For those who missed last time announcing Forward, please take a look:
What I’d like to cover today is the main elements within Forward and how you can use Forward to organize your life.
A quick reminder: Forward is a web app that helps users organize everything they need to do in order to have a productive week and incentivizes them to follow through.
Like any personal productivity app, it’s critical to see how Forward structures itself and the flexibility it provides so that you can figure out how to best apply it’s structure to your own life.
With that said, let’s dig in:
Life Areas
By setting up Forward, you’ll be setup by default with four life areas: Family, Career, Self Improvement, and Miscellaneous.
Life areas are the broadest organizers in Forward, and encompass everything else. These four may work for you, they may not, in which case you can change them to fit your needs. I have a few more than this, but you can change them or rename them as desired by clicking the “manage” button in the top left.
Here are the one’s that I’ve settled on:
Obviously, each of these has its own cluster of work related to it. Forward was a part of my Career life area, but it ended up being complex enough that I broke it out.
But let’s move on to what makes up a life area:
Habits
Here at Forward, we are big believers in building and sustaining habits. At the end of the day, a lot of really big factors in your life are going to be due to the habits that you decide to build and maintain. While habits aren’t what we spend the most time on every day, they make a big impact in the long run.
You can add a habit via the box at the top of the page, which will prompt you to give it a name, select the life area it belongs to, and say whether it is a “yes/no” habit or a “numeric” habit. Simply put: if you want to track whether or not you worked out in a day, select “numeric.”
Once added, habits can be quickly logged each day by clicking and editing the cell for that habit. Now of course, just tracking a habit is good, but doesn’t add much “oomph” behind it. We recommend clicking on the “Set Target” button to set a weekly goal for your habit.
So let’s say you have a “Flossing” habit, you can set a target to do that 5 times [or more] per week. This will replace the button with a progress bar that will show your progress and show green as long as you are on track to hit that target for the week.
If you click on the little “expand” button on the top right of the habit box, you can go to the full habits page where all of this is displayed and accessible in a bit more detail for the current week. Check it out!
Projects and Tasks
As noted, most of our day doesn’t involve habits. Rather, most of our days can be broken into a series of tasks that are either assigned by yourself or others and then eventually completed.
Ostensibly, all of these tasks are working toward something. Which, in this case, we call a project. It’s important to note that you can think of project in the traditional work sense, but you can also be a bit more creative with this term. For instance, among my many projects are:
“The Wifey” - not to imply she is a project (of course not), this essentially holds any tasks releated to my relationship with my wife within my “Family” life area.
The HOP Blog - is a project within my “Write and Learn” life area.
“Social and Events” - is a life area that I toss any events for the week as a lightweight calendar of sorts.
And I could go on. As I am dogfooding Forward, I am using it as my kanban board for development and thus have a project for each major component being built within Forward.
Once you have projects, you can easily add tasks to those projects.
Tasks, put simply are any step or building block toward your project. In the above example you can see three tasks for the week, organized within their projects, all of which are within the “Write & Learn” life area.
This organization approach makes it easy to stay on top of what you need to do, and also focus you on planning out a given project. Clicking on a project or life area, you can see the details and manage tasks on your backlog or scheduled for future weeks:
As you can see there, we can also set goals, so let’s go there next!
Goals
Goals are the broader high-level targets that you have. These are organized annually in order to align with how most people plan new year resolutions.
They fall within a life area, and optionally can be tied to a project.
Goals appear on the homepage (as shown above), but also have their own page where you can plan future years, organize all your goals, and more.
There are a number of ways to make your goals more impactful (whether or not you track them in Forward). Of note:
Make sure your goals are quantifiable. “Get Fit” is a bad goal because future you can interpret that and rationalize it however you want. “Successfully Run a 5k under 30 minutes” is a better goal since it is strictly provable if you do it or not.
Make your goals achievable! Nothing is as demoralizing as a goal that is so ambitious you don’t have any hope. That’s why I’ve started with a goal to reach 100 Forward users. I sure don’t want to stop there, but you can’t reach a million people unless you reach the first 100, which is much more doable.
Check in on your goals at least 4 times over the period that you are working on it. So if you are working on annual goals, set aside time to check on them once a quarter. Have a goal you want to reach by the end of the month? Check in once a week.
This last point is another way that Forward really helps by keeping your big goals visible to you! Sure, it may be tempting to tuck your new year resolutions away in a word doc somewhere, but you are more likely to get them done if you see them and have to track where you actually are on them!
To track the status of goals in Forward, you simply click on the colored circle and select your status:
Color-coding seems non-scientific, but there is a reason many companies use a similar approach to quickly track status and hold people accountable.
Reminders
Lastly, we have Reminders! Reminders are used to track longer term recurrences: birthdays, annual, quarterly, or monthly tasks, et cetera.
Reminders are easy to set and a great way to ensure you don’t miss birthdays! Beyond birthdays, it’s great to set monthly or quarterly reminders for house-related work (changing AC filters, fertilizing the lawn, et cetera) and financial tasks (check in on portfolio, start tax prep, et cetera).
You can also set one-time reminders for counting down to things like vacations, travel, et cetera.
Using Forward in Browser
Forward is, for now, only a web app and does not have native iOS or Android apps… yet.
However, it can be used very easily on mobile (I do regularly) via your web browser.
Just as importantly, it is great to use as a sidebar on desktop browsers like Vivaldi (my choice) to keep it always visible and use as a companion while you are doing your work. For instance, to get a bit meta, here is my view as I write this article:
You can see the main window and the article on the right, and the sidebar with Forward on the left. Super handy!
Conclusion
And that’s all we’ve got for today! As a reminder, we’re running a super 60% off promotion for our first 250 Forward subscribers, which gives you lifetime access at only $1/month! You can use Forward for 30 days free and then subscribe using promotion code: LAUNCHFORWARD.
Get started at www.mumma.co/forward!
So please give it a try! My inbox is open for suggestions and improvements as we continue to build a better tool for individuals to accomplish more in an increasingly chaotic world.