Merry Christmas And A Happy Coming New Year!

Latest update was the last in 2015, if no urgent bug appears - fixed restoring backup failing in some cases, goal page reworked a bit to try to ease typing, some other minor improvements.

We wish you all the best in the coming year!

Recent updates 16.11.2015

Released version is 0.17.10. There are two new features, if I remember it right :). First of them is the ability to copy action's details (notes) to a separate note in the whole app's Notes-Ideas section. Use the menu on the action page. The note will be created and it's title will be "From action action_name_here". A bar will pop up clicking on which you will be able to go straight to the note. This often comes handy if you keep notes related to some actions while working on them, and want to keep the notes once you finish the action (which I usually delete).

Another feature - when you filter by goal or set an action's goal, you can now create a new goal and use it. Just press the (+) round button in the goal list that opens. It will ask you to choose a role you want to add the goal to, then enter the goal text. This goal will then be either applied as the filter on the FTF/Actions pages (if you triggered the page by filter), or will be set as action's goal.


There are still bugs known to be fixed, will look at them next. Among them - setting filter on FTF/Actions to 'Today' ignores calendar dates, only abstract week days are used. For example, today November 16th, 2015, Monday. If you set the filter to 'Monday' it will ignore all the actions that have their action date set as 'Nov. 16th, 2015'. This is the result of the evolutionary development - as many of you know, calendar dates for actions have come not long ago. Before that we had only week days. The filter worked with those week days, but has not been updated to use the calendar dates as well. We are working on fixing it.

On vacation.

We are on a short vacation, so please forgive for some delays in replies to letters, questions and reviews.

Random productivity mood

New feature published yesterday. The idea is: if you set the option on in the settings, almost each time on start the app will randomly choose the productivity mood color.

It is still in experimental mode, may remove it if we get many complains. We had to publish it since there were complains about FC on FTF page for some users, we had to publish fix for them, and this feature was already implemented and went public together with the bug fix.

As said above, you can turn it on/off in the settings. And see if it's on or off in the mood selection area:

Update: This change lead to a funny bug on the weekplan page:

If you don't like this side effect, just switch the feature off in the settings.

On procrastination, again.

Procrastination is when you avoid doing something important that you have to. Your brain doesn't like new or hard work. It likes things pleasant, fun, easy to do. It likes things it did many times before that it knows well.

Technically, it just tries to save energy: new things tend to take more brain time, because the brain has to learn how to do them. That's why it tries to "trick" you into not doing that important thing. And instead of getting ready to your next exam or tomorrow's meeting at work, you go read some interesting article on a blog or watch again an episode of your beloved series, surf the facebook or instagram (or, another blog on how to fight procrastination :) ).

As a result, in the beginning you feel yourself better - because you do what you like, not what you have to - but that's just for a short time. After some time, your brain (the same brain that made you procrastinate, remember?) now "whispers" into you the feeling of guilt, makes you unhappy you didn't do what you have to, that you're lazy. Now you end up with a not finished task and with a movie (blog post) that doesn't make you happy.

That sounds bad, but here are the good news - there's a way to make yourself into doing that important (but "unpleasant") task. And the trick is - simply start doing it.

It turns out (some scientists found out, if you want to learn more, you can search for it) shortly after starting doing the work, you forget about that fear and reluctance and do what's needed much better. You get a working mood and have a better concentration on the work, too. You get into the process. After some time of doing your work, you forget that feeling of fear and discomfort and work normally. So, the only thing left is to just start doing it.

One of the ways that may help you get into that working mood is by dividing your work time into periods, interleaving them with breaks. The length of a period is rather personal, I try to change it time to time, some times using 21 minute work periods, some times 44. You work for 21 minutes, than have short break, than again.

This is what this page about:

The post seems a bit cumbersome and not complete, but you have to forgive me - I'm neither professional psychologist nor professional personal trainer. Procrastination is one of my main problems, probably, thus I started writing the app - first of all to help myself do better and do more. If you google on the topic, you can find a lot of information and tools. I learned something from a course on Coursera called "Learning how to learn": https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn. It is a great  help to anyone  who wants to improve his learning, working skills. And it is free and easy to follow, take it - won't regret.

Anti-procrastination feature

now has its own page. Currently with the timer only:

Also, you can set in the Settings whether the alarm should be on by default when you open the program.

Expand entering goal, role, etc. - anyone uses it?

Upd.: Since it turned out that there are still user who use it, we'll not remove it! Thanks for the feedback!

Long time ago, on smaller screens, this was a necessity for some users (including me) to enter more text than is visible.

Time goes on and bigger screens gain more and more market place. It seems like it's not that useful anymore and even may lead to confusion to new users.

So, if there's no serious objection, we'll gradually remove them from most of the screens.

Main page scrolling and more

Main page scrolling enhanced: now all the items in action list are used to scroll the screen, before it was only the today/tomorrow counter section:

Week plan calendar view can now be scrolled by 3 months back and forth:

Weekly goal view shows up to 3 of its actions (Four, One, Seven are actions):

I like how it looks much better now, but we still want to continue improving it.

Enjoy!

One of the updates in the next release

 




But, not the only. In fact, there will be several very nice, almost not noticeable, changes that should make your app experience much more pleasant. Enjoy!)

P.S. Don't forget to rate us on the Play Store - it is very important for us and keeps us awake working on the app better than anything!

Weekplan page look and feel updated

Now it looks something like this:

Other changes are: use left menu from Google (the look has changed, too), improved note editing, other fixes and improvements.

What's new in recent update: weekly goals and other

Earlier today we have launched new update distribution. It is mainly about improvements to the week plan page and various fixes and improvements to other pages.


On the weekly goals page we've reused the layout used for actions - horizontally scrolling lists for each day. Also, the goals now take calendar day and filter into account.


The layout of the goal item also has changed, too - no more expanding panel, clicking on the item you go to the goal page straight. It is also not final change - we still are not happy about its look and functionality, so it is subject to possible change in the future.

An open question is - is it at all useful? The idea was to have an overview of what goals you need to reach during the week or at concrete day. One of the problems is - goals are shown based on actions for that day - if all the actions of a goal for that day are done, the goal is shown as done. But, the goal might as well contain actions for other days, which are not done. And when you'll go to that goal's page, it won't be shown as done.


There was a bug on the weekplan page - it FC-ed when you scheduled an action for the August 31th - we've fixed it.


Some other changes: home and some other pages' background changed to grey - seems like we had too much white on the screens. The form of some elements also has been tweaked a bit. What do you think?

(yes, I didn't do today's morning workout)

Our greatest achievement...

in breaking the app in one day is definitely today. We managed to break it 3 times, latest fix just has been published

:(

Help with bug on CalendarView

Upd: we've found the bug, will fix with the next  release.

There's a bug on Weekplan's Calendar view. It doesn't happen to all, but, apparently, quite some users are affected.

Some users wrote in their crash reports that they just click on the Calendar view and it fails. But, most probably there are some other prerequisites, as we do the same - just click everywhere on the calendar view - and it doesn't fail. Would be great if anyone could give us those steps.

If somehow you know the steps, please, tell us at ksasdk@gmail.com - that would be a very great help to us! Thank you!

Week plan calendar view

Upd.: some description of the current features:

+ you can change week view for 3 months: 1 month before, current month, 1 month after. This is to be modified in the future, probably, but at the moment gives enough room for better calendar planning;

+ current widget may be modified in future updates - from what we found, this looked like the only open-source library that was compatible with Android 2.3, the minimal version of Android we do support now. It is simple enough, so we might well stay with it;

+ goal view (and reminders) are not updated behind the basic view - this is the next step - to make the goals view use calendar settings, too. The goal view itself is a separate question - we don't like how it looks now, will most probably work on it;

Today

I have upgraded my role Father to Father twice :)

Bugs

Upd. 03.06.2015: 0.15.1 with bug fixes is out.

It turns out that the latest version has a lot of critical bugs. Thus, the next release will be mainly about fixing them.

Among the bugs:
+ FC when you enter Notes in two-column mode
+ FC when you cancel achievements dialog
+ 'Now!' in Days/Priorities dialog does not refresh the data set
+ Pomodoro crashes on period change if the app is in the background
+ Project sub-actions does not get parent set (thus becoming simple actions) when coming from the Weekplan page
+ some more.

All of these were reported by you, either by FC reports or by reviews or by direct letters - thank you! And a special thank to one particular user, who constantly keeps giving us feedback almost after each update!

Coming soon

Coming:

Can see Today's actions on the Home screen now

Weekday, recurrence, reminder - how they behave in regards to Weekplan

A recent user has asked a question about the behavior of the day selection, recurrences, reminders of an action. I'll bring the reply text partially here as it will probably be very helpful to others as well.

First, there was a simple 'Week view' for which you  could set an action. If you set a day on an action, it will be shown on that day in the Week plan. If you don't, it would be shown on the 'Not set' section. The quadrants filter filter by this day - it checks for exact value of this property of an action set.

Then there came the recurrences - from simple ones like once a week to a little more complex, like several weekdays. This new functionality has to be merged with the previous 'day' selection. And it took priority over the weekday set. I.e., if you have both, the recurrence will be taken into account on the Weekplan page - the action will be shown for each recurring day, and ignore the day set. The problem here is - the filter on the FTF/Actions pages still works with the old day setting. This is definitely a bug (or, rather a not updated functionality), so we'll fix it soon.

Also, there's a third feature that is related - reminders. Up until recently we had only one-shoot reminders. Recently we've added the reminder type 'On recurrence days'. From its name you could have guessed that it fires on the days the action is to be shown. Every day it takes today's actions and schedules reminders for those that have a reminder set. And by 'today's actions' I mean those that are shown on the Week plan by the logic described above.

Again, since the system has been evolving, not everything finished - we are working on that. Hope the logic is clearer and more helpful now.

Notes section broken on many devices

Sorry for that! Haven't really noticed that until one of the users pointed to it in his review in the Play Store review.

The problem with the crash visibility was in that it was similar to one of the crashes fixed long ago, and in the developer console we've marked it as 'hidden'. Thus, we haven't seen the great number of reports from you. We've already fixed it, will roll out the fix now!

If you have any issues, suggestions or just want to thank the developers, do not hesitate to use the Play Store reviews - it, along with email at ksasdk-at-gmail.com, is the most visible way of notifying us of important things! We've even added a special button in the navigation menu called 'Improve the app!' which leads you straight to the store.

Done occurrences of recurring actions

You can now see when did you do an action that is a recurring action. For that, click on the 'done count' panel on the Action page.

I use infinitely recurring action for one of my actions: from some point of my life I've understood that I have to keep a good shape (or, at least I have to try). So, I started to do morning workouts relatively regularly. And our app became a helper in that.

First, I've set a recurring action 'do morning workout', set its occurrences to be on every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. And tried to adhere to it. It is really hard some times and I don't do extensive work outs - if I feel like skipping it, I do a very light one. Important, I think, is to build a habit of doing the morning workouts. I've read somewhere that good habits are good!

Then, the 'On recurrence days' reminder came into help - it reminds me every morning. On the picture above it's reset because I play with it time to time.

And now I can review not only the general amount of workouts done, but the exact days, too. The page is minimalist at the moment, will work on enriching it with useful info. And the suggestions would be great!

Enjoy!

Many-time executing action

Do you have an action, that you plan to repeat a noticeably big number of times? Maybe even infinitely. Usually you use it to build a good habit or when you have something to do that is imposed by outside circumstances - like, paying the rent.

Fighting procrastination

Procrastination is when you don't want to do something important now, putting it off as much as you can and doing something more pleasant instead. Like for an office worker surfing the web instead of doing work activities. For a student - watching a film or hanging out with friends instead of doing homework. Your brain tries to avoid negative feelings about doing unwanted stuff and proposes a comfortable but, obviously, wrong solution which makes you temporarily happy.

This causes a lot of problems - not only people don't do what is important, but in addition they know that and the feeling of guilt arises. Which makes them even more unhappy.

One of the ways to overcome this is to simply start doing that unpleasant activity. It is easy and it turns out, some time after you start the work, that negative feeling disappears. Thus, if you are facing procrastination issue with a task, one of the best ways to win it would be to just start doing it. Split your work into work and break periods, concentrate on the work during a work period, have rest on breaks. After some time you'll find yourself comfortable doing it.

Reminders on Recurrence days

New reminder setting has been added - On Recurrence Days. It means, when set, it will add a reminder on each day the action is set up for. The time when it will fire will be the one set for the reminder, i.e., time setting hasn't.

If, for example, you have a recurrence set for 'Every day' and a reminder set to 'On recurrence days at 9:00 am', then it will fire notification everyday at 9:00 am. To do so, every midnight it fetches all the actions for the next day, sees if any reminder is set there and registers them in the system.

I myself like the feature a lot and can't now imagine how did the app work without it before :)

As always, any feedback (bug/feature/suggestion/greeting) is very welcome!

Too complex

Yesterday I showed the program to someone who hasn't used it before. I wanted to start explaining, but then it all seemed to be too complex for her. All she needed was a simple Todo-list to quickly add her grocery list. This is what many people complain about when they first open the app - too complex and not intuitive to use. Once they get used to it, they often admit that 'it is thoughtful and feature-rich' (well, not all of them, but many do). But, not all of those who install it reach that mind-clearing  point :)

And, the question is - what to do with it? Make the app more simple just like hundreds other todo/task lists out there? Or, keep the current shape, not without constant improvements, of course (of course!) and have the app for those who seek something more than a dumb list? The latter comes at price of less users using the app. Hard question.

Pomodoro fix and reminders

The recent version 0.12.2 has 2 noticeable things: first is the pomodoro fix - the service now should work without problems and be more stable when you switch across the apps.

The other one is the Reminders section in the week plan. It lists all the reminders you've set for your action. Clicking on them you can go to that action and change/see the info. The work on the reminders will be continued in the near future with plans to make this section be used more.

Besides the section itself, the new update adds the fix for times, when your reminders were cleared or not set - after phone restart or backup restore. The app now checks these cases and re-sets the reminders, if they are after the current time in future.

Hope you'll like the update and the app will continue help you be more productive!

Pomodoro not working?

Anyone has problems with pomodoro after latest update?

Upd.: Released a new version, 0.12.2, the pomodoro should work now and even be better - if you close the app, it should stay there in the status bar ticking.

Can now sync across devices using Google Drive

We've added support for Google Drive.

You can now sync your data across your devices using your Google Drive account. To do so, go to 'Sync' menu on the left navigation bar:

When first accessing the page, it will ask you to enter the google account you want to use. You can use existing or add a new one. The steps are default to google and quite intuitive.

Then you'll have a new screen, something like following:

Here you can either upload (push) your current device's backup to your Google Drive account. Or, download it (pull) from there, if you've previously done upload.

The push operation will create a file called 'MyEffectiveness.bcp' on your Drive. Then this file will be uploaded when pulled to / pushed from this or other devices.

This syncing, by the way, does not restore reminders, which is something we have missed, but we'll work on that soon.

The functionality has just been implemented and probably has bugs and inconsistencies. So, we'll appreciate any feedback on the feature.

Hope this makes using the app much better!

19.02.2015 update

Today we've released two minor versions - 0.11.2 and 0.11.3. The first one introduced some minor fixes and enhancements of UI, but introduced a sever bug for Androids < 5 version. Thanks to reports from you, we've noticed it almost immediately and uploaded the new 0.11.3 version. Should be ok now.

The update brings a new feature of showing your running pomodoro cycle in the status bar. No 'Stop' action, yet, and no other features, but should help you track the work/break cycle without having the app stay open.

Yabs

Just have release, what do you think?

Short: starting to roll out a new update.

Some changes to come.

0.10.6 update details

There are several things changed.

On the Week plan weekly actions:

• The layout has changed a bit
• Before the current update an action could be marked as done by swiping the action left or right. This was very counter-intuitive so we've modified it. Now you can do/undo the action by simply clicking on the tick.
• More information has been added about an action - day set, priority

 

On the Main page:

• The layout has changed a bit
• Pomodoro section has been decoupled from the next action. They say the pomodoro is helpful when tackling your procrastination - it helps you get into the focused mode faster. Doing so you should concentrate on the abstract process of working rather than on doing a concrete action - this is easier for your brain.

On Action page:

• 'Details to actions' now parses lines, too. I.e., if you have a text separated by new line, you can split it into subactions by end-of-line.
• Checklist items can be drag-n-dropped by 3-dots at the right of the item. There's a small bug with overlaying, but it will be fixed in the next update.

On all the pages

• The left menu is modified slightly so that the Home / Exit buttons are at the top of the menu now. This is not final - if the new layout is not better, we'll revert modify again.

There are also some bug fixes and other improvements on some other pages: for example, long-press on FTF and Actions didn't work; an action can be checked as 'done' from notification now; etc.