February 11, 2019

Introducing Vica - Weekly review app

In the last few years, I’ve been studying and applying various productivity methods in my personal and professional life.

This varied from reading small blog posts to overhyped medium posts, Harvard Business Review articles and various books.

The two most notable methods were Getting Things Done and 12 Week Year. Each has a unique view on productivity, I’ve applied the two systems and they worked well. Both of them had periodic reviews, weekly or longer term as one of the cornerstones of the methods.

Unfortunately, after some time the review process started to be the weakest point, and a result it affected the whole system.

Once I’ve noticed it, I’ve realised the problem is that, for me, the weekly review is a process connected with a high cognitive load. You need to go back through a week or two and remember all you have done, and how it is aligned with your longer-term goals, which is both time-consuming and requires focus.

Also, it’s the process where missing one session doesn’t necessarily break everything else, but if you skip a few sessions it actually affects the overall process and after some time de-rail the whole system and a result you feel confusion and frustration.

Another crucial point I’ve noticed is that to do the review I had to use a few applications like a calendar, Todo app, and sometimes email.

Todo apps were actually a nightmare as once you mark the task as complete - that’s it. It’s hidden, and most apps don’t allow you to filter completed tasks by date.

As a result of this frustration, I’ve decided to start Vica - a simple application which helps you to review some period of time and reflect on what you’ve done in that period - what you had scheduled and also tasks you’ve completed.

There are bigger plans for the Vica app, but in my experience, it’s best to release something small and iterate from there based on users feedback. This helps to learn about various things which I’ll cover later.

Also, starting small and releasing new features gives you a momentum to continue working on the application. This is the digital version of showing up every day. And this is one of the most important productivity techniques I’ve used.

I’ve blogged about it a few years ago and I’ve also started to do it a few months ago. Just working on the app every single day, even for just 15 minutes. These efforts compound.

The larger vision for the application is to be the better version of the calendar applications. We use calendar apps almost every day, and they can be so much better.

I won’t cover how the calendar apps can be improved here as it’s a topic for another blog post. Sign up for the newsletter (https://eepurl.com/gf95lf) to be notified on my journey of building the Vica app.

The application is available at https://vica.app.

Your feedback is welcome, get in touch with me via [email protected]. It’s still in beta and there will be many exciting features added this year.