Joe’s Blog

Inspired somewhat by GearFire’s suggestion that Joe’s Goals is a good way to track “task chains” and by Lifehacker’s original article on Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity techniques, I bit the bullet today and was able to hack together a long requested feature.

To make this work I wanted to keep with the spirit of Joe’s Goals and keep it as simple and as unobtrusive as possible. As such you can use it, or ignore it and go on about your business.

Chaining your goal’s progress is the practice of keeping track of the number of days in a row that you’ve completed a task. The goal is to keep the chain unbroken or, when you do break the chain, make a longer chain each time you work on a habit. Today I added a line to the far right column of the tracker that is called chain. This shows the length of the last chain you worked on.

After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain. — Jerry Seinfeld

So, for example, if you haven’t worked on a goal for a while it will show the length of time you were able to consistently do it right before you stopped. Likewise if it is something you have been working on for a long time the number could be quite high - but if you skip a day the number will start over again at 1. The chain counter ignores days that are considered “off days” on your goal (configured under options) so if you don’t do something on weekends it won’t count that as skipping, nor will it count a check on those days as part of the chain.

The chain measurement only tacks number of times in a row that you complete your goal on the days you scheduled it.

In addition to the chain feature I also found and fixed a bug with the pop-up calendar where it wasn’t really letting you pick a day in the current month. Let me know what you think of the chain and any other ideas you have here.