How does the widget work?

[Neill Alexander]

Meditation Helper allows you to configure a target daily meditation time i.e. how many minutes do you want to meditate for every day. It then keeps track of how many consecutive days you hit that target. I call this you 'chain'. With that in mind, the widget shows 3 things:

1. The top number shows the length of your current chain.
2. The bottom number shows your longest ever chain.
3. The green indicator shows what proportion of your target you have meditated for today. For example, if you target daily time was 30 minutes, and you had already done a 15 minute meditation, then the green bar would be about half full. Once you have done 30 minutes or more, it would be completely green.

The idea is that once you have a long chain, you won't want to break it. This can help motivate you to meditate every day.

There are 2 settings that are relevant to the widget in the settings menu:

1. The target daily time - how many minutes you aim to meditate for every day.
2. The day start time. This determines how the chain is calculated. For example, if I set the day start time to 2am, then any meditation that starts between midnight and 2am actually counts for the previous day. You find out what day's chain a meditation counts towards by subtracting 2 hours from the time. If the start time was 3am, then you would subtract 3 hours etc.

Here's an example. I set the target time to 30 minutes and the daily start time to 2am. On Monday I meditate at 7am for 30 minutes. On Tuesday I meditate at 9pm for 30 minutes. On Thursday I meditate at 1am for 30 minutes. My chain is now 3 days. The meditation on Thursday actually counts as Wednesday because:

meditation start time (1am) minus 2 hours (because day start time is 2am) = 11pm on Wednesday. Hence I have meditated for 30 minutes on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

If I then meditate at 2:30am for 30 minutes, that brings the chain to 4 days, since 2:30 minus 2 hours is 12:30 on Thursday.

Hopefully that makes sense! Check out the description on the Android Market as well: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nwalex.meditation

[Neill Alexander]

Here is a picture of the widget on my home screen. This shows that my current chain is 190 days long, my longest ever chain was 369 days, and I've done about 50% of my target today.