I’m kind of struggling to “get it” with Intend. You log onto the website and then you tell it what you want to do that day? I don’t get it. I can do that with a piece of paper each morning, which is what I currently do.
Part of the problem is that the website has very little graphical information (ooh pretty pictures), and is very verbose. Until I actually see what it does, all of the text in the world describing what it does will sound like general self-improvement mumbojumbo to me.
Maybe some real examples will help. What do you use it for?
I’ve been using Intend for a bit over a year, and I would probably be willing to pay twice as much for it (@malcolm please don’t look!).
The basic value proposition is that it doesn’t have features. It just has a complete, integrated design for the specific purpose of making sure your intentions and actions line up as thoroughly as possible, with as little friction as possible.
So, while there’s flexibility in how you use it, it is one of the most opinionated tools I’ve ever used, in the good sense.
Most days I have 15-20 intentions, many of which are very easy (brush and floss at night), but some of which are tougher to get to (right now, the worst is probably an automatic daily habit to “Set evening timeline to wrap up by 22:20 and drop everything that doesn’t fit”). I mark the most significant or troublesome ones with a star, and also make some use of the automatic highlighting of missed+retrying intentions so I don’t keep my head in the sand but recognize when I’m really not making something happen.
When setting intentions for each day, I can see current top priorities (and any check-in dates) and intention-setting streaks for each goal, giving me a better perspective on what’s getting neglected and what I should be trying to work into my schedule soon. So I can see that goal #3 (get in shape) has a top priority to “Make appointment with optician by 2024-10-10” and my intentions should be starting to reflect* that whenever I can fit something in.
There are all sorts of other thoughtful design points to enable better reviewing and more focus, like integrated reminders, timers, quick looks back at relevant past reviews, and so on.
If this all sounds more up your alley, you can use my referral link to get an extra week on your trial. (And, uh, I guess also increment a counter for me? Not much else.)
I use it religiously – I even made a custom app for it for some AR glasses so I can use it while walking around doing chores chores.
I use it for:
My day job
Side projects
Home life (chores etc.)
Occasional sub projects (moving, some major work projects, etc.)
It’s not for everyone but for me the main benefit is that it doesn’t get stale.
I related a lot to this post that Malcom made:
I’ve tried many systems, but they always end up in the same place:
100s or 1000s of future scheduled tasks that I will never do, most of which are irrelevant
an overwhelming list of tasks that I could never do in the current day
a nagging feeling that I’m losing track of what’s important
a lot of wasted time maintaining all of this worthless overhead, to the point that I eventually scrap the whole thing
Intend embraces the idea that you don’t need to keep track of all the little details at all times – the important ones will naturally surface at the right time simply by thinking about your goals regularly.
It intentionally tries to minimize persistence (i.e. minimizing how granularly you plan for the future, how much work you bring over from yesterday)
That said, it does provide some persistence in the form of:
A single box where you can add daily tasks
Allowing you to access “Not Dones” from the past 3 days
Workflowy integration for anything you need to do that is 2+ days into the future or recurring (which I try to avoid using unless necessary)
I also really like that it’s the only app that natively supports Mark Forester’s FVP (or whatever it’s called), but that’s a separate rabbit hole.
I’d love to see some screenshots from @tne and @lambo on how your intend system looks on a productive day.
Obviously blur or block any data that is too private. But, I think this could be a big help for me and @ericdoeshabits as when I tried intend I didn’t “get it” either.
Sounds like it could be right up my alley though if I implement it correctly…
I also made a Keyboard Maestro script that sets a Mac app called “one thing” so I can automatically see my current task on my Mac menu bar at all times which helps with my ADHD
(Since Intend has an amazing API)
I think it’s too much of a pain to block it all out as my average is maybe 90 or so tasks a day
But like I’ll break down high-level blocks of tasks from a productive day, last Thursday:
119 tasks added, 97 tasks completed, across 4 categories / “goals”, 11 hours of tracked time via the “sand timer” feature that Intend uses (it took me maybe 3 months or so to really understand this feature and start using it consistently)
Side project, maybe 40-50 tasks completed, mostly commerce work, did a few coding problems which I do regularly for fun / practice – when doing intense focus work I usually make a bunch of micro-tasks that may only last from 0.5 - 7 minutes or so (in the moment) that work towards a larger task that I set earlier in the day (helps me keep my train of thought)
Day job like 30, a mix of research work, communications (I’ll often make tasks like “draft a message to ABC” and “send the message” separately to reduce anxiety around it), actual engineering work, taking a nap, attending meetings, etc.
Also for both side project & day job I have some tasks regarding getting into focus via some deep work things I adhere to
personal life / emotional health – took a 49 minute nap between 2 and 5 PM, claimed points for avoiding a few personal vices, took the dog out, ate food, took a shower, put on clothes, responded to family several times, played some Halo
longevity / physical health - took various supplements / medications, brushed teeth, etc.
Then I have different Beeminder goals for each that track various things like time-spent working, number of tasks, time spent gaming, etc.
So I did go ahead and I made a trial account and started to check it out. Got more familiarized with it yesterday.
I can definitely see the use. I feel bad for being a little flippant about it in the OP, I was trying to be succinct in communicating my first impressions
One caveat is I have it set to work with Mark Forster’s FVP bottom-up dot approach, a slightly hidden feature – in Intend if you press the “d” key it adds a dot and lets you work through your list bottom to top that way.
Probably need to tweak it if you use Intend top to bottom, but I imagine it shouldn’t be too hard to get GPT to change it based on the API docs
This is the companion python file that pulls the intentions for the macro (will need to update the path in the macro to match your home dir)
what made you choose to buy it over the competitors ?
I had looked into xreal vs virtue vs rokid a while back, and was considering to try using a vision pro although a simple portable to-do list would be awesome to have hands free while walking around and doing chores…
It’s not on the same level as the other devices, it’s more on par with Google Glass (which I also developed for back in the day) – just a lightweight HUD mainly for displaying several lines of text, but it looks natural enough that no one has ever bothered me about it in public.
It definitely feels like a developer tool (little rough around the edges) but gets the job done. I use 1 tap to view my top 3 tasks, and 3 taps to mark them as complete, all using the Intend API.
I also have some of the XReal Air 2s + Beams, that I use every day for work, for a mix of (A) larger screen (B) privacy (C) improved focus due to the dimming capability.
Really like those. But it’s more of a sit-down external display thing rather than a legit walk-around device (I tried that, not great).
To be honest though at this point I would probably wait for Meta’s new Orion glasses, as they’re a merger of both feature sets (natural looking, wireless, able to work on them) and they have the mind-reading wrist band thing (that I think Thalmic Labs was working on before they were acquired).
