Time Planner:Household stuff under control

Let's say you've decided to get your household activities controlled, as you think it takes next to forever to cook every day, wash the dishes and do the laundry. You've read a bit about effective housekeeping, and even have tried to implement some new habits from Fly Lady or something, but after a while it is back at square one. It's the perfect time to plan your chores effectively and find out how much time it really takes using Time Planner app!

You would need a few things to do to stay organized at home:

1. Define what and when you usually do.
2. Plan things thoroughly, estimating how much time you would spend for your activities.
3. Start doing what you've planned to do without delaying.
4. Track the time you've spent for each of your activities.
5. Analyze the statistics to see your success and understand what you might improve.

Create activities

So, first of all we need to understand what are the things we do regularly, and add them as activities in category "Home". Those might be something like "Cooking", "Laundry", and "Cleaning", but also something very specific like "Clean the aquarium" - whatever you'd like to have tracked.

1. Tap on purple float action button Control tab and choose "Activity".
2. Enter the name, choose its icon, icon color etc. and tap on "Save".
   

Then you can add some tasks to your new activity, like "Bookshelf", "Bathroom", "Windows" and so on.

1. Tap on "Add task" in the drawer appeared.
2. Type the name of a task, and adjust it the way you like.
3. Use importance marks and levels of offset for tasks so the task list looks easy to navigate.

Create rituals for your routines

Once you're done writing down what you usually do, decide when and how regularly you do that. Those will be "intents" in terms of this app.
Let's say you vacuum-clean the carpet in your living room every week on Saturdays, so here is one of the way of creating the intent below:

1. Tap on the task "Carpet" in the task list and choose "Add intent".
2. Customise your ritual: choose time value as intent type, and have it repeated weekly at Saturdays.

No delays!

Our life consists of little things that need to be done otherwise they turn into a big trouble (if they don't, maybe there's no need to do those things, is there?). So we need to focus on developing a timely manner of doing everything, and household chores are handy things to practice on. You don't have to rely completely on your memory but you can use reminders instead!
Recall how great it feels to have something done without procrastination! Lets add more of this feeling to our daily life.

1. Tap on the menu button right to the activity name, and choose "Intent list".
2. Tap on the intent you need and tap on "Add reminder".
3. Choose "Intervallic" reminder type (it will suit best for our case), and define its range and how often it should trigger during this range. Also set the strength of this reminder - we go serious with "Alarm + Captcha". It won't be that easy to ignore your intent now!

Track the time

Once you start doing what you've planned (hopefully, nothing has distracted you), start logging the time so you can compare later what it took to what you've planned.

1. Find the "bubble" of activity needed in Logging tab
2. Tap on it once you start performing the task, and tap again once you're done.

Look through the stats

Once you get used to the app and log the time spent regularly, you can look through the statistics so you can realize how well you do with your planning and implementing.

1. In Ratio top tab (in Statistics tab) press purple wrench button on the left, to open the settings drawer so you can adjust the stats you'd like to look through.
2. Put the drawer back and review the bar chart of intended and logged time. In our case, analyzing the stats, we see if we work a bit more some days, we can work less in the following days, plus we usually have more to clean in the end of the week )

So what?

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Surely those examples are somewhat primitive, but we need something to start with, right? Once you get used to tracking your time, that would be harder to keep procrastinating or to kill loads of time with "time-eaters", as you know what you would see in stats. That actually do motivate to devote more time to the things you love and lead you to success, so your start living richer and funnier life. Then we would say the app does what it supposes to, and that makes us happy developers =)

Please let us know how the app helps you to stay as organized as you like, we will really appreciate it!