May I recommend [considering] keeping both in place, at least for a while? Let the Complice-habit bed in before removing a long-standing safety-net.
I find that the belt-and-braces approach works well for a lot of things. They may not be measuring exactly the same thing, or prompt action at the same rhythm, or something. I’ve got plenty of complementary Beeminder goals, each measuring an aspect of the same real-world goal.
I expect my Complice-driven goals to mostly be additional ones, in the same spirit. In a couple of cases, I’ll echo the Complice-driven datapoint into a pre-existing goal using IFTTT or my dancer script. e.g. pomodoros need conversion to merge into my tocks goal
Ahh, the subject needs to include the word “intentions” or “outcomes” and the date in YYYY-MM-DD format. Future or past dates will mess you up. Can you get access to that in IFTTT or will I need to tweak something?
Hmmm, well the Beeminder recipe includes the goal deadline, but 1) it’s not in YYYY-MM-DD and 2) it’s guaranteed to be within 24 hours but not necessarily today. It might be tomorrow’s date.
The behavior I was naively hoping for was that it would append the intention to whatever set of intentions is currently “open” in the Today tab. I don’t know if this is actually the best behavior, but I think it would cover my use case since all my eep!s start around midnight.
Maybe this is something that you deliberately didn’t include due to the aforementioned staleness, but is there any intention to support some kind of quick-add for tasks that didn’t get completed the previous day? Generally what happens is I have a list of things I want to get done at work, and then some new tasks come in and bork my previous intentions, so I don’t finish all my originally intended tasks. I’d want the leftovers to carry over to the next day, since they’re still my top priorities assuming nothing else urgent comes up. I realize many kinds of intentions don’t always carry over, but it’d be nice to have an easy way to choose to add some of these with a few clicks rather than having to copy/paste text from an entirely different page. (Maybe having an active quick-add rather than a passive carry-over would help with the staleness problem?)
Correct! I do ultimately want to have some sort of solution for this though
That’s actually a pretty good idea. So like it would autocomplete from past not-dones? Or something? I’d love to hear a bit more about how you’d design this!
Would it be useful for it to be its own Outcomes type? e.g. - is “Did not do, drop” and some other character is “Did not do, keep”. So you would have to put a little thought into it, but it wouldn’t add that much tedium to the Outcomes process.
That said, I have already run into situations where I want “Did do, keep” since I ended up only making partial progress on the thing. So maybe the keep/no-keep is orthogonal to did/did-not, in which case it should probably be a separate “keep” character (rather than risking combinatorial explosion).
…huh, I hadn’t thought of this before—it’s a decent idea! Although… I think that often people think they want to keep things, but those items end up stale anyway. So I’m wary of making there be extra work involved given that it will end up often being incorrect.
Could be! I’ve only been using this thing for 48 hours! My post should be taken as “Here’s an idea on how to implement X” not “I think X is worth implementing.”
+1 for making this manual, but no objection to making it easy. My hope for Complice is that it will usefully and regularly make me reconsider the value of things on my list.
Part of the intro text to Complice says something about it not being just a todo list. My (premature, inexperienced, & naive) suspicion is that the tab label is right: it’s a today list, not a todo list.
Every other todo list app on the planet [citation needed] encourages accumulated cruft. Some of them will fade out neglected entries, etc, but they don’t throw stuff away or force you to rethink it. One reason that I keep returning to paper-based systems is because it’s easier to periodically restart with a clean sheet.
Which, as I read down the page, is pretty much what you said more eloquently:
Here’s a thought: let’s upgrade Complice to be a first-class integration partner, so that a datapoint from Complice sets the goal into autod mode, and replaces the refresh arrow with a logo & link. #UVI
This. A hundred times this. I’m a complice person (https://complice.co/Sylvia) and the big thing it does for me is hand me a blank slate each day. I have to decide what I really want to achieve that day, rather than being handed a list of things that I thought were important yesterday.
Okay, so if I am following this, is it fair to say that Complice is not for repetitive tasks? For example, I am trying to declutter my closet and if I remove an item every day it will eventually be done. How would you track this in Complice?
I do really like the blank-slate aspect of Complice - it makes me actively think about what I want to do that day, from scratch. That said, it’s nice to have some reference points! I like @drtall’s idea of an orthogonal “keep/no-keep” character in Outcomes.
The naive way I’d do it, if I were designing the feature, is to put all the “keeps” in some kind of checkbox on the Intentions page (or even just a box that you can copy-paste from, in an initial implementation). Then you can check them to make them appear in the intentions, or just copy them over. That way I at least see what I was thinking about keeping from the previous day on the same page as my Intentions, rather than having to toggle back and forth between my to-do list window (because I still need one of those to keep track of long-term tasks!), my Outcomes for the previous day (generally in my email client), and that day’s intentions (in the Complice window).
Just curious - how do experienced Complice users handle the to-do list issue? Do you keep a to-do list, and choose tasks from there to put in Complice? I generally have to plan my workflow out on a multi-week timescale, in order to get everything done by the appropriate deadlines. If I don’t have some list of pending work, too many things will slip through the cracks as I forget about them or don’t allocate the appropriate time. For me, having to use a to-do list (I still use iOS Reminders!), Complice, and Beeminder is a bit heavy for a set of productivity applications.
For comparison, before I started using Complice, I would enter my to-do items as calendar items in Google Calendar - that helped me both plan out my time on a granular level, and keep track of outcomes. It’s also useful since I can easily drag items to the next day if I didn’t get to it. I’d love to have something like Complice replace this workflow, since it’s a bit awkward and does suffer from staleness, but I’m trying to figure out how to do it.
Uhhh. I kind of cheat. I use a text-completion app to insert a bunch of the same intentions every day. I have tentative plans to add this as a feature, though of course I’m hyper-vigilant about making sure it doesn’t cause too much staleness.
Complice user of two years here
I do a whole mix of things. I don’t have a lot of deadlines, so a lot of things don’t need to be planned so far in advance. When they did, I would track reminders with a variety of systems, including followupthen.com for email stuff. I break stuff down in workflowy, and will fairly-often draw on it when setting my intentions for the day. I also use some prioritization spreadsheets to help me figure out what to work on, so some tasks go in there. And still other things just come out of my head, based on what feels salient that day.
I think that the intentions process could be improved a lot, and I’m really appreciating all of the suggestions and considerations you’re all voicing!
Could you imagine a world in which Complice has integrations with “intention providers”? e.g. for my Work goal I am copying intentions out of JIRA. I might start using Workflowy for a different goal. I’m already using Beeminder as an intention provider for certain other things.
Giving us a “Boilerplate” page, where we can list the things we want to be imported every day (essentially baking in a version of your autocomplete script) and then putting an “import boilerplate!” button on the intentions page would be great. So you can still have that blank slate feeling on days when it’s not business as usual and all your regular routines are deprioritized in favor of some more vital project – or on weekends, say, where your weekday boilerplate doesn’t apply – but you can import all your daily todos into your Today field with one click. That seems like a good compromise between preventing staleness but also not making us type the same repetitive intentions every day.
So for me, my boilerplate would probably say something like:
Inbox Zero
Reply Zero
Reconcile YNAB
Update YNAB journal
Update productivity journal
Send off transcripts
Because those are things I do every time I sit down to work. I’m still not sure of the reasons I should or shouldn’t add something to Complice. There are three main ones, as far as I can see:
Because you want credit or positive reinforcement for it (that warm little checked-it-off feeling)
Because you want a realistic view of what you did all day when you’re doing your weekly reviews
Because you need to be prompted or reminded into doing them.
In some ways, I’m tempted to leave stuff like “four hours of scheduled captioning work” off my Today list, because I don’t need to be reminded to do it, and it’s not optional; I’m going to do it no matter what. It’s not a nebulously timed task that needs prompting and that I could conceivably slack or procrastinate on, like “brainstorm for crowdfunding video” is. But on the other hand, if I’m spending four hours a day captioning and I leave that off my Complice outcomes list, that’s a pretty big gap when it comes time to review what I did that week. I’m going to be more productive in terms of prompted outcomes in weeks when I caption less, and vice versa, so it would be useful to have some way of reflecting that when reviewing my overall productivity. If I could have a “caption * hours” boilerplate line (or many people could make a “spent * hours in mandatory meetings” boilerplate), and then when I make my daily intentions I could just enter the number I’m scheduled to do that day and check it off at the end of the day, that would help me keep track of hours spent on both prompted and non-prompted tasks.
