Thursday, April 2, 2015

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.

Saturday, March 28, 2015

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!

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

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.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

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!