Happy New Years, Amplenote friends! 🎊

This New Year, our goal is to try out a new approach to goal setting with you, the most effective task finishers we know.

We are calling it “Accountability Group Goals.” As of this week, we will progressively unveil a new “Social” link in the header. That link opens the door to a new experience called “Amplenote Social,” which hosts what we're calling "Goal Central," a bunch of themes that might inspire you to set or join a goal:

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Browsing the v1 goal themes from the Amplenote Social landing page

Our Social site also includes new on-site forums for discussing numerous productivity- and organization-related topics. Plus, we've implemented a light messaging system to enable contact with your fellow productivity mavens (if they are open to it).

The main entree on this plate of "social features" is the goals, so let’s discuss how you can use them to boost your followthrough… and maybe-just-possibly make this the year where your good January intentions actually stick?!

link📈 Accountability Goals

The good news is that Amplenote is launching two ideas to improve "goal followthrough" that we have not seen tried online before. Both of our features are research-backed methods to improve cohesion between "intent of the current self" and "action of the future self."

The bad news is that it's still up to you to suss out "goals worth following through on." If you choose goals lightly (without hours of contemplation), you'll probably let go of them lightly. It's important to recognize the core truth of goal-setting: picking a worthwhile goal is hard! Identifying a goal that will still feel "worth your willpower" 3 months from now is a much more intense chore than picking a "shiny goal." Broadly speaking, a "shiny goal" is one that sounds good because you met it recently. For example, a "shiny goal" might be "signing up for the gym" after you started listening to a fitness podcast, or "intermittent fasting" after reading a single persuasive article about its health benefits.

Not every shiny goal will fail, but they start with a considerable handicap: they're already at or near "peak novelty" by the time you start. To whatever extent your shiny goal was fueled by "freshness" or "novelty," it's fair to assume your enthusiasm will reverse polarity (feeling "boring" to think about/act upon) during the backswing of your attention pendulum.

If you truly want to follow through on your goal, you must start by picking goals carefully.

When you sign up for a goal, you are often committing 20+ hours to its pursuit. In order for Amplenote's new goal action hacks to get purchase, we trust you to figure out what matters most to you this quarter. As with any important choice, we strongly recommend writing (journaling) for an hour to maximize the clarity of your thoughts.

If you succeed at picking goals that are seriously worth your time, our Accountability Goals offer two key features to boost your odds of dazzling your future self with your incredible follow-through.

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When clicking through to an Accountability Group, you can join it, optionally with a bet that pays off when you stay true to the goal

linkTactic #1: Social accountability

The first benefit of Accountability Goals is that they help you to discover like-minded people who want to make progress on a goal similar to yours. The Power of Accountability, a 2018 AFCPE research paper, also cited by Angela Hayes, Phd , notes that:

The probability of completing a goal if:

You have an idea or a goal:  10%

You consciously decide you will do it:  25%

You decide when you will do it:  40%

You plan how you will do it:  50%

You commit to someone you will do it:  65%

You have a specific accountability appointment with a person you’ve committed to:  95%

Do we trust this research? Eh, kind of, not really. In spite of being cited by multiple academics, the numbers are suspiciously tidy, and the effect size of 95% almost never happens in carefully run experiments. But even if these numbers were not scientifically derived, they still gesture toward a truth that feels intuitively correct.

When you are working to make a change alongside others who want to make that same change, your odds of success improve. Probably substantially. Or at least, substantial in proportion to how connected you feel with your goal partners.

That’s why one of our v1 features allows goal creators to designate a recurring weekly or monthly meeting for goal members to build real human connections (!). Long-running real-world social groups like Alcoholics Anonymous have proven that human connection can change behavior, even when it's hard.

linkTactic #2: Risk/reward with coins

The second feature we’re offering to trick compel your future selves is currency, aka “coins.” This tactic builds upon the observation that, given a numeric representation of "success," ambitious human minds will strongly desire to maximize it. What do they get for maximizing it? To be transparent, we're still figuring that part out. 😅 But we've figured out about 10 ideas to start with, including:

When you sign up for a goal as a Pro+ subscriber, you will have the option to risk 10-100 coins on the bet that you'll keep up with your goal (as opposed to forgetting about it as it drifts into the ether, to join the other billion “good intentions that never were” 👋).

If you defy the odds to stick with the goal(s) you joined (or created), as indicated by recording progress on the goal within the goal creators’s “recurrence interval,” you will earn a 20% “interest” payment for every month that you stayed on time marking the goal complete. Because doing what you said you would deserves a prize! 🤑💰💸

You can depart the goal at any time. If you depart prior to being removed for inactivity, you can get back the bet that you made.

link📣 Promotion forums

Got something to sell? Noticed that nobody on the internet wants to hear it? We noticed that, too. We wanted to create a place where entrepreneurs can get visibility for their product -- when they have a unique deal/coupon to offer -- without getting yelled at.

But how to allow promotional content without getting deluged by scammers, crypto and online sports betting? That was the question.

We decided to tackle the problem using the same infrastructure that incentivizes progress on goal completion: currency (coins). Creating a new topic in the promotion forums requires an investment of 100 coins. It also requires that the topic abides by the Terms and Conditions of our forums. 😇

The baseline "community engagement" requirement is expected to minimize the usual effect of "spam and run" posters.

link🚓 Tax collection

As is our obligation, Amplenote has long collected taxes for all transactions that occur in the app stores. What has been more complex to set up is per-state tax collection with Stripe. However, we have finished an initial implementation that will allow us to remain compliant with all state requirements for our Stripe-based customers as Amplenote continues to grow.

Stripe customers may notice a few cents difference in their bills this year. The good news is that you are no longer obligated to track and submit your own software taxes. 😅

link💰 Daily coin redemption

Along with generating coins through Goal Accountability Groups, another new option to collect benefits is a button at the bottom of the Amplenote Social page. It's pretty fun to click:

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Collecting daily coins from the Social page

Depending on the subscription level, the daily coin redemption ranges from 5 coins for Personal users, to 20 for Founder subscribers.

link🔮 What's next?

It has been an exciting quarter, between launching our dual #1 voted feature, and now opening the door to an entirely new flavor of goal pursuit.

Should we rest on our laurels? We probably should, right?

Oh, right, we are locked in a years-long battle against Todoist, Evernote, and the best note taking and productivity apps created in the whole wide world? Well, in that case, I guess it makes sense to set the table for an ambitious pace during Q1 2025.

Here are some of our team's goals for this coming quarter:

Those are three big ones we know we'll be pushing Product Changelog updates about. Beyond those, it will be a battle between "Ubiquitous forward slash menu," "Completed task stats," and "Global task capture on desktop." Those three all figure to be complete by mid-2025, if our past velocity is an indicator of our future results, but it's hard to pick their precise order. We hope that you'll stick around and enjoy all of the above?

Let's make 2025 the best-ever year for Amplenote users following through on what our past selves methodically determined as "most important." No reason not to get started now on the march toward the "best-case lifestyle" that you've envisioned for your long-term future? 🌴