0.20.5 update

Started rolling out new update after long pause, it's mainly about fixing reminders for Android8+ users. If you see problems with reminders, would be happy if you told us.

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.

Korean translation

Korean translation is out there. Hieroglyphs look a little different than Chinese, but, too, small, neat, and pretty. 

Thanks for the translation to our user, Kim J.!

Another quick update

Just pushed to the Play Store. Sorry for such a rush and quick update after having one just a few days ago. We are going on a short vacation and wanted to do it before, so that some of the users that are having problems would use the program without any problem.

It brings Vietnamese translation (thanks for the help!) and some fixes and adjustments. In particular, on the My Achievements page clicking on an achievement to share it lead to error. Now fixed. Enjoy.

Apostrophe used in languages

Adding the Italian translation to the app now, the one that was kindly done by our users. Interesting thing noted - Italian version so far has the largest number of ' apostrophe used in the texts - 77. I thought English would be the first, but it has only 50 ones. German has 10 (!) and Lithuanian 13 :).

Portuguese has 8 and the Russian only 3 :).

"This a testing app, shouldn't be used any more."

If you see this message when opening your beloved My Effectiveness, don't panic. Just !!! UPDATE !!! to the newest version that has just been pushed to the Play Store. This is completely embarrassing, we are very, very sorry!

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.

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)

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

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!

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.

Short: starting to roll out a new update.

Some changes to come.