I’ve added a number of improvements to Actions lately, touching on each of ease-of-use, better collaborative communication, and more visually satisfying.

Scheduling for clients in different time zones.

Throughout CoachAccountable, times are generally in the eye of the beholder.  Meaning, for example, that if you as coach specify an action do be done at 7:00pm, that’s in your time zone, and CoachAccountable will convert it to your client’s time zone as needed.

Now, when the client’s time zone is different from yours, CoachAccountable provides you with a real-time display of what time time is implied for your client:

As you change the time, the client time changes with it.

Comments and Notifications for New Actions

Sometimes there’s just a little more to an action than what fits in a “to-do list style one-liner”.  Extra comments including specifics, the recommended approach, or even a little bit of motivating context are often quite useful.  Now when creating actions these can be added right in with the action itself.

Sometimes a few extra clarifying bits make all the difference.

Beyond that, a notification of the new action can be sent to the client by ticking a check box.  (Like before, unless turned off notifications are always sent to the coach whenever a client creates a new action.)  The notice conveniently includes the action, the due date, and any comments added by the coach.  While I was at it, I made comments render in a more visually meaningful way:

The head shot of the coach makes the message a little more personal, thus has the client take the assignment a little more to heart.

Marking Actions Complete

The window for marking an action complete got a little bit of an esthetic boost.  After all, the happy happening of marking something done deserves a big, pretty display.

Finally, when an action is marked complete a tidy message swoops in to summarize its timeliness.  (The way it flies in and out of view looks really sharp so long as you’re using a modern browser–essentially anything but IE9 or older.)

Even if it’s from a computer, the little pat on the back is welcome.

So those are the recent improvements to actions.  Already with some very unscientific observations I can say that the communication bits of comments and notifications make actions a little more real for clients to take on, and I can only assume that the little “action complete, hooray!” message makes marking things complete just a smidge more gratifying for clients.  (Ah, and for sure as I travel around the world, it’s rather nice to know what time in my clients’ time zones I am actually scheduling actions for!)

Enjoy!