Overview

Vitamin-R is the productivity tool that starts where other tools stop. Instead of concentrating on capturing and organizing action items, Vitamin-R is designed to accompany and encourage you while you are working on your tasks. It is a collection of tools and techniques that are designed to work in tandem to raise your productivity level while providing you with a more enjoyable working life.

Vitamin-R encourages you to break down large, vaguely defined tasks into a series of short “time slices” of between two and sixty minutes, each with specific, easily reachable and actionable objectives. During each time slice, Vitamin-R keeps you focused only on accomplishing the objective at hand and provides mechanisms for dealing with poor concentration, outside interruptions, everyday distractions, and so on. Vitamin-R also allows you to record your progress, detecting and tracking positive and negative work patterns to help you discover how to work most efficiently in the way that suits you best. In addition, to be even more helpful, Vitamin-R does all this while staying out of your way.

Because task management itself takes up so much time, concentrating on getting started on the real work to be done, rather than on organizing your tasks or becoming obsessed with project management, has many benefits. It allows you to break through the resistance of procrastination and creates a positive feedback loop of small achievements that inexorably bring you closer to your ultimate goals. This greatly reduces the stress caused by looming deadlines and a lack of clear direction, empowering you to enjoy guilt-free breaks during which you can relax or pursue renewal activities.

Many topics in this guide touch on the underlying principles that have guided the development of Vitamin-R, but for a more comprehensive discussion, the User Manual is also available. Easily accessible via Vitamin-R’s Help menu, the User Manual offers a complete explanation of the rationale behind individual application features and the underlying neurological and psychological foundations on which they are based.