Announcing Volition 2.0

Welcome to the first Volition progress post! Whenever we have exciting news to share, we’ll post it here. Join our community list if you don’t want to miss any updates.

Expanding the team

Volition started as a one-person show. Not anymore! To speed up the pace of progress and see Volition reach its potential, I’m bringing in my good friend Harsha Murthy. Harsha is a designer and developer who has an excellent mind for product and has already contributed a great deal to Volition. Read on to see what we’ve been up to.

Weekly planning

We believe constraints are essential for improving yourself. With unlimited room to add tasks to your daily to-do list, things tend to get lost in the pile. The line between doing work and making progress start to blur. That’s why Volition only allows you to choose five tasks to plan for each day. This scope has been useful in helping us prioritize our work. It forces us to be thoughtful about what we explicitly want to get done on a given day.

We understand that having a sense of the bigger picture makes it easier to plan each day effectively. We wanted the ability to maintain our focus, but zoom out and be strategic with how we were going to make progress over each week. So we created the Weekly Plan.

Volition now encourages you to think ahead and plan your week. Here’s how your workflow may look using the Weekly Plan feature:

1. At the beginning of the week, you think about all of the tasks you want to make progress on or complete. You may not know how long each task will take or the scope, but you write them down, so they’re all in one place. The Weekly Plan is meant to be a place for you to brain dump. There are no limits on how many tasks you can add.
2. Each morning, you add tasks from your Weekly Plan to your daily list and estimate how long each will take to complete. If you think a task will take longer than five 25-minute segments, break it down further.
3. At the end of each day, you’ll be able to add any unfinished tasks back to your Weekly Plan when you reflect on how the day went. This way, you can focus in on each day without letting anything slip through the cracks.

If you still have unfinished tasks in your Weekly Plan at the end of the week, you can choose to transfer them over to the following week’s plan or remove them all together.

The most important aspect of this workflow is that it forces you to be deliberate about how you plan your days and weeks. Nothing is allowed to pile up. If you don’t get a task done that you planned on completing, you either choose to add it back to the Weekly Plan, or let it be discarded.

New pricing structure

To sustainably maintain and improve Volition, we decided it was best to move to a monthly subscription pricing model. We like the idea of paying one price and having something forever, but the nature of software requires us to charge regularly to keep the lights on and continue improving the experience for everyone.

When deciding on the price, we compared it to the other software in our lives that form the foundation of our productivity. We landed on $5/month. $5/month requires thoughtfulness around the purchase, without causing hesitation around spending too much money. We’re firm believers in paying for the things we find valuable. We want to put Volition to that test.

Referrals and gifts

We’re trying to spread the word about Volition. To make that happen, we’re offering current customers the opportunity to refer their friends. For each referred friend that becomes a customer, we’ll give you both a free month of Volition! If there’s someone in your life you think would benefit from Volition, you can also purchase an annual gift subscription.

Thanks for joining us on the journey thus far. Stay tuned for more updates!

If the updates in this post piqued your curiosity, head over to Volition to give it a try!