meditations is an application for tracking progress towards goals that builds on habit formation and long term thinking.

Note

Meditation is under active development (12/28/19) but mostly in the feature/ng branch. This code is very old but has been hackily upgraded to modern React in order to fix bugs and add minor improvements.

Intro

Originally a Trello board, meditations simply keeps track of how often you complete tasks, and how much time you spend on them (optionally). It's fairly minimalist compared to more complex time management systems, and leave the structure of your day entirely up to you. The goal of meditations is to get an objective, long-term view of how you are doing.

In addition, it has a note-taking application that supports tagging and organizing entries by named categories.

Manual

For information on how to use Meditations as well as some documentation of its architecture, see the documentation. Also available in your local install under the docs directory.

Running from command line

$ go get github.com/upvalue/meditations

Go to your workspace's source.

$ go build
$ yarn

Run the following command if you'd like to seed the application with some example data.

$ ./meditations seed 2018-02-22 # put in today's date

$ ./meditations serve --port 8080 --database sample.sqlite3 --migrate 

Doc rewrite

Below is an initial rewrite of the docs, still under construction.

Philosophy and usage

Meditations is based around the concept of using habit formation to accomplish long-term results. Normally people think about things in terms of the goals they would like to achieve, such as "I want to run a mile in under 5 minutes," and "I want to write a novel."

The problem is that these goals require quite a bit of work, and it's easy to lose sight of that or get discouraged when one is starting from scratch.

The idea of meditations is that you can break your day down into daily habits that will eventually result in long-term progress towards these goals, logging relevant statistics and creating a positive feedback loop. Meditations does this in a simple manner by tracking tasks based on their names.

So for example, if your goal is to become an accomplished runner, you might start a series of tasks called "Run." You'd add a "Run" task for the current year, the current month, and then copy it over to the day each day you want to run. You'll note success or failure by clicking on the daily "Run" task. When you start logging daily completions, meditations will track your overall completion rate as well as your completion streaks.

This is a very loose and non-prescriptive way of logging things, which is what I've found to work best. It works well for establishing new habits as well as tracking existing progress. For example, if you generally stick to a diet, but have occasional "cheat days," it's easy to get a sense of whether you're going too far by glancing at the success percentage. If you stick to your diet 90% of the time, then you're probably going to be just fine. If it starts sliding below 85% or 80%, maybe it's time to focus more on it. Want to exercise 3 days a week, and miss a day? No problem, just delete the task and add one for the next day. Figuring out your success criteria is entirely up to you -- meditations just handles the boring tracking part of it.

API

Meditations has an API to enable external programs to interact with it. Examples of external programs interacting with meditations might be:

• A program that tracks internet usage and automatically adds a daily 'Internet' task with usage time

• A phone/smartwatch run tracking program that adds or updates a daily 'Exercise' task with a comment reflecting run/location, statistics, and time spent

For API documentation, see habits/model.ts for type definitions and habits/api.ts for API details. Note that any non-GET API method (POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE) will cause a UI update to be sent to all connected clients.

Consistent things

All dates have the internal format of YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DDZHH:MM:SS.

All objects returned by meditations have a CreatedAt, UpdatedAt, and DeletedAt field. These are managed by the ORM. In the case of objects where dates are important, like tasks, the date is determined by an additional Date field. This is because tasks might be added in advance or logged after the fact.

Tasks

Tasks are the main item of interest in meditations. Each task has the following fields:

Name	Type	Description
ID	int	Task ID
Name	string	Task name
Scope	int	Task scope (1 = day, 2 = month, 3 = year, 4+ = project)
Status	int	0 = unset, 1 = success, 2 = failure
Order	int	Order within scope

Tasks also have a one-to-one relationship with comments, which have the following fields

ID: number
TaskID: number
Body: string (HTML)

Note that Date is the field that meditations uses to determine where a task should be. CreatedAt, UpdatedAt and DeletedAt are internal fields maintained by the ORM, and only DeletedAt will effect the functionality of meditations (if it's set, the row will be ignored).

API Methods

GET /tasks

Accepts the following query string parameters: scope, name. You can pass date to get tasks from a specific date, or from and to to fetch a range of dates, inclusively.

POST /tasks

Given a new task in JSON format, add a new task.

PUT /tasks/:taskid:int

Update an existing task. If given a comment, this will also add or update a comment as necessary.

{
    "ID": 4,
    "Name": "Exercise",
    "Status": 1,
    "Comment": {
        "Body": "<p>ran 3 miles</p>"
    }
}

DELETE /tasks/:taskid:int

Delete a task by ID.

Dependencies

• Go libraries: See Godeps/Godeps.json
• JS libraries: See package.json
• Programs: Pandoc (only necessary for exporting markdown/plaintext descriptions of progress)
• Browser: Meditations relies on modern browser features like fetch, and does not include polyfills. It is developed against the latest version of Chrome, but should work on other evergreen browsers.

Attribution

The favicon.ico was used under public domain from Tango The logo at the top of the file was created by @reallinfo. Thank you! :)