Hi Lifetickers,

Well today is a big day for us here at Meridian 86 because after much anticipation we are finally proud to announce the arrival of Lifetick Coach! We believe it will offer a whole new opportunity for mentors to engage proteges. If you are a Life Coach, Manager, College Professor or Sporting Coach then Lifetick Coach is for you. In fact, Lifetick Coach can be applied in a host of situations. Here’s why:

• Coaches get a complete overview of proteges’ goal setting and progress.
• Coaches can interact with their proteges through the system. Whether it be encouragement, inspiration, advice or links to resources, the Coach can be in touch 24/7.
• Proteges can feel empowered to set ambitious targets for themselves under the guidance and mentoring of their coach.
• Coaches can access full reporting from the journaling that proteges enter. You can track, report and graph everything from Sales to Sprints, Gym visits to Grades achieved, Hours of study to Hours of training or even Courses completed to Calories consumed.

You can access more information from our newly revamped website. Furthermore, our FAQs have also been updated to reflect the addition of Lifetick Coach. In the meantime though, here are a couple of answers to questions you may have:

1. All Lifetick Coach plans come with a free 30 day trial. You can cancel anytime within that period and you won’t be charged.
2. If you already have a Lifetick account you can sign up for the Lifetick Coach product with the same email address. You will then be prompted to merge the accounts. Lifetick is given free to all Lifetick Coach account holders so they can manage their own goals through the existing Lifetick portal.
3. Users (proteges) you add to your account do not need to buy their own Lifetick account. These are included in your Lifetick Coach plan.
4. Users can also create private goals and journal entries that only they see giving them the freedom to record absolutely anything and everything.

We hope you enjoy everything Lifetick Coach has to offer and, as usual look, forward to your feedback.

Finally, a thank you to all the support we’ve received along the way. The launch of Lifetick Coach represents the second major milestone in our journey and we are greatly appreciative for the words of support you’ve given along the way.

Lifetick Coach. Motivate. Mentor. Empower. Need we say more?

Hi Lifetickers,

You are probably wondering why we’ve been quiet as of late. Well, I’m here to say that it has been with good reason. Over the last few months, we’ve been working away on a brand new product that extends Lifetick into a whole new market. It’s called Lifetick Coach and as you may have guessed is targeted toward Life Coaches, managers, personal trainers, sporting coaches and anyone who assists others in achieving their goals. Here’s a simple breakdown:

• Coach creates accounts for clients
• Clients use Lifetick to create and manage goals
• Coach gets to monitor his/her clients’ progress
• Clients and coach can communicate through Lifetick

For clients, this tool captures the full functionality currently available in Lifetick with the added advantage of communicating directly with the Coach. Goals and journal entries can also be marked private for information that isn’t to be shared with the coach.

For the coach, a whole new way of managing clients is presented. Through its monitoring capabilities, Lifetick Coach ensures the relationship is able to be a proactive one with endless opportunities for the Coach to motivate and support his/her clients no matter what their pursuits.

If you’d like to be notified as soon as Lifetick Coach becomes available, simply go to http://lifetick.com/notify.html and complete your details. An email will be sent to you on launch day.

You may be asking when Lifetick Coach will be released. Rest assured it is not too far away. In the meantime, as always, good luck with your goal setting and thank you for your ongoing support!

Hi Lifetickers,

The correlation between journal keeping and success is universally well known. There is no shortage of statesmen and women who can attribute in part their ongoing motivation to succeed to the daily habit of maintaining a journal. Allowing time each day to collect one’s thoughts and put them into words not only serves as an effective check of one’s activities, progress, purpose and direction, it can also lead our minds to a deeper level of introspection of how we carried ourselves that day. Be they interactions with loved ones, colleagues or a random person on the street, when keeping a journal it is hard not to reflect on whether the world was a better place for having us in it today, which of course is a healthy thing to do.

But how do we make this happen? Journal keeping (like most things that require daily commitment) sounds good in practice, but can be a drag for most of us. Personally, I suffer from a severe case of inconsistency and therefore good intentions last a week at best. Nevertheless, there is always hope. I recently committed to a technique that I believe is already proving effective in getting my journal entries made on a more frequent basis. Quite simply, it is – Write one sentence per day.

When you think about it, one sentence a day is not hard at all. In fact, it is ridiculously easy. But is it useful? I would argue a heartfelt “yes”. Why? Because it is not the content that matters, but the act. We can’t all aspire to be Oscar Wilde, able to produce a worthy quote at will, but that doesn’t matter. Simply logging in and making the entry itself is the action that develops the necessary discipline and focus that can greatly benefit us. Furthermore, once you’ve logged it, it is almost impossible not to write more… and there of course is the complete benefit. But, if one begins with the very modest and honest objective of only writing one sentence, then it will ensure the goal remains achievable on a day-by-day basis and that is the key.

We are starting to notice in our stats a great rise in journal category usage in Lifetick. For those of you who are yet to try this functionality, it is most useful in recording daily activities you would like to measure or report on. For example, gym visits, calories eaten, books you’ve read and much more. Totally customisable, you can read more in the help tips when you edit the categories themselves in the journal.

Finally, we would like to sign off today with the announcement of some new features:

• Task notes (frequently requested) allow you to capture extra information on your goals
• Fortnightly (every other week) recurring tasks
• Interface improvements
  (including larger task and full screen reports windows)

Hi Lifetickers,

Thanks for your continued support. We appreciate your comments, compliments and feature requests (which do uncover some gems for us). Today’s post is to announce a selection of new features we hope will add more to your Lifetick experience.

Looking forward… we’ve added visibility of due dates to goals and tasks in the journal to assist with some forward planning. Furthermore, we’ve livened up the Life screen with filtering of goals by priority and due date (adding to the existing core value breakdown). We’ve also added some more icons to the journal categories for some visual stimulus.

Looking back… we’ve now allowed for normal text journal entries to be backdated. Whilst our philosophical perspective was that a journal entry should be recorded at the time it is written, we have caved in to popular demand, so please make use of this! Another request which has been raised on occasion is the ability to delete completed goals. This is also part of this release.

As a footnote, we just wanted to apologise for any inconvenience caused earlier this month when our hosting provider caused a doubling up of email reminders. The problem was quickly identified (by our team) and resolved (by their team) and we thank them for their prompt service. With a bit of luck it may have even improved your productivity? Who knows… but we are sorry just the same.

Thanks for your ongoing support and remember during the goal setting and achieving process that life is about the journey, not just the destination.

Hi Lifetickers,

It’s been a little while since we last updated you on activities here at Meridian 86, so we are happy to finally announce the arrival of some functionality we know will appreciated – recurring tasks.

Apart from a short hiatus in February, we’ve been doing some major planning toward the next evolution of the Lifetick product and as part of that, we are happy to release recurring tasks. You might be interested in knowing that it actually did form a part of the original product, but was scrapped at the 11th hour because we couldn’t quite nail the design. After all, our guiding force has always been simple, yet rich and intuitive functionality and at the time we felt our design would compromise that philosophy. Nevertheless, since then we’ve had a lot of requests for recurring tasks and as a result, decided to keep tinkering with the concept until we came up with something that would fit within the Lifetick approach. Therefore, we hope you will be happy with what we’ve been able to deliver.

As for creating a recurring task, the process is straightforward. Create a task as per normal, but in the date field you’ll now see a “Recurring” button. Click on this and you’ll be able to configure the recurrence itself: what days and for how long. Once this is complete you can move onto the reminder options before saving.

In terms of completing tasks, the same checkbox appears, but with a recurring symbol inside which, when clicked, brings up three completion options: 1) complete an instance (or multiple instances), 2) complete all instances or 3) skip an instance (this will delete the instance and move the due date to your next instance).

Hope you enjoy and as always we look forward to your feedback.

Hi Lifetickers,

We always intended to take the iPhone version further and today represents that first step. Due to popular demand, we’ve added some more core functionality whilst also going to great lengths to incorporate some more aesthetic beauty you’ve come to know and love in the main version.    

So what have we done?                                          

- task editing 
- goal sorting (due date, priority and core value)
- daily, weekly, monthly view of Journal (for paid subscribers)
- complete history viewable in Journal, beyond the previous 7 days (again for paid subscribers) 
- and some pretty nice look and feel touches to bring about a better user experience. 

Good news for Google Android users too. We’ve made some tweaks to the iPhone version to make it available on this platform and we hope this helps a whole new range of users.

You can access the iPhone and Google Android web app at http://lifetick.com/iPhone/

Thanks for all the feedback and we hope your 2009 goals are tracking well.

Hi Lifetickers,

Hope the New Year sees everyone in full swing with their goal achieving. A short note to announce some features we think will streamline your use of Lifetick (we actually snuck some of these into the previous release):

1. Lifetick now remembers your last screen layout for navigate and journal
   (a) Expand your goals list in the navigate screen and when you return to that page or log back in, it will be the same
   (b) Select a daily, weekly or monthly view in the journal and Lifetick will also remember for next time you visit the page
2. Journal reports now have a show and hide details option. Particularly useful for text based journal reporting.
3. Task creation supports keyboard input. Press TAB to move to different inputs, SPACE to select the option and we’ve enabled PAGE UP/PAGE DOWN to change the month selection for reminders.
4. Mac users can now enjoy use of the scroll wheel.
5. Google Chrome Browser: We support a high resolution desktop icon for application shortcut.
6. If you change a goal due date, this is now time stamped in the journal.

And finally, for those of you who’d like to spread the Lifetick love, we’ve added a “Tell a friend” button to the bottom right hand corner of Lifetick.

Hi Lifetickers,

As some of you who’ve emailed us recently would know, we’ve been toiling away on a feature release we’re confident will be very pleasing. So, without further ado, welcome to the world of Journal Categories and Reporting.

In short, journal categories allow you to create custom entries in the journal that you can later report on and graph. Anything from gym visits, to books you’ve read, to distance run, cycled or driven, to weight loss to just about anything can now be tracked using the journal. You can even back date entries to capture older information you want to measure.

How does it work? Quite simple really. Create a category e.g. Savings. Define the unit e.g. $. Then enter the amount every time you make a saving. e.g. $60 this week. Here’s what a graph would look like if you continued with your Savings…

I’ve had the fortune of using the categories functionality over the last two months during testing and so far I’ve set up eight. If I’m not careful, my whole life will be categorised in Lifetick. But maybe that’s the point.

What else have we done? Well firstly, we’re keen for everyone to get a taste of the journal so we’ve opened up limited access to free users. We’ve also provided a bit more flexibility in the viewing of the journal by adding day and month views to the existing week view. Finally, we’ve added journal category entry to the iPhone version in case you can’t wait to get back to the desktop before recording your gym visit.

If you would like more information, we provide the usual help tips along the way in Lifetick. Furthermore, we’ve updated the tour on the website to give you the visual. If that’s not enough, then fire off a help request and we’ll be sure to assist. We look forward to hearing your impressions of our new journal categories and in particular will be interested to hear what types of things our users will end up categorising. 

We’ll leave it there for today. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably itching to check out the features by now. So go for it. You won’t be disappointed.

When first designing Lifetick, we had a strong desire to help users maintain the integrity of their Journals by not allowing them to edit or delete their entries. We felt that this restriction would force people to think hard about what they were committing to their diaries before embarking on each entry and subsequently would allow them to reap the benefits of a well constructed journal of their lives. On a more subtle level, it was perhaps our reaction against the woes of a modern “throwaway” society. Words and thoughts can easily be discarded in a flippant manner because all things these days are expendable, replaceable and sometimes refundable. Our method of resistance to the tidal wave of turnover was a small commitment to clicking the submit button forever!

Whilst we may have served you and us better by communicating our philosophy to you up front, we still couldn’t turn around the all encompassing practicality argument that was presented to us. After all, it is now inherent that all software systems have edit and delete. Furthermore, we can understand the discomfort people might have in not being able to ever delete some things they committed to their journal. So, in accordance with the feedback you’ve provided us in recent times, we now have edit and delete functionality in the journal. We hope you enjoy a richer experience with Lifetick with this simple addition and may you also experience new freedom in writing and un-writing as much as you like.

Hi Lifetickers,

In the time we’ve been operating we’ve had some interesting feedback and questions regarding Core Values. It can be quite inspiring to hear how users are re-evaluating their priorities in life, simply based on the fact that Lifetick forces them to consider what their Core Values are exactly.

During the months of development and testing, we had the opportunity to refine the product again and again. However, we also found ourselves refining our core values again and again. Sometimes it was easy to name something important in our lives, like “Family”. Other times it was not so easy. In fact, one of the reasons for it being difficult is that our values can change over time. It’s also common to enter values that don’t necessarily feature heavily in our lives on a day to day basis. There is nothing wrong with this, providing it is where we want our lives to be. One such example is “Adventure” (one of my own core values). Although I’m very much a part of the 9-5 crowd (and some), having the Adventure core value reminds me of an important aspect of my life that I am always striving to achieve, even if it is only once a year.

So with all this being said, we wanted to give you some feedback on what the most popular core values are that you’ve created, so you can see what it is that people value. Here are the Top Ten:

Probably not too many surprises there. In fact, Lifetick now has over 100 different core value names from our users, so here are some of the ones we found inspiring: Charity, Peace, Love, Kindness, Compassion, Honesty, Freedom, Trust and Integrity. Nice to see such a blend of values with virtues.

Finally, we wanted to quickly mention that we’ve now added a “Print Tasks by Core Value” feature (originally requested by Christy). Simply click on the Print button in the Navigate or Life screens and you’ll see it added to the available list.

We hope it provides another useful perspective on your personal journey.