Subtle but important update for complice.co today, realigning something that had been slightly off for years: a source of staleness. The existence of this feature is cool, but isn't the important part. The important part is a constraint: an old path replaced by this!
Fighting staleness in Complice with a task-breakdown feature
12 tweets · July 2021 · 30 likes · 1 retweets · read on Twitter
Complice, in a different way than Twitter, is all about TODAY. It's a to-do list app, but it doesn't have a big backlog of tasks queued up of bullshit that your past self thought was a good idea but your current self couldn't care less about.
These backlogs are what I call "staleness", and it's one of the main issues most people face with almost any productivity system. And those systems can hide almost anywhere. I realized I had a backlog growing in my browser tabs! Apply aliveness to that:
Much more I could say about that but maybe that'll be another thread. Will probably do threads on each of the core 4 elements at some point. For now, there's this post: malcolmocean.com/2020/12/compli…
Anyway, about 5 years ago I added something people had been asking for, which was a slightly easier way to grab things from yesterday that hadn't been completed. I didn't want them to roll-over automatically, and I wanted some friction to aid awareness: blog.complice.co/post/149127901…
Unfortunately, the reality is that people tend to bypass sources of friction, so the "write about how you're going to approach this differently today" just turned into people writing a single character to get through the prompt, then deleting it. Hazard of adversarial design!
What I've now done is still slightly adversarial, but should be more attractive: • it has a nice interface for actually doing the breakdown • *after* breaking down clears the staleness marks: ")))" - makes sense since the new steps are fresh!
The main thing I think will help is that I think that breaking things down will actually WORK better than trying to type some sort of "what are you going to do differently this time?" answer. If so, people will associate the breakdown UI with relief rather than obstaculousness!
This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of designing more elements into Complice to nudge people towards loving relationships with themselves and their goals.
One I'm planning to work more on soon is what I call the "metacognition module", which will be a series of prompts that helps people figure out why they're stuck. Feel free to share any ideas for exercises or components to include in that!
And ofc check out the new task breakdown feature on complice.co, if you're so inclined!
(You can access it using the ⋮ menu on an intention in today's list, or as the forked downward arrow button in the notdones propagator.)