MetaPrompt is a nonstandard todo list. The very bare-bones basic idea is that you add ideas to a deck of cards, and you shuffle this deck to draw things to do. This is useful for "tasks" with no priority, where you just want to be reminded of the idea at some point in the future. You can also add cards which tell you to add more cards; hence the name.

Most of this is written in a very narrative way. If you just want the how-to, skip to the how-to section.

For many people, there's something interesting about being told what to do: it's easier to make someone else a sandwich than to make one for yourself, for example. One partial explanation is decision fatigue: deciding to do things for yourself takes some sort of energy, which being told to do doesn't take.

This suggests that, in some situations, people can benefit from 'willpower partners': you each (for example) tell each other to make a sandwich. You end up with two sandwiches and no decision fatigue; a net gain over you each making a sandwich for yourself.

But what if you could be your own "willpower partner"?

In 2016, I was learning dvorak. I wanted typing practice; but, I didn't want boring typing practice. I remembered the post about WriterKata on Agenty Duck from the previous year. WriterKata was a great little website for practicing writing by responding to writing prompts. Why not practice typing and creative writing at the same time, by responding to prompts?

Unfortunately, by 2016, WriterKata no longer existed. It seems the author took the website down. I guess it wasn't worth the hosting expense? (Sad; it seemed good enough that it should have been able to support itself somehow.)

I could have just found writing prompts somewhere and typed my responses into any kind of text file, but I wanted the clean interface: a random prompt selected for me, with a text box directly below it where I could immediately type my response. I know from experience that can be enough to make the difference between vaguely intending to practice for months, vs sitting down and doing it for hours.

I went to the command line. I started a file "kata" for writing prompts, with the idea that I could pull one line from it randomly using standard command line tools. Then, I could write my responses to another file.

However, I was lazy. I didn't want to spend a bunch of time copying writing prompts to the file before beginning.

So, the...

Caleb Sparks

Caleb Sparks