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.

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.

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.

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.