Wonderful Day for iPhone: Stay Motivated, Every Single Day [Review]

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We’ve all downloaded our share of to-do/productivity apps. We’ve all made New Year resolutions. But most of us use them for sometime and slowly they get phased out of our busy (read lazy) life.

Why?

So why another productivity app, you might say? Well, this one is slightly different. It’s actually based on Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity secret. You can read about it in detail at Lifehacker but I’ll brief the process for you. Pick out a task – walk every day, leave for work on time, learn a new language. Buy a big yearly calendar with boxes for days. Now everyday you walk, mark a red cross on the date. Think of it as a game you’re playing. You have to maintain the streak. Every single day without the red cross is where you failed. Once you do it for a few days, it gets exciting. You just want to continue the longest without failing. The best part – at the end of a long enough chain you’d have accomplished something amazing, an achievement of sorts. So if you spent 30 min a day learning a new language, after a month you’d probably would be already speaking a few sentences!

What does it do?

So, coming back to the app, what Wonderful Day does is allow you to track the chain on your phone. You don’t need to buy a calendar and you can track multiple small tasks without messing up different colored crosses on a calendar. The app is really simplistic in approach. It allows you to add activities and specify the days you’ll do them (for instance no need to worry about leaving for work on weekends). The activities are show as a list that shows how are you doing on each of them. A simple toggle lets you see the last 7 days chain in the same view. Going into the activity shows you the stats as well as a grid view that marks the days you didn’t do the activity as red. The marking screen allows you to mark the activities as done or not done. Ahead are a few screenshots from the app that show the various screen described above.

Suggestions to the Developer

Here are somethings I would like to see in the upcoming versions:

• If an activity isn’t updated on a day, mark that day as a failure (with an option to change later). Optionally remind the user the next day that he didn’t complete given activities.
• Allow manually sorting the Activity list.
• Revamp the marking interface. The user shouldn’t need to go 2 levels deep just to mark an activity as done. Put a checkbox or something next to the list. Or maybe have a Tweetie-like swipe gesture.
• Calculate and show the user the present streak and the longest streak for each activity (like current score and high score in games). It’d make the process more fun.

Conclusion

The app is a breath of fresh air when it comes to productivity/goal tracking/to-do apps. The interface is neat and simple but the best part is the inherent don’t-break-the-chain idea. I’d certainly recommend everyone to download and give it a try. In a week of usage the app has found place on my homescreen and I can vouch for the fact that it works for me, better than most to-do apps.

Wonderful Day for iPhone will cost you $1 at the iOS App Store. The app was developed in India by Tenmiles.