Show HN our weekend project: an email based productivity log | Hacker News Reader

Show HN our weekend project: an email based productivity log

idonethis.com

20 pointsrguzman23 comments

It's funny how similar in implementation this could be to OhLife, and yet how different a feeling it has. It is really interesting to take the exact same technology, put a different story in front of it, and be amazed the entire new audience you have just discovered.

Out of curiosity, did you consider skipping the signup requirement/process? Instead, just having a user put in their e-mail address as the only step?

Then it might work like this: 1) user enters email 2) you send daily "What have you done" emails to that address, they reply (which you can uniquely key to your database/calendar) 3) you email out the intended results, or if at a later time a user wants to log into the site to see a fancy calendar/history/graphs/charts, etc., at that time they could complete the signup process

I wouldn't say the signup is prohibitive in any way, and I admittedly did not investigate what features are part of being logged into the site - just a thought as less burden on signups seems to be a growing trend.

I did consider that and, in fact, would work. It was just quicker/simpler this way (django auth out of the box as it stands). We will likely move to that signup flow soon.

> I wouldn't say the signup is prohibitive in any way

I would. I didn't sign up. The concept looked interesting, but there was no real information on this side of the sign-up wall. For me, there really is a mental effort in establishing One More Relationship with One More Website.

how about sticking an image of what the calendar will look like on the main page? there is really all that much to explain about the site otherwise -- it's simple. (the mental energy of having to deal with one more site we hope is mitigated by the fact that we email you, you don't have to remember to check out our site.)

Hi, you should add email sending time to chose. Because I'm in Europe and now in the morning (6am) I've got mail saying "What'd you get done today?". I'v just barely woke up ;)

yeah, we just wanted to get it off the ground quickly. we will add timezone support soon.

Looks interesting. Few initial thoughts;

- I'd really like to see a demo or something before signing up (classic "Show HN" feedback)

- Even signing up wont show me how this will work, as I will have to wait for my first email. Right now all I get is an empty calendar

- My calendar appears public. As I haven't received a reminder email yet I don't know what information will be public, but I'd personally like to keep a log like this private (or possibly be able to flag which items should be public)

- Perhaps the calendar data could be exported to Google calendar and/or other calendars people use?

Thanks for the feedback. We were just discussing your first two points -- we'll do something about it soon.

As for the public vs private calendars, we weren't sure what people would prefer: public, private, or option. So, we opted for what we have until further notice. I'll put do you down as wanting the calendar private.

i second the first bit of feedback. the visualization of 'getting things done' is really important-it's a deal maker/breaker to me. and i don't want to sign up unless i know what it is. keep on keepin on!

Cool. We'll do this. Thanks!

Second the bit about private calendars. To me this is about tracking my own productivity across all kinds of contexts (work, play, gym, diet); I can't even fathom a reason why I'd want to make data that span those contexts available to anybody / everybody.

The other bit of feedback - I have to wait a whole day until the app starts showing value. How can you make it add value immediately? What about sending me an email and asking me what I did yesterday? Or letting me enter it right on the site, since otherwise I gotta go fire up my email client?

Two excellent points. We'll most likely implement both. Thanks.

Agreed on all points equally.

Getting an error after registration:

NoReverseMatch at / Reverse for 'dailydone_calendar' with arguments '()' and keyword arguments '{'username': u'.....'}' not found.

edit: my username has a dash '-' in it, maybe your URL regex isn't catching it

edit2: also you shouldn't run with DEBUG on

Thanks! Both should be fixed.

Unfortunately doesn't work with Cyrillic characters. I got this in the calendar

"=C7=E0=EF=EE=F7=ED=E0=F5"

argh... pesky email stuff. i'll look into this soon.

Cool! I've just started doing something like this, but just for myself. It's based on lionhearted's time tracking efforts... so it's interesting to see others building things around recording your productivity.

Tried to do registration but got an Internal Server Error. Not sure if my registration went through or not. (My e-mail is in my profile).

Thanks for the heads up. This was fixed. Rodrigo dropped you an email.

smalter, peng, and I put this together to scratch personal itches and help us keep our new year's resolutions.

Any feedback is welcome.

I've been looking for something like this!

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