How do I use habits. My Influence.

My Influence page helps in your general overview. Simply talking, everything that concerns you is your concern (interesting twist). Concerns are divided in those you can do something about (influence), and those you can't, that just sit there in your brain just to irritate you (concern :) ). So, now you don't have to keep them all in your brain but can rather enter them into the program. You can add optional description to each concern.

For example, the world economic crisis might be something that bothers you, so it's your concern. You have to decide - is it something you can influence or it's just something that irritates you, but you don't have much control over? After you decide, you enter that into corresponding section. I thought that it concerns me but there's not much I can do. At least, for now :). I've put that into concerns. At the same time, my own behaviour while driving a car is something that I control. I've put this into My Influences.

After some time, I might decide that I can actually influence world situation - I move the crisis to My Influences.


As you see, the idea is quite simple - to be more productive, you concentrate on what you can really influence. You should spend time on that rather than on useless thoughts that do nothing but take your time. This page accompanies My Mission page, helping you to write "on paper" what is on your mind - a technique that helps to "free" your brain of data, moving it to something in front of you, and use the brain to better categorize, visualize, analyze that data.

Editting the items is pretty simple:
1. Click on the item to open it
2. Press Edit - do your modifications (e.g., move from Concern to Influence)
3. Press Save

I don't use this page every day. I return to it when I feel like I need to do some review work. Or, just to get some motivation. Or, some guidance. Or, just to see what I've written there times ago.


What about you? How often do you use this page? Do you find it useful at all (we got some letters from people who didn't) ?
Is there anything you want to change about it?

The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time

magic

How do I use habits. My Mission.

In this series of posts, I want to share how do I use the Habits app in my everyday life. I will describe the steps I make, features I use, what I like and what I don't like, ideas about what needs to be done.

How do I start?

First of all, I go with My Mission statement. As said in the book, a Mission statement is a Constitution. A constitution is a basis for all the laws in a country. Similarly, My Mission statement is something that will lead me in my goals and actions, will create rules and boundaries for defining and executing them. It is what I want about my life flow, what I see myself, what I value. Idea (if you can say idea of an axiomatic substance) is to visualize what you want to be and what you want to do. Thinking of and writing it helps you better identify your principles, which in turn helps you better define your mission.

My current mission statement differs from the first version, probably almost fully, if considering the text. I don't even remember the words I wrote the first time. Because I come back to it time to time, modify it. It evolves as evolve thoughts in my mind. I don't mean that my life vision and phylosophy change drastically - most of us think basically of similar things - happiness, health, wealth, etc. It's just the shapes these wishes are expressed by change. So change the statements in my mission statement.

I enter my statement. Return to read it time to time. Modify it a bit. The program is very convenient for this - just 2 clicks to read, write, read again. Usually, I return to it once in one-two day, sometimes more often, sometimes less.

We understand that not all people are ready to share their statement with others, so we added possibility to protect this page by a password. Similar protection exists for the whole app itself. To use it: 

  1. Open "My Mission" page 

  2. Menu 

  3. Protect with Password.

Resetting is similar.

What about you - do you have your mission statement written? How often do you read it, review it? What do you want to add/modify/improve about this page?

Habits: what's new!

We just posted a new update of the My Effectiveness Habits app, aka Habits. It came out just 5 days after the previous release, and, since it introduces some nice and useful features, we decided to roll it out today. This is what it has:

1. Drag and drop for sub-actions in Project and Checklist actions.
2. UI redesign - moving to less elements on the screen + searching for better usability. You will like new screens, they're better enough, and not complete rework at the same time. Evolution.
3. Action name 'tap to edit' on the action screen - making life easier, trying to avoid as much unnecessary steps as possible.
4. delete backup file from app directly - use long-click menu. Reason - same as above, as before, as must be: make it simple, pleasant to use. Very useful if you want to cleanup your backup folder and not launch heavy file explorer to do that
5. ss - seconds added to backup file name: ddMMyyyy_hhmmss. You might want to make 10 backups in 1 minute (or, even 60, if you can). Previous naming template didn't take that into account. Now it does.