If you're not intentional about how you spend your days, it's hard to get anywhere except by accident.
The Intentions Format lets you quickly enter your intentions for the day, indicating which goal each task goes towards by starting that line with the number of the goal.
For miscellaneous tasks, you use some other symbol, conventionally an ampersand (&
) or a tilde (~
) but you can be creative and use symbols like $
or ♫
or ♥
if those seem more appropriate.
You can also indicate that a task goes towards multiple goals by separating their numbers by commas, e.g. 1,2) hike with Kate
might go toward both a fitness and a relationships goal.
One of the core parts of the Complice workflow is submitting your outcomes at the end of the day (or the next morning, for some people). Where your intentions capture what you intend to do each day, your outcomes are a chance to reflect on what you ultimately accomplished, and how that looks in relation to your overall goal.
This is the accountability aspect of Complice. It's soft accountability: there's no punishment if you don't Complice your intentions. Instead, it's being accountable for looking at that list of intentions you set sometime in the last 24h, and reckoning with the items on the list. Not just letting them slip by.
For some goals, you may have numerical metrics for assessing whether or not a given day was enough. For others, it might be totally by feel: am I satisfied with how today went?
If you're not sure, consider: if the next hundred days go like this one, am I on track towards my goal? You may find you want to distinguish, too, between days that you intended to do a lot towards a given goal versus days that were focused on some other area of your life.
Press enter while in the "say more..." box, and it automatically jumps you down to the next goal's buttons. From there, it's an easy shift-tab to get to the plus button, or just press the += key on the keyboard, to create a new item.
But also, when you have the buttons selected, you can deploy the letter keys to answer the "Is this enough?" question:
When you select one of these buttons (by any means, including space or the mouse) it automatically focuses the "say more..." field. This means that you can rapidly progress through the form by hitting y, enter, n, enter, y, enter... etc.
Have tasks you want to do every day? Or maybe just habits you want to track, like "get up before noon" or "drink at least 20 cups of water?" You can add these to your list of Daily Defaults by pressing the grey below the intentions box.
In order to not swamp you with these items, they don't automatically get added to your list every day. Instead, during the intentions-setting phase, you get to push a button () to add them, and then you can edit them if certain ones don't make sense that day.
You can put an extra (
before the number, which is an informal way to make the daily intentions look less punchy and more remindery. It doesn’t get parsed as anything special at the moment, though it might!
Some users also like using ~
for miscellaneous in dailies, instead of &
. It’s smaller and seems more like a structure than a specific thing I have to do. See the examples below.
Include something about getting up on time. If you set your intentions the night before, add something like (~) get up without snoozing my alarm
. Or, preventatively, (~) turn off my computer at 11pm
.
Want to practice a new style of working? Add something like (~) use pomodoros
or (~) no email before noon
.
Like the (
, nothing special happens with these values, but again, maybe it will soon! (Like they could be graphed or sent to Beeminder or something)
Most todo lists very quickly become stale, ie full of old tasks:
Complice avoids this by having you make a fresh list each day. If you don't do something, it doesn't just stick around forever. It goes on the list of "things I was intending to do yesterday but didn't". Which is fine! You don't need to do everything every day.
To make it a bit easier to recover tasks that are truly important though, Complice now has a feature that shows you not-done tasks from the last 3 days and lets you grab them for today's intentions. This makes the recovery of said tasks be a conscious act, rather than an unconscious default state. You have to consciously think, "no, this is really important."
(Protip: Complice inserts extra )
s on intentions that have been left undone in the past, to make them visually distinct. These don't have any specific function yet though.)
It's easy to remove tasks, and if you don't do something multiple days in a row, you get a message like this:
Here's how it works: pick a task to work on.
Work for 25 minutes
If anything tries to interrupt you, don't let it. Write it down if it's a thing you need to do later. If you let something distract you, you have to reset the timer. Focused work is important.
Then...
Take a break for 5 minutes
Actually take a break! Even if you're right in the middle of something! Being in the middle means it's exciting to come back, unlike if you break when you're stuck, and then it's tough to come back.
When the break timer ends, start another 25 minute work timer. Repeat. Every 4 or so, maybe, take a 20 minute break.
Features:
“This is the only thing I have found so far that keeps me even moderately productive in very unstructured work situations.”
Features:
“Joining [this room] is probably the literal best thing that happened to me this decade. Thank you to the people who made this place exist.”
(tip: add #videoDisabled
to the end of the url before loading the page and it'll turn off video)
Beeminder is for quantifiable, graphable, usually long-term goals. It focuses on ongoing metrics like time spent working, pages read, words written, or tasks completed. (It's also good for fitness goals like steps, calories, weight, hours of sleep, etc.)
What really makes Beeminder unique though, is adding an explicit commitment device to your Quantified Self data. You literally enter a credit card and agree to get charged money if you don't keep all your datapoints on a Yellow Brick Road to your goal. It's not for everyone but it's life-changing for some, and integrates beautifully with Complice.
Research suggests that simply telling other people about your goals can make you less likely to work hard at them, perhaps because the mere act of telling them feels like progress. The Complice Accountability Partner system is different though, because you're not just telling them—you're making a specific plan, and they're overhearing. Also because your partner will see within a day if you're not doing what you intended, so you can't exactly rest on your laurels.
“My boyfriend introduced it to me and suggested that we use it to stay updated on each others' lives while we're doing the long distance thing.”
Complice is made to be used throughout your day. But if it's late at night, you might not want to be staring at a bright white screen. Toggle darktheme (or have it automatically enable in the evening) to relax your eyes.
Access this setting by clicking the gear on the today page, then the View tab. Dark Theme currently only works on the today page.
? | Show / hide this help menu |
` | Open settings dialog (above tab key on most keyboards) |
n/m | Switch to NextAction/Organize tab |
i/o | Toggle intentions/outcomes submit box |
0-9 | Enter a new intention for the goal with that number |
alt + 0-9 | Filter list by the goal with that number |
space | Toggle done-ness of selected item (or next action) |
c | Select next action (top not-done item) |
↑/↓ k/j | Select higher/lower |
⇧+↑/↓ K/J | Move selected item up/down |
t | Timer: start/pause timer (note: pomos are indivisible, so you can't pause one halfway through) (also this hotkey will add a minute to the timer during breaks) |
r | Timer: cancel |
y | Timer: apply detected time |
T | Timer: start timer in break mode |
shift+c | Move selected item so it's the current task |
l | (lowercase L) Select the last not-done task |
L | Move selected item so it's the last task |
* | Toggle star on an item |
% | Toggle nevermind on an item |
# | Seed the intentions input with a #) for each goal |
shift+t | Timer: start pomo clock with a break |
p | Assign a completed pomodoro to selected item |
shift+p | Unassign a pomodoro from an item |
alt+p | Destroy an unassigned pomodoro |
alt+shift+p | Undestroy an unassigned pomodoro |
ctrl+shift+a | Hide/show completed tasks |
f | Toggle distraction free mode |
shift + f | Toggle dark theme |
g e | Go to timeline page |
g g | Go to goals page |
g r | Go to reviews page |
g s | Go to settings page |
To submit intentions quickly, press ↹ tab (to shift focus to the submit button) then press ↩ enter (to submit it). You can combine this with the following options (which also work while clicking the button).
In addition, if you hold ⇧ shift when submitting intentions, they'll be put as the next task(s), rather than at the bottom.
And if you hold ctrl+ ⇧ shift when submitting intentions, they'll be put second from the top, underneath the current next task.