How are you keeping yourself accountable / staying organized?

1. Tools for keeping accountable? I suggest a strong internal compass -- sorta kidding, but honestly most here won't suffer any repercussions of not hitting a goal, or completing a task on schedule, etc., so first and foremost, you need to want it bad. My accountability hinges a lot on simply not wanting to let myself down.

One thing I suggest for calibrating your internal compass is coming up with a personal mantra. A short sentence or a list of reasons you're doing what you're doing. Days will get long, problems will mount, walls will get higher, budgets will get tighter, burn out will ensue... but there's something about coming back to that mantra that brings peace and focus.

2. Agendas? yes. Goals? no. I'm being pedantic here, but a day is too granular to be setting goals for. At the daily level, I'm putting tasks on my agenda that I believe get me to one of my goals.

For tracking, I use a combo of a notebook, and a text editor(vim of course). The notebook is for more informal notes, drawings, and general scratch, and the text editor to formalize a list by day that I can more easily massage and move things around.

I also use the notebook before bed to hash out the next day. With a wife and a baby boy, the wee morning hours are highly valuable so I do everything I can to hit the ground running. It also has the added benefit of helping me stay off my laptop after working hours.

3. A bit of an expansion on @SEOGuy's point, but about a year ago I started using a hierarchical approach where I start with a few high-arching goals for the year, then break those into monthly milestones. From there I can break those monthly milestones into smaller, more defined weekly chunks. Then obviously from there, the weekly chunks are broken down into hyper-specific daily tasks.

I love this approach because I can always see what a task is "tied" to -- that is, I can walk up the hierarchy and see why I'm working on this task today, and how it plays into the bigger picture(great for that accountability you're chasing). It also helps me set pace, gives me clarity on if a task is really worth doing, and also gives me a constant dose of reality on how much time I actually don't have, and how important it is to say no.

4. Definitely. @joshtronic is on point, a face-to-face with like-minded individuals every week brings about a lot of intrinsic accountability, and if nothing else, a healthy dose of inspiration (the whiskey doesn't hurt).

I'll also second the benefits of diverting some of the ear-load my wife gets from me :)

Absolutely love talking about this kind of stuff...

1. Paper and pen. After using damn near everything out there, I always come back to the tangible.

Also Standup.ly (more on that in #4) and Slack as a whole for through the day chatting / bouncing ideas and such.

2. I work in weekly blocks (part of why I don't partake in the daily stand ups on here). I don't set monthly goals and do have a few loftier yearly things, but really the magic for me is in continuous weekly progress.

Going back to the paper and pen, I keep a list of up to 25 items (left side of a page) that I would like to accomplish for the week. Anything new that sneaks in is added to a second list of 25 deemed "next week" (on the right side of the page)

I work on items from both sides of the list but in a perfect world, I try to focus on the current week's tasks. Every week I create a new list of up to 25 items based on what was left from the previous week.

That's not to say every task carries over, since I'm regularly backlog grooming in a sense, I will grade the tasks and if they no longer seem important, I'll just omit them moving forward.

Sometimes tasks drop off then come back later.

3. As mentioned, I don't do much in terms of longer term goals. I'm a believer that building a great product will lead to success, so setting out to make a million bucks isn't as important to me as moving the needle every week with product improvements.

I've worked in shops that set a single monetary goal, and while it's awesome when you hit those goals, it's also pretty tragic when you wake up only to realize that the decisions made to hit a monetary goal doesn't always create a great product.

4. Definitely have my peeps. Right now it's mostly just me and my buddy / advisor @jwd2a

We have a weekly call on Mondays, usually just talk through what we're going to do for the week, bounce ideas and the like.

We've been doing this for over a year as part of our previous startup and now with our respective products.

Our process is our own bastardization of how we did things for YC Startup School with our group. Our process looks like this:

Monday: Standup.ly pings us with some questions:

• Our 1 one-liner (we type these out weekly to help improve them)
• Our trackable metric of growth (for me it's MRR for my bud it's active users)
• What we plan to ship this week

That's sometime in the morning, then later in the afternoon we hop on a video call and talk through stuff for about an hour. I wouldn't say that either of us a mentor to the other, but we are peers with high levels of respect for each other's respective accomplishments over our careers.

Wednesday: Standup.ly pings us to ask some more questions:

• Are we on track - Hell Yes or No
• If we're not on track, why the heck not?

Not related to the Monday video call, but I also hop on a video call Wednesday afternoons and sip whiskey with a few other buds of mine, including one of my advisors @collinbrewer. While not necessarily side hustle related, it never fails that I will probably bring something up related.

Friday: Standup.ly pings us for an end of week retrospective:

• Did you ship everything you wanted to
• If not, why?
• How's your morale, 1 through 10.

This has been going quite well for us. We took a few weeks off with everybody traveling recently and it was actually noticeable to me how I had a bit of void. Talking to my wife about my business is great and all, but I know she gets tired of hearing about it, so nice to have that extra set of ears to bounce ideas off of and stuff.

I'm also on todolist (text editor, nothing fancy), but my focus is only one project per time.
If I had ideas about new projects, I simply write down for later grooming.

Finish something is crucial, starting is too easy!

I think one of best advice I ever had on organization my personal/hobby/job todolist comes from @mirkop: "write down a list, but don't put a strictly deadline. When you have time, pick an item from the list, then move on, every day, just a little"

1. Todoist
2. Yes. Todoist.
3. Breaking long-term goals into daily tasks
4. No.