4 common misconceptions that “murder” productivity.
And how my team uses them to build an App of The Day (Apple)
Preface
I am writing this for, first of all, my users. I believe you are already familiar with my changelogs and instructions, but not the philosophies behind Habitify. I sincerely hope this post sheds a light on how we built the app, and how you can use the app in a better, more productive and creative way.
I am writing this for, second of all, other devs out there. Knowing Swift doesn’t mean we can code an awesome iOS app. It’s all about researching and constantly validating your ideas with the market. I do not deem the growth of my app entirely to the researches and philosophies that I am going to present below, but I do know they act as a solid compass that guides us along the way.
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We are human-being. Not human-doing.
But not many people get it.
We try to do as much as possible in a short amount of time and proudly call ourselves “productive”. We invented laptops only to lock ourselves hours on a chair, typing, reading, typing again. Soullessly.
Seeing a lot of people blindly follow that vicious circle, we couldn’t help feeling an urge to do something about it. With coding and designing background, we chose to create an app to help people break that circle, have better work-life balance, and return to the real “productive” state. By “real”, we mean:
Complete our tasks with highest quality in a period of time.
Our first app, Habitify, was built around that vision. Therefore, all the core features are designated to deal with people’s most common productivity misconceptions.
1. “If I adopt Elon Musk’s habits, I can become him one day”
I’m sure you must have heard of something like 10 habits of successful people, or, 10 morning-routine-killer that will skyrocket your productivity. Many people blindly believe that if they simply take on such habits, after 1–2 weeks, they’ll become the next Elon Musk (who reportedly works effectively 100 hours a week). I saw many of my friends failed. I failed.
What we are missing in the success recipe is:
Being productive is equal to listening to our body.
We human function differently from each other. Your energetic morning may be my fully-charged afternoon. We’re only productive a few hours a day, and that holy-grail moment differs from person to person. Superhumans like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs account for only 1% of the population. And while we may be waiting for that 1% to (magically) fall upon ourselves, isn’t it better to take action and become the top 1% of the rest 99%?
Instead of applying other’s habits, we should build our own system that works for us. More particularly, we should undertake different tasks at different times of the day to maximize our potential, consequently achieving more in less time.
If you feel most energized in the morning, choose tasks that require most mental/physical effort. If you are always weary and teary like me in the morning, then move them to the afternoon/night. After all, there’s no use in “eating the frog” first thing in the morning (as many life-experts suggest), if it ends up being the lowest-quality thing you could have achieved in the whole day.
It’s not easy to communicate this tip to our users (we had a relatively modest user-base in the beginning). For that reason, we decided to make it a core feature in Habitify that everyone must go through.
The most primitive version is grouping habits by different times of days: Morning, Afternoon and Evening, instead of by categories (health, work…) (I will show you a workaround in the 2nd part).
You must fill this to be able to create a new habit, and in return, it will encourage you to think of the best time to handle it.
Choosing the right time is a de facto key factor in keeping your streaks unbroken because your body will be more likely to do something it needs to, not that you force it to.
However, after testing this on a group, we were really surprised to figure out: People like to plan. Like, a lot! They put a lot of things in their daily schedule, and tend to look at them to check how far they’ve gone.
The downside of this, sadly, is that it makes them greatly demotivated, seeing a long list of undone tasks and even missed ones. We suffered a critically low retention rate due to this.
After successfully identifying the root cause (thanks to a few warm-hearted conversations with our most loyal users), we only let them see what’s due next in a specific period of time.
It means if it’s currently morning, they can only see morning tasks; if it’s afternoon — afternoon tasks, and so on. They are not able to choose any time of day to see like before. (Of course, they can still check all habits, but at least we’ve reduced their tendency to do so)
If you own a Mac, you should not ignore the powerful combo Habitify — Notes!
First, you can use Notes to list out monthly repeated tasks or habits you want to form (brain-dumping), then organize them by different times of day in Habitify.
This is where the Mac excels because you have more screen real-estate to have a full view of your day (and notes), compared to a limited screen on the phone where you’ll have to scroll forever.
2. “I’ll remember it tomorrow”
Our solution above poses a consequence: People think that they remember where they stopped yesterday so they can continue the undone tasks or improve their performance today. They think that simply by remembering, they can be more productive tomorrow.
It’s quite the contrary.
According to a popular research done by Hermann Ebbinghaus, we forgot 40% what we just learned after 20 mins and more than 60% in 9 hours. Well, then, how can we rely on our brain after 24 hours to recall exactly where we stopped?
To resolve this, we design Notes to record people’s current progress. It could be their achievement (run 1km, exercise for 10 mins) or their failure (only do Hand training for 45s/60s because hands are too weak, haven’t answered Tom’s emails…).
The next day, before getting down to all the work, they only need 1–2 minutes at most to read those notes and get their brain in the right frame immediately.
(Rob Nightingale explained this brilliantly in an article called “What are notes for”)
Notes function, therefore, helps us continue working in almost no time. Sometimes it can drive our performance for the better if we choose to work only 1 unit better than yesterday (Run 1 more km, exercise for 1 more min). In other words, we win every day.
We were deeply inspired by this HBR post about daily small wins, so we designed Notes for our users to view all their notes — their small wins — in one place:
3. “I’m more productive if I take on more work”
One of the biggest ironies of productivity is this:
Achieving more requires you to do less
Wait. Don’t leave. I know you are dead confused. Let me explain.
Over-extending your self a.k.a saying “yes” to all the requests from your friends/colleague is the quickest way to getting yourself burnt out by an overwhelming workload.
Furthermore, taking up more work/habit/goal for yourself in a day, and your focus is chopped off into multiple tiny parts that have absolutely no connection with each other.
You’ll start to be distracted while your body and your mind are constantly calling for rests in between your “work” sessions because it is so tired of adapting itself to too many things a day. Procrastination, if anything, is an imminent enemy that results in your (constant) disappointment at the end of the day.
So contrary to our good intention, we accidentally squeeze our body to be less productive, making it prone to ineffectiveness.
Each of us only has 24 hours a day. Subtracted all the time required for our basic needs and social interactions, we’re left with only 10–12 hours (This is a VERY optimistic calculation!). If we are not selective of what we are going to do in that 10–12 hours, the truth is we will not produce anything worthy at all. In short, we make no value in 10–12 hours.
Choosing only a few specific things to do in a day, and you’ll start to see the results at a higher level. You start to make values. Your body and your mind are focused on a few “topics”. They get used to it fast, and they don’t have to “spare” any bit of energy for anything else. They are “in the zone”.
We want to help our users “get in the zone”, too. I mean, what’s the use of a habit app if, at the end of the day, it makes people more tired and disappointed in themselves because they couldn’t achieve a thing?
Instead of distracting our users with too many hashtags and categories (like many traditional trackers and todo list apps), we let them focus by adding emojis to their habit name and the default “Journal” text.
This feature helps people “tag” their most focused habits for that day. For example, on Monday, Thursday, and Friday, my focus is my health (because Monday is the start of the week so I need to feel healthy, Thursday is to balance the whole week and Friday is to prepare for all the carbs coming from Saturday and Sunday)
Psychology-wise, a habit with a special emoji will tell them to prioritize it over other tasks. And since that focus only exists during the day, they can only “beat it or miss it”.
4. “When I’m at work, I work only”
Because many people claim to value a work-life balance. They don’t want to bring their work home, so they work as much as they can while they’re at their office.
This is not particularly wrong, in a sense that people should have a clear separation between working and enjoying their off hours. However, isn’t work a part of our life? If we’re working, we are also living. In that context, it doesn’t sound right if we only work and do nothing else.
On one hand, working non-stop will actually decrease your productivity.
On the other hand, working only will deprive people of many golden opportunities they could have had in their life.
Some of us, including our co-founders, used to work in a crowded corporate before founding this company. We understand really well that a walking session around the office at your break time can bump ourselves into a creative co-worker who happens to have an interesting solution to your problem. Or, an accidentally-met colleague at the coffee machine can become our future wife/husband (oh, believe me, this happened once in a while in my old company), or a potential partner.
We don’t know what our users do and who they are. But we know that by designing Habitify to pull them out of the work zone, we’ll give them a chance to create even more chances for themselves.
They can be social interaction, working out or self-care (meditation, for example). They can be anything that gets the creative juice flowing or adds some extra dopamine to our blood (smile!). As far as our researches go, they are what makes people many times more productive.
Therefore, we build Habitify for Mac. This required effort and resources of the whole team, but (we believe) it’s worth it. People today spend an increasing amount of time in front of laptops, and sadly, they turn themselves into voluntary slaves for their “beloved” tool. They need something to rescue their poor restless soul. And if we can do something about it, we do it.
Second, we create multiple reminders. Reminders, as in our shared perception, will be the key to pulling users from their laptops to do some light jogging or drink a cup of water.
Forming habits without reminders is like sailing without wind.
Following that purpose, Habitify’s reminders’ sounds are designed to have high, upwards and energetic tone. They are most useful to signal users’ brain to take a short break from whatever they are doing.
The “multiple” features will counteract people’s tendency to snooze that reminder (swiping it away). If you find yourself the fan of that action, set 10 reminders, 1 minute away from each other. I’m quite sure you’ll choose to get away from work rather than be disrupted every now and then.
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Much as we’ve tried and perfected each feature, our solutions are not one-size-fits-all. We’re still interviewing a lot of users for more insights, with a hope Habitify can solve more than just the aforementioned misconceptions.
In the meantime, if you enjoy this article, I hope you can spare some 👏to help others find it as well.
Again, if you are one of my users (or my to-be users), I hope you’ll have an idea of how the app works. And if you are a dev, I hope the post has fueled you with some ideas for your current, or next big project :)
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