My Weekend Project: Mr. Goal -- simple goal reminders by Email and SMS.
mrgoal.net
mrgoal.net
will remembering my goals better actually help me reach them, as is stated? why might that be?
do you vary the frequency of the reminders at all?
Would this be enhanced if you had human mentors that saw the interactions? I find messages computers are dismissed pretty easily, while people a need to respond or show progress to humans.
I think quite the opposite. What makes you reach goals is never forgetting them to begin with.
I can't speak for others, but I have very few goals, and they haunt me, awake or asleep. The rest of the "self dev" stuff I off-load to my fiancee :-P
I think technology can facilitate mentors as they ask the questions one needs to answer if one is to translate goals into the actions required to achieve them.
If it's a goal a lot of people have, and which follows a general formula, then once someone has written it down, the software can store it in a central database and let everyone else make use of it. Imagine entering "write book" into your to-do list app, hitting TAB, and watching it expand into "write proposal chapter, find writing group, show chapter to group, modify chapter using feedback, write outline for draft, [...], submit to publisher."
Then, if you immediately know how to "write proposal chapter," you can just stick with that and check it off when it's done—but if you're unsure, you can select that sub-task and hit TAB again, and it will expand into "select writing tool, find environment suitable to writing, schedule writing time, create new document"—and then there would be a placeholder step with a question in it, "what are you writing: {prose fiction, technical guide, biography, etc.}" You'd select, say, prose fiction, and it would replace the placeholder with more steps: "think of name and other physical details for main protagonist, think of conflict, write first paragraph introducing both character and conflict, [...]"
And there's already a collection of such lists available online to get your database off the ground: the eHow/Wikihow/etc. type sites. You could also parse the StackExchange-driven sites for answers that look like ordered lists.
You can change the SMS frequency in your profile page under "SMS Frequency". It's a dropdown for now, but I've been doing some testing with a jQuery slider bar.
As for actually achieving your goals, I think that one is more likely to get something done if they are consistently conscious about it. That's the rationale I have for now -- you'll make small adjustments to accomodate your goals. Speaking personally, most of my goals are not things that take years of effort to do; they simply require that I remain consistent and think + act about them often.
There's definitely a lot to be said about the psychology behind reminders. For now, my strategy is to make the service seem as personal as possible without making it seem like it's artificially trying to grab your attention, like a real person would. I think that this blog post does a good job explaining some of the considerations: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/12/avoiding-the-uncann...
It actually seems that they might be tied together? Is "regime" in your context referring to the months of subscription that I can sign up for, the max length ahead of time I can set a goal...? I did not recognize its meaning in this context.
Also, it was not clear how much I'd actually pay you if I signed up for a paid plan. The sub-heading of the "Cost per Month" shows that I can cancel, but am I paying monthly or per year? Anyway, that's what I thought reactively. It seems that cost per month multiplied by regime length is the sub-heading cost amount for each subscription.
That makes no sense to me.
And as someone trying it out, I'm not sure if I'd sign up for a free plan that I'd be afraid of upgrading.
Cool idea. But I am afraid to sign up for anything besides the free plan based on the payment matrix.
Regime Length -- how long the plan with Mr. Goal will last. I think of it as a personal trainer, so a 1-month regime will be 1-month of help with you goals.
The actual amount you pay is in the cost per month row -- $3.06, $2.70, $2.96. If you multiply the cost per month by the number of months in each regime and then scale by the discount, ($2.70 / month * 6 months) / .82 (as it's 18% off), you get $19.74.
It's pretty confusing, so I think at this point I'll figure out how to simplify the process as a whole.
At the moment, the table moves on 2 degrees of freedom: 1. feature set, 2. plan length. I'll try holding plan length constant -- so I'll make every plan 3 months. I suspect that it's hard to understand a 2-d table when the featureset itself is moving both on features and plan length.
I'm going to re-work the pricing table today. Could you please shoot me an email: omar.bohsali@gmail.com if you're interested in providing some feedback on a new pricing plan? I'll get you setup with whatever plan I come up with, for free, of course.
Thanks.
And, something like a random time (like, some random moment from 17pm to 20pm) will be a cool option
As for random times, it actually does that a little bit. I pushed most of the timezone code to behind the scenes so that it will automatically figure out your timezone through javascript and then push it server side via ajax. I also put in a random checker in the views that will decide if the user should have their timezone checked.
Given the timezone, it tries to guess your "working hours", i.e. 8am to 6pm your time. It'll send you a set number of random texts throughout each day, that number is set by the message frequency in your profile.
That was one of my biggest concerns. Google calendar sends me a daily email at 5:15am with my calendar in it. That's nice, but I have a hunch that the texts will be less effective if people know that they will come at a set point throughout the day. So that's my rationale for randomizing the delivery time throughout the day.
I have been thinking about dropping in a slider bar to set both the text message frequency, as well as the texting window throughout the day, so I'll definitely be implementing your feature in the near future.
my problem is I can't keep a schedule due to serious sleep problems (it just not worth it). I think randomizing my timetable will help to distribute my tasks so getting them done will be simpler. I'm not sure, but experimenting with such idea sounds great for me
1. I signed up for the free plan and i am not seeing an option to upgrade to the paid plans. 2. A better word choice for 'Introspections' would be nice 3. Making the 'forgot password' page consistent with the site design would be good. I guess you will be having it on your list. 4. Notifo push notifications would be really awesome!
If you had this, I would give Mr. Goal a try and if it was any good, I'd probably pay for it. It'd be nice to have a service that told me how hellish some school weeks would be in advance.
Also I tested your app a bit and it tells me to 'choose a password that's at least 5 characters' even when I am putting in 5-character password. But otherwise seems OK. Good luck.
And actually, re the sentence 'Doing something, every-day, until you achieve it', you could remove all the commas and it would mean the same but read better.
I'm looking at using CDYNE for texts. At volume they also charge 3c, but there's no distinction between networks with their price so you pay the same to text Nepal as you do San Francisco.
http://particletree.com/features/rediscovering-the-button-el...
The icons are from FAMFAM: http://famfamfam.com/
I also keep this page updated with the technologies we're using: [3] (see the section on technologies).
[1] http://www.djangoproject.com/ [2] http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/ [3] https://mrgoal.net/about/