Everything's Beta

Goals are good; regardless of how they work out, working at them gives you something to show for the time spent. Read the last 13 words again. If you don’t have something tangible to show, you just wasted your time. So, always try to produce something tangible.

With a ~/Code folder full of projects ranging from “twinkles in my eye” to “just need one more day”, I will be the first to admit I suck at this. I tell myself it’s because I have overcome the core technical problem and the only thing left to do is polish and release. It’s really easy to get sucked in by this, especially when you get another idea (and you will). Or, you may get embroiled in feature creep; you add feature after feature after feature. It’s also easy to say “I really learnt xyz even if there was no releasable product” and let it go at that.

However, all these reasons suck. The first gets you in the habit of abandoning projects 80% of the way, the second is tricky balancing act, but the third is merely mental hand waving; the experience that counts, where you actually learn something, is when you have a working product *that people can use*. It doesn’t matter how close something is to being released. Anyone can make things that kinda work; if it wasn’t released, you probably haven’t learnt the most important things or solved the hardest problems.

With this little epiphany that I need to finish projects, I decided to kill 2 birds with 1 stone by writing an application that keeps me on track with projects (no, I didn’t miscount, that’s 2 things). I also set a deadline of starting and finishing it in one day so I could beat feature creep.

Consequently, let me introduce Commit, a OSX app based on the wisdom of Jerry Sienfeld’s productivity secret. Basically, you set up various goals that you commit to doing everyday. The motivation to keep the chain from breaking pushes you over the humps when you really want to take a break. Instead of thinking “I will just miss today” you start thinking “I can’t break the chain today”. If that isn’t enough, you get *A GOLD STAR* for everyday you live up to your commitment

Commit also generates graphs to help you track your progress:

• All time graph shows you a graph of all days since you started this goal. The dips are the days you missed !
• The weekly graph lets you see what days of the week seem to be problem areas.
• The monthly graph, like the weekly graph, lets you determine patterns of when you slip up, but at a higher level.

So those are some things it currently does. It was hard not to keep on tacking on new features. But, the limit of the one day release really helped, even though I pushed it a bit

Things I decided to forego for now: optional twitter/facebook updates on milestones, group commits(group of people commit together, it tells you who is lagging), more graphs, better interface.

So download Commit now and start collecting gold stars