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niceguyanon comments on Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016 - Less Wrong
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I once had a system in which I was writing checkboxes on paper for tasks I wanted to do regularly.
Stuff like eating vitamins, or doing backups of my server.
It started with the typical daily/weekly/monthly todos, but it gradually evolved into something much less rigid, and calculated in a (increasingly complex) spreadsheet.
For a long time, I've been working out the balance between this system being forgiving...
(as in, allowing for soft recovery, rather then being hit by "do 12 hours of jogging" after a week of vacation)
and also giving you accountability over a longer period
(as in, avoiding the "I'll skip it this week, and instead definitely do it next week" effect).
I've also recently had the idea to publish some Android apps, and one of the first ideas was to code a cleaner, leaner and meaner version of my old spreadsheet.
As far as productivity apps go, this is very basic stuff, but I haven't actually found anything out there that could replace my system.
So lo and behold.
It's still kinda maybe not feature complete, but I already use it myself (and I've finally retired the spreadsheet :D):
If you like this sorta stuff, give it a try and let me know what you'd like to see improved.
(Also if you happen to really like it and be generous, there's a premium version which has the same functionality but makes me more happy)
I think your app is great! I am also the kind of person to get really excited about new productivity apps that have that one cool trick that makes it different from other apps, so I might not be a good gauge on how well your app would be received, but yea, I love it.
The only other self tracking app I have used is Beeminder. My only gripe about Beeminder is that everything is linear, if you do 10 units more you are 10 ahead, if you miss 10 units you are now 10 units behind. I have always wanted some sort of discounting for being ahead, and some sort of sped up recovery for being behind, and I think your app does this well.
How is it after a week? Do you still use it?
Update:
Was I able to use the app successfully to increase my tasks by 50%? No. But I wont blame it on the app.
I found that manually clicking next day was something I did not like. The temptation to delay clicking it and catch up the next day is strong. If it were automatic I would have to live with the consequences of getting a bad score. Furthermore if you accidentally clicked next day before before updating other tasks, then too bad, you cant reverse. So for testing I made a few tasks and advanced it several days, but unless I reinstall the app, the date can not roll back for when I want to stop testing and use it for real.
There is no way to easily see your progress for the last few days. It would be nice to click on the task and see how you did recently or if I missed a few days to see when was the last time I did the task. Sure there is an export button but the data is hard to read if you just want to know quickly how you did recently.
Thanks a lot; I'll this it into account, and think how to improve this in next versions.
Though with the "next day" button, it would be a hard tradeoff - you might not have had this experience, but sometimes you travel and your timezone settings get messed up, or your phone's clock is reset etc. It's possible to design something that would avoid these problems, but it's a pretty big change in the internals of the app.
This is surprising to me - the algorithm in the app makes it strictly easier to catch up when you click the button first, and then do the tasks rather than the other way around. Is it not enough incentive to make you want to click the button, rather than "cheat"?
I think it is about the don't break the streak thing. Suppose that you decide to run every day, and you do it in the morning every day from Sunday to Thursday, then sleep in and don't have time for it on Friday. Now on Saturday you can either advance the day before your run and have a one day streak, or you can run twice, once before and once after advancing the day and have a seven day streak.
This perfectly expresses my thoughts
I have not used it since testing it out. No change to how I feel about the app, I just haven't used any self tracking apps recently. I use Trello as a general to do app, which lacks regular occurrence task tracking. I will move meditation and gym tasks to Hastewurm and report back in 2 weeks. Both these tasks are things I wished I did more by about 50%.
My commitment to report back will probably result in increased likelihood of me sticking to this goal, but I could nonetheless try to be mindful of my bias, and provide some feedback on efficacy and or improvements.