Medvedev91
[FR] Bring activities back
I would like to have separate activities back. The new implementation is extremely inconvenient for me because:
- The convenient activity launch feature is gone. I can no longer start an activity for a fixed period of time by selecting an interval from a predefined list (which was the main function of the app for me).
- I don't need goals for daily activities such as eating or showering on the main screen, and it's no longer possible to hide them in a drop-down list.
I can no longer start an activity for a fixed period of time by selecting an interval from a predefined list
Do you mean "timer hints" in the previous version?
and it's no longer possible to hide them in a drop-down list.
You can hide goals on Settings -> Goals screen.
I can no longer start an activity for a fixed period of time by selecting an interval from a predefined list
Do you mean "timer hints" in the previous version?
Exactly.
and it's no longer possible to hide them in a drop-down list.
You can hide goals on Settings -> Goals screen.
I can, but then they remain hidden. There is no longer a list of all possible activities. In addition, having basic activities (daily routines) as goals is inconvenient for me personally. I don't quite understand why the clear distinction was removed.
Totally agree with DancingEmptier667. I eat every day, but that's not exactly a goal of mine. It's a necessity. Most of my activities aren't goal oriented, but I'm doing them on a regular basis. I only had 5-6 daily goals (Training, chess-exercises,...) to establish good habits. But now everything is a goal, which doesn't make sense to me.
This is more or less exactly what I am missing. Features I used that are gone now:
- Start an activity for a set time. Used this heavily when picking an activity for a short time, examples:
- I had 20 mins left until having to leave the house -> Start "Household" with a timer set for 20 mins, so that I get reminded in time to move on
- I had different Timer Hints for commuting, for my usual trip lengths (into the city, to work, picking up children) -> got a reminder when that time was over to pick a new activity
- No more activities without goals, problem like written above by ssos75 just some minutes ago:
- Eating or Commuting takes as long as it takes, but there is no Goal
- Spending time with my children is no activity with a hard schedule, I can't even set a daily or weekly goal as it heavily depends on our schedules when we even get to start time together. Used the activity timer like described above, as a "timeout" when I need to eg start cooking.
The way it is implemented now, that everything is a goal, forces you to pick a desired daily time. That's nothing I want or need. You can always adjust the limit upwards by hammering +, but no way to reduce it. Taking the Commuting example from above, my steps were 15min, 35min, 2h - now I need to always start with 15min and then increase to 2h.
In addition, the main screen just got very cluttered. I had much more Activities than Goals.
I know you write the app primarily for your needs, so I can totally understand that it's optimised to fit your habits. But perhaps it's possible to find a way to allow both ways of usage?
Thank you for your feedback, guys!
Since the release I've received a lot of messages, some of those positive, some not. I believe we will find a way to solve all the issues.
Seconding this - the previous flow was super intuitive and provided just the right level of complexity for using the app as a daily tachograph, to-do list and habit nudge. As others have said, lunch isn't exactly a goal that I seek to achieve each day, but it is something that takes about an hour out of each day and the previous split of 'activities' and 'goals' captured that distinction perfectly.
Also, #162 is related to this
Strongly seconding this.
Only that for me it's exactly the opposite when it comes to what activities I need as goals, but the baseline problem is the same.
I've had my basic needs like eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom and self-care as my goals, to help me take care of them. But having "social media" as a "goal" just feels wrong. It's not a goal, if anything, it's rather an anti-goal, still it's something I sometimes do. Technically I can still use it as before and pretend it's an activity, because it's only a name, but idk.
Honestly I just needed an app to track all of my time to help me manage my ADHD and executive dysfunction. I liked that it had no stop option. I've been using it for more than a year. But now it's outright judging me and tells me I only need to do goals 24/7. With all the recent changes it fits my needs less and less, I'm afraid I will have to delete it eventually (at least until I fully give up using internet for entertainment I guess, so = never).
It now feels as an app suitable only for overachievers and people obsessed with productivity and planning, those who have their days planned down to the minute. It all started first when it became impossible to create tasks with no set time of the day, forcing us to puzzle over and come up with random time of the day every time we wanted to edit an existing task of create a new one, then adding a bunch of visual clutter in the form of the red "HH:MM"'s if you missed that time. So it didn't directly punish us for not having our day planned, but given these it still felt like a punishment.
And now the activities are gone, and it's implied we have to only have goals and be productive 24/7.
Besides, it now limits the total number of activities/goals we can have, moving the "extra" ones to the "hidden" field we can't directly access, except from the "edit" list, and I see there is already an issue created for that which I'm gonna second too. Here also goes limiting the names we can give to our "goals"/activities (the longer the name the more space it takes, otherwise it would look like a cluttered mess of letters and numbers. Limiting the total number of possible activities even more.), in order to fit as much "goals" as possible to the quick access screen the name has to have no more than 1 uppercase letter and 3 lowercase letters (yes I actually took my time to test that!), OR 3 uppercase letters, OR 1 emoji, 1 uppercase & 2 lowercase letters, OR 1 emoji and only 2 uppercase letters!
Speaking of emojis… finally came to my biggest problem with the latest update, and I'm gonna create a separate issue for it, because it makes using the "tasks" features basically impossible, and my decision of whether I'm gonna delete the app or not depends on this. Emoji coding was the feature I heavily and fully relied on. It was the only way I could quickly choose a task from my task folders. As the folders are not sorted by name or activity, but by date, so while quickly scrolling through them to fish out the task I needed I looked at the emojis to determine which activity it belongs to, then the first letter and then the timer duration! Once the emojis were gone, my folders became a hot mess. Now I'm forced to READ all the names!!! It will take me, like, several times more time now to only choose a task! It became really tempting to just stop tracking altogether because who's got time to spend 10+ minutes choosing what to do next? Before anyone could say "but you can manually rename your tasks to add emojis to them", no way I'm gonna do that to the hundreds of tasks that have accumulated in my folders in over a year. I renamed some of the repeating ones I do daily but that's it.
To end this on a positive note, the only good feature of the latest update is the possibility of editing entries older than 5 days being brought back! Now I can finally edit all the times I dropped asleep while the timer was saying I was doing something else, then proceeding to immediately do another thing upon waking up.
Btw, the app told me I was writing this comment for an hour and a half.
