User Story 3 Andy

User Story 3 Andy

Andy is trying to get an online Masters degree finished. He uses a formal reflection process to think deeply about his own practices and used to puzzle over why had to keep asking for extensions to his deadlines for handing in reports. He started Action Logging at the beginning of the fourth term and now has two months worth of records to reflect on. Looking at October, he concluded he had been guilty of comitting “Category Drift” which isn’t a capital offence, but does need to be addressed before it gets completely out of hand. Too often when adding an action, rather than categorise it simply as A for Action or R for Running he felt the particular event or achievement he wanted to put down in his Action Log belonged to some new category of it’s own, soon to be joined by many more over the coming days, he had pressed the all too easy ” Add a Categorybutton.  Then the poor thing had languished on it’s own until forgotten about, joined not by more actions of the same type , but by yet more lonely new category codes.

The fact that Andy had this insight meant he could fix it though, and the overall summaries of total number of actions completed on a week by week or even day by day basis were still very helpful and on the whole positive. It was an occupation hazard of academic life to worry more about the meta-process than the real business itself, but the latest iPhone in his pocket with the ActionLogr app on his Home Page was his best weapon in the war against time.

Posted in ActionLogr | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Action Logging Stories : Brian

User Story 2 Brian

Brian has been using the Action Logr app for two weeks now. Most days he puts in his actions just before knocking off for the day, but sometimes he does one or two as he is going along and occasionally has to bring it up to date the next morning. He decides that it is actually quite a lot easier to get done on the same day before he forgets some stuff and has to rack his brains, so he sets an alert to go off at 6.20 every afternoon if he hasn’t already made the entry for that day.  If it goes off when he’s just leaving the building well he can always press “remind me later” and it will go off again first thing in the morning. While in the mood for tinkering, Brian also decides to spend a couple of minutes looking at his weekly action summaries. There’s not really enough data to analyse properly yet, but he was pleasantly surprised to discover that he had actually managed to maintain an average of  4.7 actions per day over the 2nd week, and increase of 0.5 per day over the first complete week. And he thought he’d just been treading water. This news gave Brian a nice cosy warm feeling in the pit of his stomach, especially when he realised that a couple of days recently he had quite easily managed to clock up seven or eight actions in a day and there’s no real reason why, in a good week, this couldn’t be kept up most days, bringing the weekly average up still further. Brian likes graphs that point upwards.

Posted in ActionLogr | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

ActionLogr User Stories 1: Julie

ActionLogr User Story 1 Julie

Julie is having a hard time keeping on top of all the little jobs that people keep asking her to do as well as all the things she feels she ought to be doing for herself. Sometimes she feels that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to possibly get around to doing even half of them so what is the point in even trying?

Then a friend tells her about Action Logging and urges her to download the App. Julie likes discovering new apps on her phone anyway so she downloads it and makes a mental note to have a play with it later perhaps, once she got some of her stuff done.

Back home with her feet up Julie is knackered and a bit fed up and bored. She looks through her phone apps and sees the ActionLogr one she downloaded earlier, but can’t remember why exactly.

She opens the App and looks around to see if it does anything useful or fun.

Julie sees a Splash Screen which tells her in big friendly writing that she can stop spending valuable time making to do lists from now on. Action Logr will provide her with a simple rescue remedy to unblock her productivity so she can concentrate on feeling better about getting stuff. “All you have to do is commit to spending a couple of minutes each day recording the positive actions that you actually completed, and now you have total permission to escape from your to do list!

Julie thought back on her frustrating day, of getting hundreds of new emails and only having time to answer half of them, while producing three new invoices left over from last week and sending out two new consignments, uninvoiced. According to this new system, she didn’t need to star the unanswered emails in her inbox or write down “Reply to enquiry from Manchester” on her post-it note. She didn’t need to print out an extra copy of the delivery notes she had produced and recycle them back into her desk diary as a reminder to do the invoices first thing tomorrow. She just needed to put down 3 invoices sent and two dispatches made. That’s five actions, which is more than gets done on plenty of other days when the number of interruptions or dealing with time wasters is any higher.

So Julie decided to give it a go, she clicked the box to signify Yes and wondered if she could really get away with abandoning her todo list.

Posted in ActionLogr | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hello world!

Welcome to Actionlogr.co.uk , a  WordPress blog. This is our first post. We may edit or delete it later, then start blogging over on the main ActionLogr Blog

Posted in ActionLogr | 1 Comment