How to Plan Your Day the Night Before Using “Day Planner”

We’ve recently made a few improvements to the site, to help those who would like to use GoalsOnTrack to make plans for the next day the night before.

How it works is that when you are planning the tasks for the next day, you can schedule them as “Tomorrow” tasks for all your goals. We’ve added a “Tomorrow” accessible from the “My Tasks” navigation on the right on “Dashboard”. Once you’ve planned all the tasks, just go back to “Dashboard” page, and then click “Print Day Planner”.

Now you will have a print-out of what you have scheduled for tomorrow, and when you start next day, you can grab this “planner” sheet and start your day right away, without even having to logon to GoalsOnTrack.

Cheers,
Harry

Hide goals on “Day Planner”, and other features and updates

There has been a new release deployed to production. In this new release, we’ve made a few improvements, fixed some minor bugs, and also added several small features.

On Day Planner sheet, now you are able to hide the goals section, so that only the tasks are shown on the print-out. This is useful if you have many goals and you want to see only the tasks on the sheet.

We’ve also done a few cosmetic fixes to menu icons, progress bar graphics, etc. We are planning to add a few major features in the next month or so, among which, a vision board, and habits tracker will be main functional modules. I will talk more about them later.

In the meanwhile, if you have any suggestions as to what features you would like to see, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Thanks, and have productive day.

Harry

Manage and track your goals easier and faster

You may have experienced some performance improvement since two days ago. I’ve just deployed a new release that has added caching to certain pages, such as Goals and Tasks pages. Now you should be able to navigate across these pages more quickly and things load faster than before.

The improvement should be significant if you happen to have a lot of  active goals and tasks. However, from a pure goal setting perspective, it’s not always a good idea to have many active goals at one time. Because that tends to overwhelm and distract you. You can always put on backburner those goals that you may not want to focus on right now, and later bring them back to be active.

I am always trying things to make the site more accessible and easier to use, so if you have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Thanks,

Harry

Improved Recurring Task Feature

The recurring task function has been improved.

Now you can specify any day of the week for a task that repeats itself. For example, if you want to add a task like “Weekly review” on every friday, then you just check “Fri” checkbox when creating the task. Then on every Friday for the next 30 days, same task will be added automatically for you. Here is a screenshot of how the new interface looks like:

However, please note that these checkboxes are useful only when you create a task. When you update a task, they won’t be used. You need to create a new task to setup other recurring tasks.

Two feature updates

There are two minor updates to the site in past few days.

1. Clearer explanation on goal creation form. Especially the label for “progress metrics”. Please note that if you enter anything doesn’t start with a number, the progress will default to be tracked through number of tasks completed.

2. Hide completed tasks on “Tasks” page. Now the completed tasks are not shown on the index page under the “Tasks” menu tab. This is mainly to reduce the clutter if you have more than 2 or 3 goals. However, you can still see those completed tasks on each goal’s dashboard page. Just click on the goal title, you will still see them there.

Also removed the dropdown box for the progress metrics field, as it seems to be useless.

Recent updates and upcoming changes

Two weeks have passed since my last post on the blog. I’ve been working on maintaining the code base steadily. Also found time to promote and optimize the site with search engines. I’ve got some good results so far, as the site now turns up in Google’s first page search results on a few important keywords.

Like always, there are some small fixes and adjustments done to the site on a regular basis. One thing you may have already noticed is that I’ve switched to the hosted wordpress blog. The reason being I am planning to post more frequently, and more things related to productivity and goal setting, than just site related updates. Therefore I’d like to have a more reliable and stable environment so that the blog can be an integral part of the site.

There was a bug that affected a few users when showing tasks other than “Today’s”. It has been fixed now. The summary report email format has also been improved, or simplified a little. I am always wondering what more or less we should put in the reminder email. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

One change that is going to happen in the next few weeks, is that a pay version will be launched, and at that time, I will be officially closing the beta phase. However, this won’t affect you using the site in any way. My plan is that all existing users will still have full access to everything for a month after the beta is closed. I will post more about this in the next few days. If you have any comments, feel free to email me or leave them here.

So long for now, as always, please let me know if you find anything not working for you, or any ideas how the site can be made better.

Cheers,

Harry

Recent fixes and improvements to GoalsOnTrack

First off, I’d like to thank all the users who have taken the time to send me warm feedback and great suggestions. I appreciate your continuing interest and support for the site. That’s one of the reasons that I have been working hard to make it as best as I can.

There have been some updates to the site this week. My main focus has been to get the site working correctly in Internet Explorer 6.0. If you using IE6 on PC, you should notice that the site is both looking and working alright now, although there may be still something not working exactly as it should as in other more standard compliant browsers, such as Firefox, or IE7.

I haven’t been able to test the site under IE6/7 on Mac. If you happen to have such combinations on your computer, please let me know if you find any problems with the site.

Another fix is the timezone related issue. Sometimes for some users, the tasks created under a timezone weren’t showing correctly as “Today”, or “Yesterday” etc. This problem has been fixed, and please tell me if you still see anything weird about the task dates.

I’ve been able to add a “Note” field to the task. This is an optional field. If it is filled, you will see a small (i) icon next to the task on dashboard. Clicking it will reveal the note data. This field is added because some users want to enter addtional info about a task, such as a phone number, or a web link etc.

I am getting good ideas from you almost daily. I just want you to know that I take them very seriously, and most likely they will be implemented in the coming releases.

It’s near the end of month, hope everybody’s still sticking to the new year resolutions.

Cheers,
Harry

Set your own time zone

As many of you have requested, the function to set your own time zone has been added to the site.

Now for new signups, you will have the option of selecting your time zone on the sign up form. But for existing users, because there was no way to set time zone when you signed up, so all old accounts now have the default time zone of “Pacific Time (US and Canada)”.

If this is not your time zone, you can change your default setting(or the one you selected when signing up) by clicking “Settings” and then “Account Info”.

Let me know if this is all working for you, espcially if you are using the site from outside of US and Canada.

Thanks,
Harry

Updates to the New Year release

Hope everybody has had a wonderful new year holiday!

First of all, thank you all who have taken the time to try out the new version of GOT website. Since the beginning of the new year, I have received from you a lot of warm cheers and many useful suggestions. I am glad this small web app can be useful to people.

There have been some minor updates to the codebase since the new year release. Some are just bug fixes, and others are functional improvements. Briefly, they are:

1. Bug fix in showing accomplished and backburned goals for some users.
2. Added more db indexes to reduce the load time of certain pages.
3. Bug fix in jounal archive names.
4. Bug fix in generating recurring tasks.
5. Bug fix in timestamp field when completing a task.
6. Now goal name can be same as long as only one in active goals.
7. Link to show all tasks if completed tasks more than 5.
8. “Remember me” feature.
9. Time reports now show actual hours spent on goals.
10. Different text colors for different task priorities.
11. Bug fix in search feature in journal.
12. Dashboard shows tags before the task names.
… …

There are some other minor performance related updates to the code, but they seem too trivial to list them all here.

Another thing is the site has not been very stable during the past week, I am still trying many different things to make it as fast and stable as possible. And this inevitably will involve rebooting the server from time to time. If you ever experience difficulty connecting the site, or it’s becoming very slow, just wait for a few minutes and try again later. Hopefully all these server related performance issues will be resolved in the next week.

As always, please don’t hesitate to let me know how you would like the site to work, or anything you think would be useful for you. I will try my best to integrate all these feature requests into the next release.

A new logo for the site

I’d like to share with you all a new logo I am considering to replace the current one with on GoalsOnTrack.com.

This is how the logo looks like on different backgrounds. Since the new front end will probably have a blueish header, so the logo at the bottom will more likely be what it eventually looks like on the new site.

The logo tries to convey the concept of goals(big G), being tracked(dots), and time being tracked and managed, etc.

The logo was designed by my brother(thanks brother!), who is a very talented artistic person.

Personally I like the new logo very much. It looks much better than the current one. What do you think?