Work Smart
Vitamin-R helps you split large tasks with vague objectives into short “time slices” with specific, reachable objectives to get you started and keep you going.
Tools That Make You Smarter
The human brain is great at some things and hopeless at others. Vitamin-R provides tools to overcome inherent limitions and helps you get the best out of what you’ve got.
Analyze Performance
Vitamin-R records your time slices to allow you to discover the hidden patterns of your working life and optimize your schedule for maximum performance.p
Vitamin-R is a collection of tools and techniques designed to overcome the biggest productivity challenges facing today’s creative professionals: managing attention and maintaining motivation. It complements the task capturing and organizing features of modern to-do list managers, by forcing you to concentrate fully on one task a time and keeping distractions at bay. Vitamin-R smooths the creative process by rejecting the dusty business book notion of self discipline and fully embracing the way our brains are truly wired.

Click on the image above for a video – “The Vitamin-R Approach.”
Time Slice Your Work
 Vitamin-R breaks down large, vaguely defined tasks into a series of short "time slices" of between 10 and 30 minutes, each with specific, easily reachable and actionable objectives. During these time slices it keeps you focused on accomplishing only this one objective and provides you with mechanisms for dealing with interruptions, poor concentration, etc.
Get Started
 Vitamin-R concentrates on getting started which allows you to break through the resistance of procrastination and creates a positive feedback loop of small achievements that get you closer to your ultimate aims. This greatly reduces the stress caused by looming deadlines and a lack of a clear direction, thus enabling you to enjoy guilt-free breaks in which you can pursue other interests.
Dump Your Working Memory
 Vitamin-R provides you with the "Now & Later Board", complete with FastType magic, to give you a place to quickly dump all those things that go through your head and allows to get back to the task at hand.
Log Your Progress
 While Vitamin-R assists you in getting on with your work, it also keeps a customizable record of your progress that can help you detect positive, as well as negative work patterns thus allowing you find the way that suits you best.
Your Way or the Highway
 Vitamin-R plugs into your life rather than trying to take it over. You can use it occasionally to overcome procrastination or mental blocks or re-organize your entire working life around the concepts that it embodies. It complements rather than replaces traditional to-do list managers, such as Things or OmniFocus.
Feature List
|
| ✔ |
Speech & Sound Reminders |
| ✔ |
Distraction Mangement (Snow Leopard Only) |
| ✔ |
Apple Help Book |
| ✔ |
PDF User Manual |
| ✔ |
Fast-Type |
| ✔ |
Automatic Software Updates |
| ✔ |
Easy Drag & Drop Installation |
| ✔ |
Read Current Objective Aloud |
| ✔ |
Separate Now, Later & Stratch Pads with multiple sheets |
| ✔ |
Global Keyboard Shortcuts for Major Features |
| ✔ |
Menu Bar Item & Dock Menu for Fast Access |
| ✔ |
Guilt-Free Breaks |
| ✔ |
Agile Workflow |
| ✔ |
Built-in Time Slice Logging |
| ✔ |
Customizable User Log |
| ✔ |
Buzzword compatible |
| ✔ |
Habit Forming |
| ✔ |
Desirable Side-effects |
| ✔ |
Buzzword compatible |
| ✔ |
Science Mumbo-Jumbo |
System Requirements: Mac OSX 10.5 and 10.6
Click to Developer’s Site for more info.
ZOT Interview with Frank Reiff, developer of Vitamin-R
1 What's the most
unique, useful feature of your product?
I think the major innovation is that
unlike traditional productivity solutions that focus on capturing and
organizing to-dos, Vitamin-R is designed to accompany while you
are actually doing the work and tries to optimize your concentration
and focus during task execution.
To-do lists are great and Vitamin-R
is designed specially to work well together with tools such as Things
and OmniFocus, but they only go so far. Most crucially for me, I’ve
long felt abandoned by those tools as soon as I actually start working;
that was the origin of Vitamin-R.
While you don’t have to buy into
the Vitamin-R “system” to find the program useful, you will no doubt
get the most value out of it, if you read the “User Manual” which
gives a deeper background on how best to implement the tool and how
you can use it to work in a manner that is compatible with your “wetware”.
Another unique angle is that it is
designed with creative professionals (I do count myself amongst them)
in mind, so the ideas that Vitamin-R embodies go well beyond old-fashioned
notions of rigid self-control, “time management” and multi-tasking.
Vitamin-R instead focuses primarily on helping you manage attention
and motivation.
2 Why did you create this app? or
What need were you trying to satisfy?
As I’ve mentioned already, I felt
abandoned by my to-do list manager as soon as I started getting down
to work. Sometimes I found myself doing my GTD weekly review and caught
myself thinking “Is this not just extra work?” and “Shouldn’t
I be doing something productive instead?”.
Furthermore, after many years of being
a part-time Indie Mac developer, I went full-time when my son, Aiden,
was born and promptly found that concentrating on what you are doing
is much easier when you are not sleep deprived; things haven’t become
any easier when my daughter Cailin was born and I now have two children
under 4 at home.
It was time to change the way I was
working and in the search for solutions, I did what every former Academic
will do, so I started reading. Along the way, I came across lots of
useful stuff and more than a few ideas that have gone well over their
sell-by-date.
Vitamin-R is my distillation of everything
I’ve learned from the usual business literature (Hi, David!), from
my own experimentations and from more esoteric sources, especially recent
research in Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience.
I’ve found that reading these books
fills my head with great ideas on how to improve the way I work, but
it all goes overboard when I start working and I find myself falling
back on old habits.
Mark Forster (Do It Tomorrow) introduced
me to the idea that if you want to become truly productive, you have
to create a system where doing the easy thing is the same as doing the
right thing.
So to answer your question: Vitamin-R
tries to satisfy the need to create a productivity system where doing
the easy thing is also doing the right thing.
3 What is most interesting to you
about developing SW for the Mac platform.
I’m excited about learning new things.
Being an indie developer means that I can pursue my interests during
work hours just as long as I deliver a piece of software that people
want to buy at the end of my explorations.
This has allowed me to channel my energy
into doing the things that I love doing, so I’m very grateful for
that.
Obviously, I could also do that as
a Windows developer, but the Mac just has so much more going for it.
First and foremost there’s this tremendous sense of community that
you just don’t get in the Windows world. Then of course, there’s
the search for perfection rather than “sufficing” (what a terrible
word!) and that has a huge appeal for me.
Most Windows software feels like it
was designed to be “good enough”; most Linux software feels like
it was written by programmers for programmers. Mac software feels like
somebody poured their soul into making it look and feel great. I’m
proud to be a part of that.
4 What features should a prospective
buyer look into during a trial of
your product?
Vitamin-R isn’t so much about individual
features as the sum of what it can do for you. On top of that, we are
just only getting to version 1.0, so it’s still fairly barebones.
A particular feature that I have found
very useful are the speech reminders. There is something about having
a voice tell you “5 minutes left” that focuses your attention in
a way that sounds or visual reminders just don’t.
I would have loved to say “Check
out the statistics feature!”. Unfortunately, it’s not quite ready
for prime time yet and I’ll only be able to release something usable
within the next few weeks.
For me, this will be particularly interesting.
Vitamin-R already logs your “time slices” and includes information
about how you rate your concentration and many other things. Seeing
the patterns of how your concentration levels vary according to the
time of the day, the day of the week, … I think it will be a real
eye-opener and an real opportunity to become more productive by re-arranging
when you do particular types of work.
It’s a crying shame I couldn’t
get it finished in time for version 1.0..
5 What are some interesting experiences
you've had creating new
versions of your software when OS
is upgraded?
“Interesting” as in “awful”?
I’ve had plenty of bad experiences
with Mac OS X upgrades.
I’m very committed to making sure
that all my software works on the latest and greatest Mac OS X version
the day it is released and I go to great lengths to ensure that it is.
Unfortunately, Apple’s cult of secrecy doesn’t make this any easier.
When Snow Leopard hit, I had been working
on making all my products compatible for a while, but every second beta
alternatively broke or fixed some features of A Better Finder Attributes
and A Better Finder Rename, so whether or not they were going to be
working depended on whether the GM version would be an even or an odd
release..
Apple had been very good at telling
everybody when the earliest release date would be, so it was fine to
go on summer holiday just before, as I would have a couple of weeks
to finish off the work.
Of course, Apple did a “surprise”
early release of Snow Leopard in the middle of the summer and I found
myself on holiday with my wife and kids in a little log cabin in the
middle of the UK, when I got the first emails about “it don’t work
on SL”.. that kind of spoilt the mood a bit, but I did get everything
to work okay using a dialup internet connection and my trusty Mac Book
Air.
6 What's your favorite Mac app out
there from another developer? Why?
Oh, dear.. there’s plenty of good
software on the Mac, but nothing really stands out as “the best”.
If pressed, I’d probably have to
say “Yojimbo” by Bare Bones Software. I use it to save PDFs, scans,
passwords, serials, bills, invoices and everything else I need a permanent
record of. I love its synching feature which allows me to work just
the same whether I’m on my office Mac or at home and I can even take
it away with me on my laptop. It’s clean, fast, stable and does exactly
what it says on the box. What more could you want?
7 What features would you like to
add to your product that at this
time seem improbable/impossible?
There’s a lot of features that I’m
most definitely going to do, but I think they are all both possible
and probable.
In the “impossible-but-wouldn’t-that-be-great”
department, I guess a bluetooth mind control probe would be great for
Vitamin-R. I’d be able to inject positive energy right into your pre-frontal
cortex and zap any stray thoughts before they can emerge from your unconscious
:-)
I must have watched way too much sci-fi..
8 What would you like a user to
ask you?
Are you interested in any feedback?
The answer would of course be an resounding
“Yes, please!”. There’s no quicker way to create great software
than to listen to your customers.
9 What should I ask that I'm forgetting?
I don’t know.
10 What are the answers to some
common questions people have about
your app before they buy?
What is it? I’ve written an
awesome user manual that answers that question in a mere 5,000+
words:
http://www.publicspace.net/download/Vitamin_R_User_Manual.pdf
Will it get updated a lot? Oh,
yes.
Thanks Frank. Glad you could join us!
macZOT!