✦
Experiments

Productivity boss fightThe thing you are dreading
has a health bar.

A big task is frightening mostly because it has no edges. You cannot see how long it will take, so every session feels like it might be endless, and something that might be endless is very hard to start on a Tuesday evening.

Free, no sign-up. Worked out in your browser, nothing sent anywhere, and the result imports into EvyOS.

Name the boss. It is more frightening while it is unnamed, which is the point.

Everything is worked out in this page and saved in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere.

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✦ How to use it

Three things that make it work.

1
Estimate the hours, badly

Your first number will be low. It always is, which is why it gets adjusted.

2
Be honest about the sessions

How long you actually work uninterrupted, not how long you sit down for.

3
Schedule the fight

The output is a number of sessions. Put that many in a calendar and the boss is already mostly dead.

Giving it a health bar removes exactly that. Once the thing has a number and your sessions do a known amount of damage, the fight has a length — and a fight with a known length is a completely different proposition from an open-ended dread.

The estimate will be wrong. It is still far better than no estimate, because it converts “this is enormous” into “this is eleven evenings”, and eleven evenings is a thing a person can schedule.

✦ The limit

An answer is not a record.

This works something out and then forgets it. It cannot tell you whether the number moved, because it has no memory of the last time you ran it and no idea what you did in between. Every calculator on the internet has that limit, and if it has never bothered you then this one is yours for free for good.

EvyOS is the same structure with the work recorded against it. Send the result across and it becomes real goals, tasks or habits with their dates — then the next answer is computed from what actually happened rather than from what you remember typing.

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✦ Questions

Productivity boss fight, answered.

Because everybody underestimates, and the error scales with how unfamiliar the work is. This is the planning fallacy with a number attached rather than a scolding — up to 90 per cent is added for work you have never done, and almost nothing for work you do every week.
The framing is a joke; the number is not. A big task is frightening mostly because it has no edges, and converting "this is enormous" into "this is eleven evenings" changes it from a dread into something you can put in a calendar.
The second quarter, where it stops being novel and is not yet nearly done. It is where most attempts are abandoned, and knowing in advance that it is coming is genuinely most of the defence against it.
Then split it. Make the first third its own boss with its own end date — a fight longer than about ten weeks stops feeling finite, which is the exact property that made the health bar useful.
Send it across: the boss becomes a project in EvyOS and each session a task, so the health bar becomes a real record rather than an estimate you made once.

Keep the answer.
And the record of doing it.

Goals, projects, tasks, habits and skills in one system, with the work logged against what it belonged to.

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