Blog: #momentum

Another entry in the neverending series talking about my personal productivity tools.

Momentum is my daily goal app, for keeping a goal chain/streak going. It’s a Python app running Django. The name comes from the momentum that a long streak gives.

Overview

Goals can be either binary flags (whether I did it that day or not) or timed (in which case Momentum keeps track of the time spent). The default mode is focus mode, which shows only the top unfinished goal at a time and looks like this (with dummy data):

The thin red line along the top is a progress bar showing how close I am to finishing my Momentum goals for the day. The red boxes show the last few weeks of the streak, the green box at the right is the button for saying I’ve completed that goal for the day, and the blue text under the goal name shows how long the total streak is.

When focus mode is off, it looks like this:

You can see a partially completed timed goal along with a binary goal. Momentum also supports ignoring goals for Saturdays and/or Sundays (the gray boxes among the red), which I use for things I don’t usually do on the weekends.

When the timer on a goal is running, the favicon changes and the page looks like this, with the pink box at right showing the elapsed time for the current session:

(The idea with the timer is that it may take multiple sessions spread throughout the day to meet the daily goal, by the way — if I wanted to make sure I spend an hour writing each day but don’t usually have time to do it all in one block, for example.)

How I use Momentum

On my laptop, I have Momentum open in Firefox as a pinned tab. On my phone, I have it saved to my homescreen as a PWA.

I use Momentum every day for my morning routine, primarily on my phone. The goals I put into it (as opposed to just adding things to my to-do list in Liszt) are things I want to do each day and, to some degree, are things I might not do if I didn’t have a streak pushing me forward (thus “Momentum”).

The future

I’m happy with the app as it is, but I’ve been thinking about merging it into Liszt, since goals like these are fundamentally to-do items. (Every morning Liszt already automatically adds all the items in my ::streak list to my ::today list, so that I can work off my to-do list without necessarily having to go back to Momentum as much.)

Giving Liszt items the ability to be timed is already in place with belt mode, so I’d just need to add the ability to keep track of both partially finished goals and total streaks. Seems worthwhile.

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I’m getting back into blogging about in-progress projects, because otherwise I hardly blog at all. Expect posts soon about the following coding projects, all at varying stages of completion:

• Vinci (notebook app)
• Bookshelf (successor to Bookkeeper)
• Codex (successor to Unbindery)
• Quill (successor to Codex, sort of)
• Storybook (writing app)
• Speed (desktop writing app)
• Liszt (todo list app)
• Endless (mindmapping app)
• Botswana 2 (revamp of Botswana)

Brief sidenote: I switched a while back to Python/Django, and I’m very glad I did. I can often get to a working prototype within only an hour or two. Back in my younger days I wanted to write everything myself from the ground up, but I see now that I was foolish. Life is short. I’d rather focus on the interesting parts — the app itself — and let the framework handle the routine grunt work.

Momentum

Momentum is the app I’d like to introduce today. It’s a web app written in Django, started back in January to help me track my goals.

More specifically, I wanted something that would help me spend more time reading scriptures and writing fiction. I don’t always have a free half-hour, though, so I needed something to track little bits of time throughout the day, and Momentum was born. I’ve been using it pretty much every single day since then.

Here’s what it looks like on my phone (with dummy data):

Some quick notes:

• It currently supports tracking minutes, times, or words per day.
• When I reach a particular goal, it disappears from the list for the rest of the day so I can focus on the goals I haven’t yet reached. (This is a change I made last night, actually.)
• If I don’t make any progress toward a goal at all within a set time period, the goal goes stale and turns red. (There’s a system-wide stale period setting and each goal can also have its own.) I started using this staleness idea in Bookshelf (more on that in a later post) and it’s been motivating enough that I ported it to Momentum.
• It supports folders. I have Projects and Health folders, where I have specific projects (stories/apps I’m working on), and things like squats and pushups.
• Right now you have to add/edit goals via the Django admin. It works but isn’t as nice as something in-app. I just need to get around to doing this, since this is the main thing keeping it from being releasable.
• The code is on GitHub as usual. Again, this is unreleased, in-progress code, YMMV, grain of salt, etc.

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