We’re excited to announce that we’ve built Goals for iDoneThis. It’s a simple way to plan your day.
To take it for a spin, just start your done with open and closed brackets–”[]“–and we’ll turn that into a goal with a checkbox that you can check off. Try this goal for today:
[] take the goals feature for a spin!
It works on the web, over email, and with any of our integrations.
To-Do Deja Vu
Years ago, we had a to-do list feature, but it wasn’t widely used and we ended up killing it.
The previous to-do list had a few problems that we’re hoping to fix this time around with our goals feature.
To-dos shouldn’t pile up from one day to the next
One of the biggest problems with to-do lists is that tasks pile up. It’s demoralizing to start you day with a never-ending list of tasks. That makes it easy to work on the easy tasks to cross off, not the important ones.
The old to-do feature was a persistent list at the top of the calendar and that resulted in tasks piling up. Ultimately we found that 41% of to-do items were never completed.
With the new goal feature, each day starts fresh, because goals live on individual days. We hope that that’ll give you room to breathe and thoughtfully consider what’s important for today.
Goals should be lightweight to create and check off
When you have to go through an arduous process to create a to-do, you become less productive. Previously, to-dos couldn’t be entered or checked off a to-do via email, and so they weren’t super easy to use.
Ultimately, the solution came from you, our customers: Ed Solovey at Twitter suggested that we use a simple markup to create a “pending done”, using [ ], that could be written on email or on the web. We tried it out, and it worked great. Thanks Ed!
Goals should help communicate to others what you’re planning for the day
The way we plan our day is currently siloed away in the individual, personal task management tools we use, like Google Tasks, a mobile app, or a text file. That’s why there are additional meetings in place like daily standup meetings or status meetings to sync up on what’s been done and what’s planned to-do.
We hope to make many of those meetings obsolete. Instead of syncing up on the day in an inefficient meeting, just have everyone share their daily goals and dones in iDoneThis.
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Take goals for a spin and let us know what you think! Just start your done with open and closed brackets, [], and we’ll turn that into a goal with a checkbox that you can check off. Try this:
[] took the goals feature for a spin!
It works on the web, over email, and with any of our integrations.
