One of the features I love the most in ZenTasktic is the ability to show you real-time stats about how “zen” you are. Or how “zen” you’re not, so to speak.
In the previous article I presented you the ZenTasktic philosophy, namely, the acknowledgement of the fact that we’re living in more than one realm at a time. We don’t live only in “do” (as the vast majority of to-do apps are, obviously, implying) but we’re also living in “Assess” and “Decide”.
When you take this point of view out of theory and implement it in a real app, with a real structure, something very interesting happens. Suddenly, the structure begins to be measurable. And you can build metrics on top of it. That’s what “Zen Status” does.
It measures (at any given moment) the total number of tasks in each realm and gives you a bird-eye view of what’s happening there. The colors of this chart are also carrying a specific meaning (but more on that in a future article).
Let’s look at a few examples here. (You can click on the image to enlarge it, if you want, I just wanted to keep the stats in the context of the app, as you will see them).
Zen Status – Use Case 1: Overwhelmed by Assess
If there’s a lot of red in your chart, it means there’s a lot of stuff lingering in Assess. That may happen for a variety of causes: you may be at some sort of peak in your activity and you have a lot of ideas and you’re brainstorming a lot. Or you simply are overwhelmed and don’t find the necessary time to process all that needs processing. Either way, you need to pay attention to the “Assess” are in your life, which may mean a little bit of withdrawal from doing or deciding.
Zen Status – Use Case 2: The “Tomorrow Syndrome”, Too Much In Decide
If there’s a lot of orange in your chart, that means you’re having a little bit of trouble deciding what to do and when to do it. There are a lot of items in Decide. Again, this situation may arise from various sources: maybe you just sent a major group of tasks back in Decide after you realized you don’t have time to Do them. Or you just sent a bunch of tasks from Assess, eager to start working. Whatever the case, you need to put yourself in a predictive state and start managing your time and availability resources.
Zen Status – Use Case 3: Too Much To Do
If there’s a lot of green in your chart, it means you really have things to do. That green area encompasses all the tasks that you have in Do, including overdue tasks. You may be swamped with work. Or just lazy. Whatever the case, you should take some time to see what’s going on there, and either send the tasks back in Assess or Decide, or simply do them and mark them as done (which will take them out of the Do realm, but you’ll still have access to them, before deleting completely).
That’s just a glimpse in the powerful Zen Status feature, something that, to be honest, I can’t have enough while I’m working on the app. One thing that I can’t show you in these screenshots is the animation. Right, the chart is moving in real time as you move tasks form one realm to another. If you want to experience this, you’ll have to sign up as a beta tester, though. 🙂
If you really want to do this, just go ahead at zentasktic.com and leave your email.
That’s it for now, in the next article, we’ll talk a little bit about the Zen Pulse.
