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.

Priority Sorting

As we noted before, we've started to move to KISS principle, to make the app simpler and more intuitive to use. This leads to removing some elements. For example, on the Goal page we have removed the "set at" time indicator. It was quite useless and even probably a bit irritating.

The other thing we've started adding - is drag'n'drop sorting. With the latest two updates we did that to goals and roles sorting. As my partner stated - arranging items from Top to Down is the most natural way of sorting. You have your top priority goals and roles at Top, lowest priority - at the bottom. We will proceed with adding that to Actions, too.

Important thing about drag'n'drop sorting - we tried to make it simple and easy to use, without the need to long-click - you just take the holder at the right side of a role or a goal and drag it up or down. Very simple, natural and pleasant to use.

Habits: Current Action Widget

Idea behind the widget is pretty simple. Though they say it is important to be able to multitask, there're many who say that you're much more productive if you single-task. Because you concentrate fully on one task at a time, you're more effective in doing it. And that feels pretty natural - since you do one thing, all your time and thoughts are dedicated fully to it. If you do several things at a time, you spend some time and energy on switching between the tasks. Some (trainers, authors) say that this switching in fact takes a lot of time.

So, we introduced a Current Action widget on the Home screen. The function of the widget is to identify the task you're working on now. Whenever you look on the screen, you'll see it written there, thus reminding you not to distract:

If you click on the Action name or Action details - it will lead you to the corresponding page with the Action loaded.

If you have an Action added to your Home screen, you can set another Action as your Current:
1. You can do it on FTF or Actions page: choose more > Current
2. You can do it on Action page: choose menu > Current.

Note: doing steps above will update the widget, if it has already been added. If not, it won't do anything.