Automate Your Business

Archive for the ‘Stay On Focus’ Category

A few people have written to me about the Stay On Focus software recently. Each of them has said basically one of two things:

1. Why not make the software rotate amongst the 7 tasks it helps you to remember.
2. Why not make the software remind you of different tasks at different times (eg, “Go eat” every 4 hours, but “Write the damed report” every 5 minutes).

Well, whilst both of these might sound like good idea, I can’t help feeling that they’re missing the point of what I wanted the software to be for.

Stay On Focus is about… staying on focus.

Not rotating amongst 7 tasks (ie, multitasking: another name for each job taking longer than it ought to continually being moved away from the one important task that you ought to be doing).

Not reminders (ie, sticking at something so long then being distracted away).

Now, I’m being a little harsh here. These are both good ideas. But they’re not what Stay On Focus is about, which is doing one thing, and only one thing, till it’s done.

Notice the bold text above: “away” and “away”. That’s the antithesis of Stay On Focus, which is about bringing you back to the important task, not sending you away from it. The other 6 slots are really there to answer the questions:

* What’s most important after I’ve completed the first task?
* Where can I quickly write down something I’ve just thought of and would like to get done after the first task?

Again, notice the bold words: “after” and “after”

Does that all make sense?

As mentioned in the comments on the last post, I’ve responded to people who raised a support ticket for the vanishing icons, sending them the URL to download the new version. I’d like to give them a couple of days to come back to me on the results, then I’ll release to the wider user base.

If you’ve download Stay On Focus, you might have found that after you reboot your PC, the up/down/delete icons don’t appear.

Unfortunately, this is a bug. One I missed since I rarely reboot my PC; it stays on all the time.

However, I’m working on a solution, and hope to have the upgrade available shortly. In the meantime, you can exit the application and re-start it, and the icons will re-appear. My apologies for the inconvenience.

As hinted in my last post, I’ve just made available a piece of software which is already helping me to get more done:

It’s available now to download, and if you are an affiliate, you can find a link to send people to that site within your affiliate admin area.

I read an article recently by a very well known marketer, who was explaining a particular process. It was a great process he’d talked about – one of those things that you read over and over again in different places, and suddenly you read it another time and it clicks into place. Maybe this writer wrote in a way that suited my thought processes or something…

Anyway this process relied on a web application (a free one), that you would set as your browser homepage. I wasn’t keen on that, as it would mean losing my existing browser homepage, which has links to my various sites and applications that I use on a day-to-day basis.

So I wrote something quick and dirty using AutoIt. Took me about 3 hours. However, there was one thing I wanted to do that I couldn’t find out how to do with AutoIt, even after searching the forum. Someone had written some code in the forum that looked like it met my needs, but in practice that code interfered with other applications.

So I looked elsewhere. After a bit of time trying to find the most common terms for the code I wanted to write, I found some online… written in C++, a language about which I know nothing.

Last night, over my nightcap, I submitted a request at Rentacoder. By this morning, I had 4 people submit a quote. Three of them basically said “I’ll do it for $x”, but nothing else.

One offered a bit of info about his background, and by looking at his history I learned he’d worked on something similar before. So similar, that both myself and the initiator of the other project referenced the same bit of code that I’d found online.

After about 6 mails to and fro today, we’ve ironed out a couple of “gotchas” spotted by the developer, and he can start on Monday. And although we’ve not agreed the final price, he’s given me a ball-park figure which he’ll pin-down to a specific figure in his next email.

In the meantime, I’ve approached the author of that original article (you’ll find out who it is later), and said what I’m up to. He’s interested in seeing the software.

So, if he’s interested enough to share it with his list, I’ll be offering it as a freebie list builder. It should be interesting to see how big the number is that subscribe to my list as a result, as this guy has been around for years – one of the first names I recognised as being “one of the good guys” when I started online.

Plus, the software is generic enough that I’ll be able to propose similar ventures on a regular basis, as this topic comes up again and again.

Plus of course, I’ll be offering the software here as well!

I’m hoping to have the complete software ready to roll at the end of next week, and most of that will be waiting time for the contractor to work his magic. Elapsed time on my part will be about 6 hours, I estimate, including testing his output. Add a couple of hours for a subscription page/download page, and a few follow-up messages, maybe an OTO as well, and that’s a normal working day for something that could result in a massive list size very quickly.