proper routine on learning to use Timely better. I'll get back to this in the next post.

Until then, let's use some tools.