## What's New Sometimes the best updates aren't about adding more—they're about making what you already do feel better. This release focuses on bringing more peace and clarity to your daily rituals, with special attention to the moment when you close your workday. ### A More Peaceful Shutdown Experience Your shutdown ritual is one of the most important moments in your day—it's when you consciously transition from work mode to personal time. We've redesigned the completion screen to honor that transition with more intentionality and calm. **What's changed:** **Zen-Inspired Messaging**: Instead of effusive celebration, you'll now receive simple, earned acknowledgments like "Well done.", "Nicely done.", or "Good." These minimal messages respect the contemplative nature of ending your day well. You've done the work. You've completed your ritual. That's enough. **Elegant Fade Animations**: The completion screen now features smooth, timed fade animations that guide your attention naturally from completion → reflection → closure. Information appears and fades in a choreographed sequence, creating a more meditative experience. **Shutdown Awareness**: When you complete your shutdown ritual, the system now understands that you have shutdown and in your focus mode, it celebrates that with you and glows to remind you to truly shut down. **Unobtrusive Return Path**: If you do need to return to work (it happens!), the option is now subtly present—visible on hover—but not demanding attention during your moment of closure. ### Why This Matters Research shows that how we end our workday significantly impacts our ability to recover and return refreshed. A mindful shutdown ritual isn't just about checking boxes—it's about psychological closure and permission to stop. The redesigned completion screen supports this by: - **Reducing stimulation** at a moment when calm is valuable - **Honoring completion** without over-celebrating - **Respecting boundaries** between work and rest - **Creating space** for genuine transition ### Clearer Smart Bets Language We've refined how we describe Smart Bets to better reflect their philosophical foundation and help you understand their unique value. **What changed:** The Smart Bets section now clearly explains: "Smart Bets reimagine traditional KPIs as 4-week bounded experiments inspired by Cal Newport's philosophy of deliberate experimentation. Instead of tracking metrics forever, you're testing strategic approaches to see what actually moves the needle." The active section is now labeled **"Active Smart Bets"** (instead of "Active Experiments") to reinforce the distinction between Smart Bets and Personal Experiments. **Why this helps:** Many productivity systems encourage you to track everything forever. Smart Bets take a different approach—they're time-bounded tests of strategic approaches. This clarified language helps you understand that philosophy and use Smart Bets with more intention. ### Smoother Weekly Planning Experience Small improvements to the "Organize Next Week" step of your weekly planning ritual: **Better Layout**: The page now uses space more efficiently, making it easier to see your task buckets and weekly success story without scrolling. **Streamlined Decisions**: Removed the delete confirmation dialog when organizing tasks. During planning, you're often making rapid decisions about what to keep and what to remove. The extra confirmation was adding friction to your planning flow. **Improved Readability**: Help text throughout rituals now has a maximum width, making longer explanations easier to read and process. ## How This Helps You Level Up These updates may seem small, but they address something crucial: the *quality* of your daily practice. A shutdown ritual that feels rushed or overstimulating misses the point. Weekly planning that requires extra clicks for every decision creates unnecessary resistance. By refining these experiences, we're supporting you in building sustainable daily and weekly practices—the kind that don't just help you be productive, but help you achieve deep success while maintaining your well-being. The goal isn't just to help you do more. It's to help you discover and achieve your deepest goals while flourishing in all areas of life. That requires practices you can sustain, rituals that genuinely serve you, and transitions that honor the different modes of your life. ## Feedback & Support **Great, but do they actually work for you?** We'd love to hear how the new shutdown experience feels for you. Share your thoughts in our [Community Forum](https://community.maketimeflow.com). **Have ideas for other ritual improvements?** Let us know: - Email: [email protected] - Community: [Feature Requests](https://community.maketimeflow.com/c/general/4) --- Yours in Flow, — The MakeTimeFlow Team