Complice

In the same week, a couple of different users messaged me to ask if I would add timer webhooks so that they could automatically have RescueTime turn on & off the Focustime feature (which blocks distracting websites) when the pomodoro timer starts & stops.

So I did it!

I set it up so that you could do the filtering on your end or on Complice’s end. If you just want to get all of the different events and deal with them, use “any”, or “pomo-any”. Or you can pre-aim different timer events to different places by making multiple hooks. I’m planning to add webhooks for task events as well, based on the beeminder arbitrary-task module, which will be awesome.

Ideas for things you can use this for:

• start/stop something like focustime to reduce distractions
• maybe integrate with tasker somehow to turn your phone to airplane mode
• store all timer-finished events in a spreadsheet so you could track which times of day you’re working
• notify a slack channel that you’re working
• change your status on some other site/system
• hook up an arduino and make a light outside your room turn red or green based on whether you’re working or breaking (I’ve wanted to do this for years)
• (and more! what are your ideas?)

Get started here

One of the core pieces of the Complice philosophy is to deal with staleness, rather than letting it get mouldy. The term “stale” can be used to refer to a big long list of to-do items that you’re probably never going to get to but keep thinking you should, or just one such item.

I wrote an article on 5 Ways to Deal With a Stale Task System. That article is about how to deal with a situation where you have a long list of items and the list as a whole is stale. This is an extremely common situation with a conventional to-do list system, in Todoist, Asana, or any other list app or other GTD system. Probably at any given time, most people have at least one list somewhere of tasks that seemed really important a few months ago but which realistically they’re never going to do.

But if you’re using a system like Complice that prompts you to recreate your list each day, then you’re already doing pretty well on this front. There are, however, still a few ways that things can go stale. Mostly this is going to be from the notdones propagator, the daily intentions system, the top priority feature, or the WorkFlowy integration (or perhaps other integrations that don’t exist at the time of writing this).

These sources of staleness are pretty small though, which means that you can look at the item or items individually and ask “what makes sense with this?”

Keep reading

This has been requested several times before, but for whatever reason I decided that now was the time to actually do it! You can enter a separator like this:

in addition, you can stick a number at the front if the separator is somehow themed to one of your goals, or you can stick some text at the end if you want to say something like “after work”. So that would be like:

If you’ve got one specific thing you “should” be doing and you’re having trouble feeling motivated to do it, here’s a few tips:

• Instead of trying to do it, just write out some instructions for someone else to do it. Then if you want, you can try following the instructions!
• Or just start with step one! what is one little thing to make some progress… can you do that?
• Or try to tap into why you want to do the thing. If you can’t tap into why you want to do the thing, then just don’t do it!

If, by contrast, you’re feeling a more general lack of motivation…

• Think of something that would feel really fun to do, and do that on purpose!
• If nothing feels like it would be fun, well… in that case you’ve gotten yourself an interesting resource of grumpy-you. Sometimes when I get grumpy-Malcolm on my hands I deploy him to do a random unpleasant task that needs doing eventually, because he’s not going to enjoy himself anyway, so he might as well be leveraged towards something useful. What might grumpy-you be useful for?
• Make sure that it’s not due to vicious rock-paper-scissors: a phenomenon where you actually *do* have something you should do, but because you don’t want to do it, you aren’t, but you also aren’t doing something else instead. You’re just… yeah. If it is that, make a conscious choice about what would be really worth doing, and do that!

A user, Will, writes:

Hey Malcolm! I’m having a general conundrum that I’m sure you’ve encountered, and I’m wondering what advice you have as it relates to using Complice.

I’ve been using Complice for the last year now (and love it, thank you for all your work).

Lately, I’m have been doing a horrible job of tracking anything at all.

I’m still following through on many of my goals, but tracking them with Complice has started to feel like a stale task I have to get done rather than a valuable activity.’

A few explanations I have: I’ve set too many goals so I’m a bit overwhelmed, the goals themselves are not specific and exciting.

My question to you: how have you dealt with this general feeling of ‘staleness’ towards goal-tracking? How do you hit the reset button, and reinvigorate yourself?

Great question Will!

As much as Complice is designed to avoid staleness, the app can’t do anything about the fact that priorities do shift and change over time.

I think your general ideas are probably pretty good, so I’m going to build on them.

“too many goals”

If you have too many goals, and you’re trying to do something towards every goal every day, then you’re going to either end up…

1. Regularly failing to do anything (some of) your goals, and feeling bad.
2. Doing some little thing towards (some of) your goals each day, and marking that as “enough” for the day “because, I mean, it’s not like I had more time to work on that goal, so it has to be enough, right?”
3. Working really hard, not sleeping, and burning out. And then feeling bad.

None of these is a fun situation to be in. But, having identified these, we can use them as diagnostics for answering the question “do I have too many goals?”

If you’re genuinely spending a lot of your time in a goal-oriented way, but one of the above things is happening to you, then probably you have too many goals. Or perhaps your goals are too ambitious, but particularly in Case #2, this is a sign that you’ve spread yourself a bit thin, and you’re not able to actively care for all of these different things at once.

Take a moment and let in the reality of that, if it’s true.

Okay, now what? Well, now you can stop pretending that you’re going to be able to do 30 hours of stuff in a 24 hour day, and you can prioritize what you actually want to make happen. You might realize that one of the responsibilities you have isn’t actually that valuable, and scale back your involvement. You might merge two related goals together. You might decide to demote your Fitness goal to just being a daily habit:

(&) do 10 pushups and 10 sittups before breakfast

It’s not gonna get you totally in shape, but it’s better than nothing and it’s much better than nothing-but-I-feel-bad-about-it.

“not specific”

If your goals aren’t specific enough, make them more specific. My general heuristic is that you don’t necessarily need a concrete or quantified definition of what completeness will look like, but it’s worth at least having a description that can let you say:

1. Have I achieved this goal?
2. Am I getting closer?

In setting more concrete targets, you want to be wary of feeling bad for not already having achieved them, and also wary of feeling bad for not achieving them as fast as you hoped you would. You’re probably still doing better than you would be if you didn’t have the target, so having the target isn’t a reason to feel bad.

On the other hand, if your goals are already specific, but your actions aren’t specific, then it’s time to do something thinking, asking, or research about what sorts of actions you’ll actually need to take to achieve your goals. One of my favorite hacks for this is to try to find 1-3 people who’ve done something similar before and ask them what they’d recommend. Maybe even find someone who tried and failed and see what they know about it.

If nobody has done this before, or you don’t know anybody who has, then you’re a bit more on your own, but you can still generate a best plan of approach, and then set out to follow it, updating it as you go.

“not exciting”

Above I included the conditional “if you’re genuinely spending a lot of your time in a goal-oriented way”. What if you’re not? Probably, it’s because you aren’t tapped in with why your goals are awesome.

Did those goals excite you when you first laid them out?

If yes, consider: did you learn something such that you’re not excited anymore? Or did you just get distracted from the aspect of the goal that was motivating you in the first place?

If you’re no longer excited because you realized that the goal isn’t a good fit for you, then this is actually very exciting news! It means you can stop feeling bad about not doing it, and find something better to do instead.

On the contrary, if you still feel really excited about the goal when you feel into it, but you just… forget to… then probably the thing to do is to find some ways to get yourself back in touch with the excitement, more consistently.

This could be things like

1. Change the name of the goal. I once had a fitness goal called “Tiger” because I really liked the aesthetic of the lithe power, beauty, and grace. It was much more motivating than “get in shape” or just “fitness” would have been for me.
2. Find a friend with similar interests who you can talk to about your goal regularly to get back in touch with the energy of what you want to achieve.
3. Do some writing first thing in the morning or first thing after work about what you’re hoping to achieve.
4. Close your eyes and feel into how awesome it will be to achieve your goal: to finally be a published author or debt-free or graduated or a entrepreneur, or whatever it is. Make sure to also reflect on the obstacles that stand in your way. More on this technique here.
5. Each time you go to submit intentions, or to start working, look at the names of your goals, and take a moment to remind yourself: why am I doing this?

You don’t need to do all of these, just pick one or two that work well for you and your situation.

…some combination of complex factors

Sometimes you need to refactor your goals. They used to represent your sense of the most direct vectors along which you could move towards the world you want to live in, but now they’re feeling blocked or frictiony. That happens!

When it does, it might be time to look at the various actions that are feeling important to you that you’re doing, and also to consider actions that feel like they might be important that you’re not doing, and to write them all out, then try to find a new way to dimensionalize the space of what you’re trying to achieve. Maybe “reading” and “writing” get combined under “information diet”, while your “content production” goal turns into a more specific “start a podcast” goal.

Or you could start over. Instead of trying to fix your existing goals, become a new homunculus: imagine that you’re an alien who just woke up in your body, your life, etc, and with your values. What would it make sense to do in the current position? Try thinking about this while thinking minimally about your existing to-do list for the day or week, and consider “what do I really want to be moving towards? what goals would feel really exciting to pursue?”

Once you’ve found your excitement, then you can excitedly figure out how to get there from here.

I think that this post contains good advice, but the most important piece of all is this: actually take the time to think about it. Knowing all of this advice is no good if you don’t actually spend time improving your goal architecture. And even without this advice, I bet most people could do a reasonably good job of figuring out what they need to do with their goals, as long as they actually do something at all.

If you’re feeling inspired to think about this, sign up or log back into your Complice account, and we’ll help walk you through it!

Also, a secret feature! You can access a goal-setting guide by going to complice.co/YOUR-USERNAME/goals/wizard. It shows up automatically for your first goal, but you might find it helpful for other goals as well. The disadvantage is that you can’t see all of your goals at once, which means it’s easy to overcommit.

One of the oldest parts of Complice has finally gotten the upgrade it’s needed for years: the outcomes submission interface.

It’s always interesting to reflect on what prompts this sorts of “finally” to happen, from a productivity perspective. In this case, it was the creation of a new landing page. We were creating 3 new screenshots to highlight the three core parts of the Complice workflow, and I realized that I was really embarrassed to be showing prospective users the existing interface.

The existing interface, which was based on a complex text format (with even more components than the intentions) worked really well if you understood it, but it was very opaque to those unfamiliar with it. It’s a testimony to Complice users’ desire to figure things out and get their goal-tracking system working that so many people actually did get past that.

Kudos to you.

Anyway, as in the past, it also helped that I started by playing with a vision for the new interface, not by committing to actually solving it.

Interestingly, I think that this represents both a challenge and an opportunity for solopreneurs (relative to larger companies): on the one hand, it’s easy to put off important things that you know will be hard to do, because you’re also the one who has to do them. Whereas if the CEO or other leader were to just tell the interaction designer “I don’t care how, but you’ve got to figure out a better way to do the outcomes submission”, then it’s on their plate and they’ve got to figure it out.

However, the advantage of being a solopreneur is that it is easier, once you’ve found a good frame, to explore it playfully, without committing a bunch of effort to a problem that ends up being unworkable. And it also means you have a better sense of which paths are low-hanging fruit and which very-valuable fruit are also very costly.

So there are tradeoffs!

The design process itself

The function of the outcomes submission process is quite straightforward–the user needs to review the tasks they completed that day, add new ones, etc, and then indicate for each goal whether or not it was enough. Unlike intentions, which people often enter in the order they intend to complete them, or in priority order, outcomes are organized by goal to make enoughness easier to assess.

So I thought I’d consider each goal separately, and asked “what would a little goal section look like?” I made a little sketch on paper:

The final design looks pretty similar to this, except it also has

Keep reading

One of the core parts of the Complice workflow is submitting your outcomes at the end of the day (or the next morning, for some people). Where your intentions capture what you intend to do each day, your outcomes are a chance to reflect on what you ultimately accomplished, and how that looks in relation to your overall goal.

The inspiration for this comes from the Pick Four, a workbook compiled by Seth Godin based on Zig Ziglar’s legendary goals program. That workbook was a lot like Complice, except without the intentions part, and—oh yeah, on paper.

The workflow is pretty simple. Having set your goals at the start of the program, you get a new page every day, on which you write down what you did towards each goal that day, and indicate by circling “YES” or “NO” whether that’s enough.

The Complice UI looks really similar:

This “enough” question isn’t actually a common one though, so new Complice users often ask: “What does it mean for a day to be “enough”?”

Here’s how I think about it:

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