Weekday, recurrence, reminder - how they behave in regards to Weekplan

A recent user has asked a question about the behavior of the day selection, recurrences, reminders of an action. I'll bring the reply text partially here as it will probably be very helpful to others as well.

First, there was a simple 'Week view' for which you  could set an action. If you set a day on an action, it will be shown on that day in the Week plan. If you don't, it would be shown on the 'Not set' section. The quadrants filter filter by this day - it checks for exact value of this property of an action set.

Then there came the recurrences - from simple ones like once a week to a little more complex, like several weekdays. This new functionality has to be merged with the previous 'day' selection. And it took priority over the weekday set. I.e., if you have both, the recurrence will be taken into account on the Weekplan page - the action will be shown for each recurring day, and ignore the day set. The problem here is - the filter on the FTF/Actions pages still works with the old day setting. This is definitely a bug (or, rather a not updated functionality), so we'll fix it soon.

Also, there's a third feature that is related - reminders. Up until recently we had only one-shoot reminders. Recently we've added the reminder type 'On recurrence days'. From its name you could have guessed that it fires on the days the action is to be shown. Every day it takes today's actions and schedules reminders for those that have a reminder set. And by 'today's actions' I mean those that are shown on the Week plan by the logic described above.

Again, since the system has been evolving, not everything finished - we are working on that. Hope the logic is clearer and more helpful 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!

Many-time executing action

Do you have an action, that you plan to repeat a noticeably big number of times? Maybe even infinitely. Usually you use it to build a good habit or when you have something to do that is imposed by outside circumstances - like, paying the rent.

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.