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App Overview

I even started a little landing page (that’s got to be secret for a moment longer)

Start with top goals and dreams

Here’s where you set your goals and dreams:

Break-down for each goal

Each goal includes a list of tasks and sub-tasks that can be arbitrarily broken down into smaller and smaller pieces

Execute the most important ONE next task per goal

And the “Execute” tab gives me the list of one top-priority task per goal.

Experience

Working with “Giraffe” in week 3, it’s been great. I’m definitely more productive since I started using it. At least more productive than my old Evernote/Outliner/Trello workflow and less overwhelmed.

Giraffe has allowed me to focus on tackling small, well-planned and high-value tasks all day.

Continuous Improvement

You know the saying “Jump Off the Cliff and Build Your Wings on the Way Down” – Well, Giraffe is truly being built on-the-fly as I’m working towards my goals.

And I’m improving it in small steps, polishing what doesn’t work on a day-to-day basis. I’m my own user and if something bothers me, well, I can change it.

The best improvement has been the awesome color coding that I discussed last week. I made another small tweak which now sorts the pending tasks by their granularity.

Basically, the best-planned, most broken-down, tiniest tasks are on top of the list. It can be worked on right away.

In the middle are the medium-sized tasks that could use some break-down TLC.

At the bottom is the least-planned, coarsest tasks that still need break-down.

I can’t stress how helpful it is to have the system tell me “Hey, this task is not yet broken down enough yet. You’ll have a bad time trying to tackle this as-is. Break it down into smaller pieces and it’ll be easier.”

Here’s the list that’s generated for me with annotations, explaining the colors:

6 Major Goals

And just as a reminder: The list of 6 tasks always reflects one task for each of the 6 major goals I’ve set for myself. In my case they are, in that order,…

1. Personal Growth
2. Ventures
3. Work
4. Contribution
5. Adventure
6. Shared Reality

From current experience, on a day-to-day basis I can reliably push forward the first 4. “Adventure” and “Shared Reality” are a little longer-term and I don’t have to work on the every day.

See Check In How I Make Consistent Progress Across My Major Life Goals With Giraffe and How Ive Rebuilt The Giraffe App With Tdd And Speed In Mind for more details.