Saturday, September 12, 2015

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.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

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.

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Expand entering goal, role, etc. - anyone uses it?

Upd.: Since it turned out that there are still user who use it, we'll not remove it! Thanks for the feedback!

Long time ago, on smaller screens, this was a necessity for some users (including me) to enter more text than is visible.




Time goes on and bigger screens gain more and more market place. It seems like it's not that useful anymore and even may lead to confusion to new users.

So, if there's no serious objection, we'll gradually remove them from most of the screens.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Main page scrolling and more

Main page scrolling enhanced: now all the items in action list are used to scroll the screen, before it was only the today/tomorrow counter section:




Week plan calendar view can now be scrolled by 3 months back and forth:




Weekly goal view shows up to 3 of its actions (Four, One, Seven are actions):


I like how it looks much better now, but we still want to continue improving it.

Enjoy!