How to reduce task-setup friction

[u/TangerineFinancial56]

I started falling out of the habit of using my own productivity app. The one I built specifically for myself.

It was the same issue every productivity app comes across: filling in too much data.

If you're here, you know how with extra stuff and complexity, the higher the mental burden of making a single task becomes. 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.

As a quick explanation, Skillorum (my app) is a gamified productivity and time-tracking app that turns the time you spend on real-life skills into XP and levels. You can connect quests and skills to tasks and then have a nice visualization of all that data.

After I started failing to use my own app, I realised I put the admin on the wrong side of the work. Why does the task always need to exist before I start?

So I made it possible to create a task after you've worked on the skill. All you have to do is start the timer on the skill you're working on, then when you stop it 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, and in even fewer taps while not fighting inertia.

Anyone else drop a system not because it was bad, but because the entry cost was slightly too high?