Pause For Gets Streaks and Reminders

Today a new version of Pause For goes live on the App Store and Play Store introducing streaks and reminders! We want it to be easy to make Pause For a habit, and there’s no better way to build a habit than to do it every day!

For me, the day is made or lost in the first actions, so I start my day without my phone. I use one of the Pause For testing phones, which has no SIM card and only necessary apps, as my phone through my morning routine. 

While I could use my main phone and tell myself not to get distracted by any of the games, social media apps, or notifications on there, it’s difficult to gather the mental energy required to be that disciplined at 6am. Instead, my morning-phone has only the apps I use in my morning routine. Everything else has been removed, and all notifications have been turned off. This keeps me from drifting in the crucial first hours of the day when I’m laying the foundation for what my day will look like. It’s kind of a weird system, and if you’re not a mobile developer, you’re less likely to have excess phones lying around the house, but it works well for me.

But inevitably, we all have to pick up our real phones. The ones with all the notifications and places to scroll. I have to bring my real phone to the office to start my workday. And it’s here that I have a problem I need solved. I do need to have a real phone that has a SIM card and full functionality, and I do need to bring it to work. But what I don’t need is a distraction to start my workday. The same way the first few actions of the day are the most important, the first few actions at work determine what kind of workday I’ll have. And when I enter my password on my laptop and see that loading bar slowly filling up, nothing feels more natural than popping open Instagram real quick for something to do while I wait.

And that’s where Pause For reminders have made the difference. Now in Pause For, you can set a time to be reminded to pause. I have mine set every day at 8am. Typically I get into the office around 8:30, and when I open my phone I have a notification waiting for me from Pause For, reminding me to start my workday in a productive, helpful mindset instead of a distracted one. Tapping on the notification takes me directly into a pause with my default cause and length, and just like that I’m off my phone and focusing on the work ahead.

I built this feature for myself and my specific need, but I also built it to solve the problem I’d heard from many users.

“I just don’t think about it.”

“The time I really need it is the time I’m least likely to use it.”

Certainly streaks and reminders won’t completely fix those problems, and at the end of the day, it’s up to you to make the decision, but hopefully this is a step toward making that decision easier.

I use Pause For to start my workday focused.

Do you use Pause For for family dinner? Set your reminder to start a 45-minute pause at 7pm. One quick tap makes the phones go away and supports a cause.

Getting home from work exhausted and flopping on the couch to watch TikToks for 2 hours? I’ve been there. Set a reminder for a 20 minute pause at 5pm so when you open your phone, you’ll remember to spend a little time practicing piano instead of getting sucked into the couch.

You can customize the time of day, which days of the week, the length of the pause, and the cause you’d like to support. And with streaks now being tracked in your profile, there’s an extra bit of motivation to stick to your goals. The addition of streaks goes along with reminders, and for me they both just come down to routine. I either do things every day, or I stop doing them altogether. Streaks help make staying off your phone routine.

I’d love to hear what you think of this addition, and what ideas you have for the next one. As always, feel free to reach out with feedback! And if you’re curious about what’s coming down the line, right now I’m working on a system for unlimited pause lengths.

Happy pausing,
Sam

Version 1.0 Arrives for Pause For iOS!

We’ve made it to version 1.0! First of all, thank you to everyone who has been using Pause For from 0.1 up to 0.9.4. We released Pause For on the App Store exactly 1 year ago, as of tomorrow. I’d like to say we planned this, but that would be an enormous lie. We’re excited to hear everyone’s feedback on this new version of Pause For. The feedback we’ve received over the past year has been invaluable in redesigning Pause For to better serve the needs of our users. But a lot has changed, so I wanted to dive into the changes and the reasoning behind them.

The New Giving Process

The biggest change in Pause For v1.0 is the way your pauses make an impact on the organizations we support. Prior to this version, pausing rewarded Kin, a cryptocurrency that you then used to make contributions in the Market to one of the three organizations we’ve partnered with. Pause For’s goal is to help you break down long-term or abstract goals into manageable chunks of time by giving you an immediate reward. This additional step between pausing and giving weakened that connection between pause and reward.

In Pause For v1.0, as soon as you finish a pause, you see your impact to the organization directly reflected. You still earn Kin, but now this Kin is used to enhance your ability to give, instead of complicating the process.

Powerups

This is that enhancing I just spoke of. Now that your donations are happening directly at the end of the pause, the market provides a place to purchase powerups to make your pause more impactful. These can be used every day (and we encourage you to use them as often as you can!) but they’re especially useful to motivate you when it really counts. Taking a final tomorrow? When you enable the Gameday powerup, you’re making a commitment to put down your phone early and often to make the most of it.

Betting

We know the Kin earned is itself a motivator for a lot of people. That’s why once per day, you can place a “bet” on a pause. When you do, your Kin bet is taken out of your wallet. If you complete the pause successfully, we double it. This is another way to keep yourself motivated when it matters. You can see the amount of Kin you’ve earned so far in the bottom left corner during your pauses.

Global Tallies

This is probably my favorite new feature. Global tallies display on the home page of Pause For below the pause button. If you don’t see them, they only appear after you’ve contributed your first gift to the organization you’ve selected. (That’s a bug though, oops.) This was a highly requested feature, and now that we’re using a new backend framework, we were finally able to implement it.

Note: right now the tally only updates when you start the app, so make sure to restart Pause For if you want to see the latest numbers.

Everything Else

This new version is so much bigger than it looks. But a lot of it is behind the scenes. We switched to the new Kin SDK, which should make the Kin earning and spending experience much smoother. We built a new backend server which handles requests better and reduces our support load. We completely switched authentication providers to a more robust one that will allow us to do cooler things down the line. And we tightened up our codebase so future updates will be smoother and faster.

And that backend I just mentioned? It now handles the vast majority of the logic of Pause For. Very little is now done on your device. That means a faster app, but it also means fewer things we have to double-build. Everything that we build inside the iOS app, we have to build again inside the Android app. That list of things is now much smaller. What does that mean? Android. Soon.

Happy Pausing,

Sam
Pause For Team

Pause For Migrates to Kin 3!

The long-awaited migration to the new Kin blockchain is happening now!

What does this mean for you?

iOS users:

Make sure you’re on the most recent version of Pause For (if you have automatic updates off) and you’ve got a solid internet connection. Then just open Pause For! The loading screen will walk you through the process, but mostly you just need to sit there and watch while it does the work for you. Shouldn’t take longer than a couple minutes, and usually less than 30 seconds from my testing.

If you have any issues at all with the migration, email me at contact@pausefor.us and we’ll get it all sorted out.

 

Android hopefuls:

This puts us one step closer to releasing Android! The new Kin SDK we are using to build Android only works with the new blockchain. Now that we have migrated to said blockchain, we can finish out the Android build and get the Alpha version onto your phones. Expect to hear some big updates on this very soon.

 

Happy pausing!