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.

A while back we added iCalendar support to Lifetick. This allows you to display Goal and Task due dates in the calendar application of your choice (providing it supports the iCalendar format, eg: Apple’s iCal or Microsoft’s Outlook 2007).

You can also use the iCalendar feed on Google’s online calendar tool. We have received a few requests for detailed instructions so here they are…

[In Lifetick]

1. Go to “subscribe to calendar” and in the calendar window, click the Copy the Calendar URL to my Clipboard button. (This copies the url you need to your computer’s clipboard.)

[In Google Calendar]
http://google.com/calendar

2. Under Other Calendars, click Add

3. Select, Add by URL .

4. Paste the URL into the field (remember it was copied to your clipboard automatically in step 1, so either hit Control-V / Command-V or go to Edit -> Paste from the menu bar.

5. Then click Add, and your done.

Google’s Calendar tool fetches new data from Lifetick automatically at regular intervals, therefore it might not show updates instantly.

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.

Hi Lifetickers,

Thanks for all your recent feedback. The support is greatly appreciated. Furthermore, we’re overwhelmed with the great ideas that have been coming through. Speaking of which, although we’re working on a major functionality release, we decided to slip in a request that came from Mark.

In short, we’ve provided the option for you to have your email reminders display the exact goal or task name, other than just a generic reminder message.

We hope his small touch will help you better organise your day, especially for the power users who are reminding themselves relentlessly to get more done!

Here’s a screenshot to help you locate where to select this preference in the Account page:

Thanks and enjoy!

Hi Lifetickers,

Hope the goal setting is going well and that the goal achieving is going even better. We hope our very first feature release will be music to your ears!

We are happy to announce that we have developed a web based version of Lifetick for the iPhone. Simply go to http://lifetick.com/iPhone from your iPhone to log in. Alternatively, you can click on the log in button from the normal site on your iPhone and the same result will be achieved.

In keeping with our design philosophy, we’ve kept this as simple and streamlined as possible. Therefore, the following functionality has been included: goal lists, task lists, task creation and completion and finally (for paid subscribers) journal entry and viewing.

As part of our release theme of “On the go”, we’ve also provided a “calendar subscribe” function which will synchronise your tasks and goals in calendar applications that support iCalendar (e.g. Outlook 2007, Apple iCal, Google Calendar).

The final component of our release is some print functionality. For those who are less technologically capable on the go or simply don’t have an iPhone (like me), you can print goal lists, upcoming and overdue tasks as well as individual goal breakdowns. We hope this will help keep you focused when you’re not logged in. (In fact, I almost had a coronary when I printed out my overdue tasks.)

Oh and we’ve thrown in a couple of new widgets and some minor tweaks and improvements.

So, good luck with your goal setting… now on the go!

Hi Lifetickers and welcome to our newly launched blog!

Firstly, we’d like to say a huge thank you to all of you for your ongoing and prodigious support. We are most appreciative of the feedback we’ve received along the way. After months of development, it is an enormous relief and source of satisfaction for us to know that people are genuinely excited about Lifetick.

Like most web 2.0 companies, we see the blog as a way for us to communicate new features, news items, advice on goal setting, tips on using Lifetick and any philosophical ramblings we feel the need to express at that point in time. We also welcome the opportunity the blog presents for users to respond to our posts and engage each other with their own tips and experiences.

Since launching Lifetick three months ago, we’ve seen our usage stats slowly climb. With a total of 9,706 tasks created for 2,883 goals, we are hopeful there will be many wonderful success stories you can share with us. In a world driven by instant gratification and short attention spans, it is our hope that the art of goal setting (and achieving) will add just that little bit more meaning to our lives.

Stay tuned for more posts in the near future and as always, good luck with your goal setting!