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.