I started falling out of the habit of using my own productivity app. This was slightly concerning, considering I built it for myself.
Skillorum is a gamified productivity and time-tracking app that turns the time you spend on real-life skills into XP and levels.
It wasn't broken, it was just fighting the same issue every productivity app comes across: filling in too much data.
Productivity apps always seem so nice and easy to start with, just some tags, maybe a deadline, but to fully sort something is never as simple as you initially believe. After learning more about what you're using, you know how to fill all the boxes and of course they all have their uses. Surely it would be wrong to not complete the whole form, right?
Now, the mental burden of making a single task becomes too much; there are too many buttons, too many things to add. You need to fill in everything before you even do the thing you actually want to do. You either stop using the app entirely, or in the worst case you never start what you wanted to do because the effort required to get to the beginning is too high.
I made Skillorum as simple as possible because, well, I'm more than aware of the problem. I just wanted to treat my real-life skills like a video game and earn levels in them to boost my motivation.
At the highest level, Skillorum times your work and gives you XP for what you did on your real-life skills. You can either work on a skill directly, or you can make a task where you can assign your quest, skill and skill actions to it and then work on that task. Making a task is generally preferred because then you can see all the different quests and skill actions you've done on your stats page.
Even so, I started failing to use my own app because I'd forget, or maybe I just couldn't be bothered to make a task for this one thing. You need to fill out a name, assign a skill, quest, maybe a skill action. When you say it out loud it's not a lot, and it often isn't, but one missed use always leads to more, and sometimes you just don't want to make a task for every little thing you do.
This is where I realised I put the admin on the wrong side of the work. Why does the task always need to exist before I start? I could solve this in the simplest way imaginable: do it after.
That's why I made it possible to create a task after you've worked on the skill. You stop the timer and then you can make a task. You don't even need a name, you just assign a quest or skill action and it makes a completed task from that.
I tested it out and it was even better than I thought. It was no longer filling out a form. You did the work; now you can collect the reward. You don't fight inertia by adding more work to start, you make it as easy as possible to get moving.
It's the same process, but in your head it's completely different. And in fewer taps. Easy!
Sometimes the best way to reduce friction isn't to remove a step, but to move it.