New productivity tool launches Friday. Thoughts and feature requests?

6 points by palish ↗ HN
Hiya! Straight to what this tool can do for you: It will help you accomplish something every single day.

Fill in the blank, "I'm going to _____ every day." Thinking of something? Great! Now go out there and do it, then return to the tool and click "I did it today!" You'll be congratulated and given the opportunity to write about your experience and post a picture.

At that point, the picture becomes a link in your productivity chain. After you've formed a few links in the chain, I bet you won't want to stop. But if you do stop and miss a day, the entire chain breaks and everything is deleted.

Now, if you just want to use the tool for just that, all by your lonesome, that's just fine. But we've included a social aspect to it as well. Whenever another person is doing the same thing as you, each one of your chain links will be submitted to a centralized place where you'll be able to explore and upvote others' chain links and post comments to everyone.

On the front page, you'll see the top 20 popular chains and the fastest growing chains for today, as well as the top comments and featured users. Next to each chain is a plus sign that, when clicked, will enable you to do that same thing each day, too. You can also explore and find interesting chains and users.

The time interval is adjustable. You can do something every day, weekday, weekend or week.

The project was inspired by this post: http://lifehacker.com/software/motivation/jerry-seinfelds-pr...

We're launching on Friday at 10PM CST. Everyone who registers in the first hour will start with 50 karma points, so bring a friend! If you have any feature requests, just let us know and they'll be waiting for you at launch.

Common wisdom is that it's dangerous to let you all in on our secret before we're out there, but we wanted to give you the opportunity to make this tool better in your eyes.

Thanks for your critique guys!

Update: First feature request will be implemented for you: A vacation switch that you can toggle on and off. If it's on, your chains are frozen and won't be deleted.

18 comments

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The idea aside, deleting my stuff would be incredibly annoying.

Say the default is a day, which I assume it is from the write up. There are a ton of valid reasons I might miss a day, or even a week, e.g. medical reasons. And to come back and have my stuff deleted! Man, I don't know what else to say about that except I don't like it.

Thanks for bringing this up. There will be a vacation switch you can flip on and off. When it's on, your chains are frozen and won't be deleted.

What other thoughts do you have on it? We'd really like to know!

What about not deleting the stuff at all, so you can do away with the vacation switch too? I wouldn't touch a site that stresses me at all about my data.

I'd lose the karma reward too. It's plain bribery, and it devaluates your site's karma.

You're right, on both counts. Simpler's better. We wanted to help motivate people.. But treating it like a game is probably the wrong way to do it.
I use: http://smarterfitter.com/chain for the same purpose. I like the social aspect of your idea though.
Cool, another competitor :) Yeah, we hope you'll have fun exploring what everyone else is accomplishing. See you Friday!
Hey palish do you have any screen shots on how the app is going to look like?
Mm.. Might as well just wait 'til we launch tomorrow. I'm at work right now so I don't have access to any, sorry. See you at 10!
Consider allowing imports of existing chains for other popular sites.
Thanks for this one, this is all I want except one thing: I can't fill in any days earlier than the current month. For one month I've been avoiding some foods I'm mildly allergic to, and in this page I can only click X-s back to the beginning of August. I can live with that, though.

I clicked on the habitcal.com link above and ran away quickly. I'd plow through the wall of text if there wasn't an alternative that's simple as pie.

TBH I'm not looking forward anything with any more features. I'd even remove the 'today' highlight so the timezone combo could go too.

Holy shit! I've been working on a site based on the exact same post. Though mine is a pretty basic take on Seinfeld's method.
:) Sorry. Wanna compare notes? Palish at gmail.
Ohh great idea! I'm excited to see this happen.
I'm not sure if I'm missing something entirely but to what URL would you like us to bring our friends and earn these karma points? Might be helpful to get that out there.