Change role and filter by 'this week' actions

Have pushed two new features to the Play Store: ability to change the role of a goal and an additional day-filter 'this week'.

'Change role' has been asked for many times, it's pretty simple and easy to use, and it does what it says - if, at some point, you decide to split a role and move some goals to a newly created one. Or, just move a goal to a more appropriate one, then use the menu on the goal page.

The 'This week' actions filter let's you see actions that are either recurrent and their recurrence falls into this week, or those that have their date set to an exact calendar day and that date also falls into the current week.

The plan is to help one have a better overall view of the actions to do and improve his/her planning. There are more ideas how to further develop this, stay tuned. And, enjoy!

'Filter by day' on the FTF/Actions pages

We've started changing the logic for the day-filtering on the First Things First and Actions pages (and eventually the corresponding filters). Take a look at the screenshots below.

 

This is just the first part of the work, eventually we want to have a more natural and, at the same time, comprehensive system for actions daily planning.

Workodoro fast-forward

We've added a new nice feature to the Workodoro (based on the Pomodoro) - period fast-forwarding. It's very useful when you, for example, want to skip the current period and go straight to the next one.

When and why may you want to do so? Remember, the technique is intended to help us get a better concentration on the current work. Imagine you are working on a task that would require more than 25 minutes to fulfill. You are fully into your work and then the break time comes. What would you feel? Having a break is a good thing for your work, but sometimes switching the context may be just too expensive. Skipping a break may be quite useful in such situations - you click the button and continue doing the work.

What if you'd want to skip a work period to have another break? Though it may seem like you'd be cheating yourself, sometimes it, too, is a very needed feature. If your previous task was too hard and exhaustive, you may want to allow yourself a longer break. Of, if you'd previously skipped a work period you have the right to prolong your current break. Without this 'fast-forwarding' we were too bound to the timeline of the periods.

Hope you'll like the update and it will help you be more productive.

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.

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.

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!

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;

Can see Today's actions on the Home screen now

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!

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!

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!

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!

Short: starting to roll out a new update.

Some changes to come.

New Action UI page

+ Looks like we've localized the crash point - will release today later

Action page got a different face. There are lots of changes. These are some of them:
+ no 'Edit' and 'Save' buttons - everything gets saved when you leave the page (auto-save)
+ right-side menu has been removed, features from there brought to the page itself into a collapsible panel.
+ checklists and projects are now added in-place on the page
+ reminder setup made much more pleasant with several setups (like in Google Keep).
+ action notes are visible on the page, no matter if it is a complex action or a plain one.
+ and more

As you remember, the best way to say you liked it is to rate the app here in the Play Store

Recurrence: Select week days + more

Can now select the week days on which to show the action - new recurrence type! With this functionality, the Week day and Week end recurrences seem obsolete, but let's keep them for a while.

The other important update (actually, all of them are rather important) - the view of the WeekPlan is now persistent! Whatever view you see last on the page, that one will open when you return - the weekly goals or the weekly actions. This will meet the needs of both those who preferred the old actions view and those who like the new goals view.

The priority and week day choose dialogs were improved - a new section called Now! has been added to both. When you choose this section, it sets the priority of the action to A and day to today.

On the FTF page, in the expanded mode when the squares are full screen without details section, clicking on an action now opens it on its page.

On the Note editing - the Save/Cancel buttons at the top have been removed - they clashed with default Copy/Cut/Paste components of the android and made them unusable. So, the note now is being saved automatically, whenever you leave the note page. And the Copy/Cut/Paste works well!

And some playing around with colors - we prefer to think the app is alive and evolves as everything around us :).

As you see, a lot of work has been done in quite a short period of time to increase the productivity of helping you increase your productivity! Don't forget to reward us with a a good, fresh 5-star rating out here!

Enjoy :) !

Upd.: Recurrence Start-Stop has been removed. Turned out not very popular feature)

Week Plan. New big changes.

As you remember, the WeekPlan page is relatively young in its current view - we have updated it just several months ago. The new look has been practical and much more pleasant then the old one. It does great job in everyday action checking. One of the most used pages by me personally.

But, every time I entered it I felt like I missed something. It was all in front of me and, still, something was missing. So, one day it struck me. And we've implemented it. The new updated will be out within few days. And when it is out, you will ask yourself - how come we haven't thought of it before and how had you lived without it? It will be a natural fit.

Meanwhile, hope you are enjoying the great feast of bootball that's happenning right now in Brasil, just as we do! Here they show some of the games at 2 a.m. due to the time differences, which, of course doesn't stop us at all :).

Now that the Spain is out, who do you think will be the King of football for the next four years? I can tell you my favourites: Netherlands, Chile, Mexico - these teams showed beatiful, fast, bold game. Besides them, I think Italy and Germany are pretty strong. And, of course, Brasil and Argentine.

FirstThingsFirst/Actions page important change

An important change introduced with the update, currently rolling out staged (20% lucky users will get them first), to the First Things First, Actions pages and the First Things First widget (aka Habits / FTF Squares): the filters you apply on these pages are persistent now.

What does this mean? It means, they are saved between visits to these pages - when you go back to android home screen and back again, or when you switch between the pages within the app. And, the FTF widget will reflect these filters. E.g., if you set filter for #day: Saturday(as on the picture below), the pages and the widget will show actions for that day:

This makes the widget and the pages more consistent with each other. Furthermore, it should help you concentrate better on these pages. We think this is not fully finished so some changes will most certainly come. But the general idea - to have filters persistent and for widget to reflect current FTF/Actions pages, also most certainly, will be preserved.

Also, the common left sliding menu is added to two more pages: Week Plan and My Roles.