I have an entire YouTube Premium profile dedicated 100% to music I listen to while working, and it's my default YouTube account on my normal Chrome profile I use to browse the internet, which helps me from falling into browsing stupid videos.

I have two big music playlists, one with my "normal" YouTube account that I had been using for years, the second with my music-dedicated YouTube account that I started using more-recently.

I've linked to one of my favorite sets in each list:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=osS2z…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZiPW…

ok so then maybe it's a legacy behavior from before when there were 'todos'.

Yeah maybe make the default a completed task and require the user to add /todo to make it not-yet-completed.

I was following Pieter's posts here for years w/o having an account myself, just to try to understand his work habits so I could emulate them. I created an account b/c I don't seem to have anyone near me who I can meet up with to cowork and talk about indie hacking every day the way Pieter/Marc/Andrey/etc. had it set up in Dojo Bali, so this is the next best thing. My childhood / school friends aren't into indie hacking (or even programming) so that's not an option either. Seeing other people's progress (like Ben w/ Watchdog), especially when I've met them IRL, gives me added motivation to get something done that day, even if it's just a small step. I also block Twitter b/c I waste too much time on it, so this is a nice way to get some social experience / take a break without risking wasting a ton of time. Indie hacking is my #1 professional priority, I'd sooner work as a garbage man and do indie hacking on the side than have to work a traditional office job for the rest of my life, so I'm happy to pay to support this community.

As for how to make the most of it: get to know the individual people by meeting them IRL if you can or following them on Twitter, check out their projects, comment on their posts, like their posts. Set a goal to hit a certain streak (ideally w/o using non-indie-hacking-related posts to keep your streak going, IMO Marc should police that more).

Your idea is well beyond where I am in my journey but one thing I've frequently thought I'd pay for is a service that helps me put out YouTube content for marketing. Helps me organize my ideas, write the scripts, buy/rent the right equipment, do outreach to YouTubers for collaborations, edit the videos.

I had been lifting for several years before I started using it and I noticed it had a minor-but-noticeable effect on my ability to lift; I could get maybe 1-2 more reps and maybe go up in weight a little bit. I think it may have also made me look a little bigger than before. So it's a very minor effect compared to the difference you'll see from actually starting to track your calories and go to the gym. But it's better than not having it.

That's a crazy schedule. What does your work schedule look like now while you're working on your startups?

I love the motivation behind this idea but in my case I'm not even at the point where I can think about SEO, so I wouldn't be able to participate in that particular topic.

My personal preference (which would be more complicated to implement) would be to have some kind of individual and/or team events where the goal is to put in a certain number of hours per day/week on your project, with some kind of verification mechanism that people aren't faking the activity or working on bullshit projects (what jumps out at me is having the community agree that your project is 'real' and then having a tracker/screenshot tool like Hubstaff/Upwork with clicks/keypresses/etc.). So it's a means of motivating people to put time into their projects.

I was imagining a little square widget on the user's profile in the right sidebar. The X axis is days, the Y axis is the amount of time it took the person to start working (self-reported).

The idea would be you could have several different types of productivity-measures that people could track. For example, MyFitnessPal lets you track steps per day, but I don't use that functionality.

I think your proposed version would definitely result in a smaller codebase since you wouldn't be collecting and storing additional types of information, my only reservation is that I don't think it would be particularly useful to me without knowing 1) when I woke up that day (maybe have that as a special TODO type that gets ignored on the homepage / profile so it doesn't clutter the UI?), 2) how difficult the TODO was, since some of my tasks take many hours to complete (I suppose it would incentivize having small tasks to jumpstart the day, which is a productivity tip I've already been wanting to use).

my understanding is that the #1 reason a lot of EU citizens changed their residency to Portugal is that it doesn't tax people nearly as heavily as their home country (some of which were like 50% taxes or something crazy high like that). IMO people/jobs moving to lower COL countries is going to be a major trend in our lifetimes, and the higher-tax / higher-COL countries are going to need to have some Argentina-style cost cutting and/or face Detroit/West-Virginia-style blight.