OneThing is an SMS chatbot to help you accomplish the one most important thing in your life every day. Every morning, you'll receive a text to set a daily goal. Every night, you'll receive a text to check-in on your progress. Essentially, it's a simple commitment mechanism to keep yourself accountable.
At first, you may find it hard to set "meaningful" daily goals, but with time you'll get better and hopefully will live a more intentional life as a result.
I originally created this just for myself, but found it to be quite effective and so worth sharing. Hope you also find it helpful!
If you have any questions let me know. To get started, text "HELLO" to 914-888-2212.
EDIT: Currently, OneThing only supports the US.
@_maxdeutsch Hey Max. Just clarifying - is this for USA only?
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@prattarazzi I'd put money on it that it is USA only, but fortunately, I have a U.S phone number though I'm in the UK so it is possible that we could use it if you also have other reasons for such a phone number, such as many other apps that are USA only.
@_maxdeutsch Hey Max--I had a similar idea that I launched (that is no longer functional) called KeepPushing.Me (www.keeppushing.me). With that idea, I asked goal setters to add a friend who would be notified if the goal setter didn't achieve a daily goal--as motivation. A couple lessons I learned that might help you take this further:
1.) People like the concept of setting goals and tools to help them keep them, but often do not know how to set goals. They don't know where to start, or how to make them measurable. You might want to consider giving some guidance on types of goals to set. Or have different landing pages for different goals.
2.) You should add different timezones for the reminder texts--It's an easy update that would increase your reach.
3.) People will inevitably start ignoring even these messages (the same way you lost the discipline of writing in the journal). It's natural because people will start to see the same message each day. You might consider adding a "quote of the day" feature to make each daily text look a little different, so it's a fresh text that is less likely to get ignored.
Feel free to email me at yash dot ambardekar at gmail dot com and I can share some more lessons learned.
@ambyash Hey Yash. These are very good ideas. Thanks for the help!
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Hi Max, like the idea. Interested to know what techniques you tried previously to set daily goals, which arguably didnt work, and led to the inspiration of creating OneThing?
@anthony_stylianou OneThing was largely inspired by the Five Minute Journal (fiveminutejournal.com), which is an actual book, where every morning you write out 3 goals, 3 things you're grateful for, a personal affirmation, etc. and at night, you write out a few things to reflect.
I liked the physical book, but it required that I maintained motivation to write in it every day. I'm a pretty disciplined person, but I found that after a few weeks, I forgot about it. As a result, I wanted something that was even more focused (a single goal) and something that automatically kept me accountable.
SMS seemed like the best option.
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Please let me specify the reminder time. I've signed up with my American phone number, but the text message each morning will arrive at 4pm for me as I'm in the UK! I would like 7:30am GMT or 12:30am PST.
@ianmayman Unfortunately, you are only able to currently set US timezones as reminder times.
To make onboarding shorter, setting the timezone happens on the 2nd morning you receive a reminder. The closest you will be able to get is setting the timezone to Eastern time right now.
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@_maxdeutsch That might work, at least for a while until you add more timezones. I'll set it to EST ASAP. I would however like it earlier, some people start their day at 4am!
@selfagency it let's you set timezone on the second morning (I divided up the onboarding across a few days). It seems like I might need to adjust that though
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