The Journal App Making Journal: Day 36
FlashChat App completed, a look into Minimalist Journaling, and journaling on Atomic Habits
Day 36, first day in the sixth week of journaling on Medium. This journal has gone through a few evolutions, from being about,
- entrepreneurship and the goal to become a tech founder,
- to learning app development technical skills,
- to putting technical skills into the context of product development, and applying it to the product category of journals.
I am reminded of a favourite book of mine, Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans from Stanford, that the design thinking mindsets for exploring new paths and way finding are,
- be curious, curiosity invites exploration and help you “get good at being lucky”;
- try stuff, have a bias to action, fail often, and build your way forward;
- reframe problems, find the right problems to solve;
- know it’s a process, be unafraid of getting messy;
- ask for help, and know the right question to ask.
This journal is finding a bit more focus now, thanks for bearing with me. It is now helping me accumulate and share my progress and observatios everyday on 3 questions:
- What have I learned about app design and development today?
- What have I learned about other journal users today?
- What have I learned about journaling products and technologies today?
So for today, 1) What have I learned about app design and development?
Finally completed the FlashChat app today. The first more serious app from the brilliant iOS App Development course on Udemy with Angela Yu and the London App Brewery.
In the last update, I got to the stage of using a UITableView and custom cell model to show some pre-loaded messages. In this update, the app went through multiple evolutions in both functionality and UX, to become the final version as shown in the video below.
The layers of evolutions include,
- creating a database in the Cloud Firestore,
- adding and reading live messages from the database,
- sorting retrieved records for display,
- wiring the interface to interact with the database,
- dealing with organising the screen to accommodate for a popup keyboard,
- differentiating messages from the account holder vs. everyone else,
- customising the navigational title bar’s colour schemes, title, and fonts, and
- learning to manage events through lifecycle moments of the Views and the App.
In the final video, the FlashChat App seems deceivingly simple and remains imperfect. But I have really come to appreciate the details behind the scenes.
I am including a video link here to show an intermediate stage, where the text in the message entry field was not cleared. And therefore as simple as the clearing of it in the final update means there was a specific instruction created behind the scenes.
Good programmers must love thinking systematically in detail.
2) What have I learned about other journal users today?
> Featured journal user today: The Minimalist Journalist
I have been intrigued by the Medium articles under the hashtag #journaling (5.3K articles), and what other journal users do. I recently reviewed the Growth Project journal by Steph Rempe. And I am taking on reviewing more authors from more articles under this tag.
Today’s article is a very popular one, top result under the tag, with 38K claps and 122 responses. Published in 2018, it is by Michal Korzonek, called Minimalist Journaling: A Fun and Effective Tool for Tremendous Habit Change — How to create your own habit dashboard that motivates you to stick to any habit. Just what I am interested.
The Minimalist Journal as shown in the picture below is something totally novel and unexpected to me. It works for the author. Three key points I take away are,
1. Notwithstanding a logical recognition of the importance of habits to our fulfilment, progress, results, and success in life, the author acknowledged he was someone who had, “always been very impatient, expecting immediate results — especially when it comes to myself. If I don’t succeed straight away, I lose focus and interest.”
2. Journaling was used as a User Interface for the author’s mental state, to create awareness. The author combined Journaling, Consistency, and Accountability in his behavioural change process, and achieved results that increased his confidence, such as changing diet, quitting coffee addiction, and meditating.
3. He also learned that in order for the minimalist journaling system to work, it had to be,
- intuitive, effortless, most importantly, deeply integrated with himself;
- in the square drawings format, which engaged him both rationally and emotionally;
- and helpful about setting goals, priorities, and focus.
3) What have I learned about journaling products / technologies today?
> Featured journaling technology today: The Atomic Habits implementation system
Although I finished my last review on the Clear Habit Journal system yesterday, I realise today that what’s most surprising to me about the journal is how open-ended it is about implementing Atomic Habits, the companion book.
Out of 216 pages in the Journal, 168 pages are blank and 18 pages are informational guides, leaving only 26 pages with structures to shape the long process of behavioural change. I thought there would be more. And there is more, but outside the journaling system, in the a weekly newsletter, and the companion online course, Habit Academy, which costs $300 and contains additional workbooks.
Given how popular the book, Atomic Habits, is, I want to create a follow-up project to journal on the Atomic Habits implementation system, which includes both the Clear Habit Journal, weekly newsletter, and the Habit Academy course?
For 21 days starting today, I will re-read Atomic Habits, experiment using the journal, the newsletter, and the course, to answer the question: Is this the best implementation technology for the book’s core ideas?
Everyday, I am going to,
- Review and share something from the book (20 chapters), the video online course (40 lessons), or the reddit / goodreads communities, and
- Apply the ideas to the habits I most want to change right now, using the Clear Habit Journal, the weekly newsletter, and the Habit Academy online course as the implementation technology. And see its effectiveness.
(I permit myself the option to not share this experience immediately so as to not conflate the effect of sharing on this experiment. Sharing via journaling on Medium has had a powerful impact on my habit streak to code consistently over the last 36 days. I think it’s important to exclude this factor from an experiment that is focused on using and assessing other tools and systems.)
So today, the key ideas and observations I am reviewing are,
> from Atomic Habits the book:
Atomic Habits is a book about the principles of habit change. We learn in its Introduction, it was inspired by the role habits played in the author’s personal journey, from a horrific injury (baseball hit into a coma), to potential fulfilled (winning a university medal).
It is a practical book about behavioural change that applies an interdisciplinary mix of concepts from biology, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and more.
The key ideas from the book are two, 1) there are 4 steps in any habit — cue / trigger, craving, response, and reward; and 2) there are 4 laws of behaviour change, which evolve out of these steps, and they are to make it obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.
> from Habit Academy the video course:
Video Lesson 6 is free. It was about hot vs cold triggers. I particularly appreciate the author highlighting, that the mobile phone these days deserves priority attention, and needs to be actively managed, in order for us to stop bad habits and create good habits.
> from its community of readers & followers:
The book and its ideas have received serious market validation, with millions of visitors per month to the author’s website, ~500K subscribers to the weekly newsletter in 2018 when the book was published.
Its reddit community currently has 20.3 million members. Its goodreads community has 101,793 ratings, 8,762 reviews, and has left the book with an overall 4.35 star rating.
> from my habits:
Since COVID, my routines have been turned somewhat upside down. Did yours? There are a few habits I am interested in creating and re-creating.
Re-read Atomic Habits with me =) And let’s see what happens in these 21 days! The last day of this experiment will be Day 56.
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