There will be typos, grammatical errors, misspellings, and mistakes on this page. My goal is to try to document as much as possible for all large changes. However, I most likely will not be heavily proof-reading this page. So please accept my apologies for any mistakes you may find.
Thanks,
-Marc
A large redesign effort started that took many months to complete. I engaged multiple usability subject matter experts to get feedback about what could be better on the site. During this redesign, the goal was to make a better user-experience on the site. Because the site is very with many activities and 100's of pages, it took some time to get through all of the pages and check for consistency and that all of the recommendations were implemented.
Back in March of 2022 I had a focus group study to show the efficacy of using Take 2 Minutes. The results of the group
emphatically showed that using Take 2 Minutes can greatly increase positivity in users. However, since over a year
had passed, I thought I would conduct a 2nd focus group. This group, the October 2023 group, engaged 20 participants.
After just 20 days of guided activities, 100% of the participants had shown an increase in positivity when using the
Modified Differential Emotions Scale questionnaire as a measurement. Again, showing that using Take 2 Minutes
can have a positive affect on ones mental well-being. However, similar to anything you want to accomplish, it
does take time and effort. You must engage yourself and be consistant.
As always, this is not medical advice. Take 2 Minutes does not claim to heal or fix any problems. It is only a
self-help tool that can, possibly aid you on your path.
Using First Promoter, I incorporated an affiliates program. My hopes are that through affiliates we can get more people to learn about Take 2 Minutes.
Because communications through Take 2 Minutes utilize SMS (testing), one of my biggest costs each month is texting costs. As time passed, I noticed many accounts were generating errors when attempting to text the telephone number, indicating that maybe the number is no longer in service. Thus, I added functionality upon each message being sent, where the system checks how long it has been since the system has "heard from" the user. Basically, the last time the user signed in, texted a message back, made a journal entry, etc. If it has been months, the system sends a message alerting the user that they account will be shutoff if we do not hear back. This warning message is sent twice, then on the 3rd time, the account is inactivated.
A new section has been added to the RESOURCES area for video content. The goal is each week to release a new video with content from a counselor, therapist, professional coach, guest speaker, or myself. The topics will be diverse, but hopefully offer information to users. If you have a topic idea, please reach out to Marc.
If you follow along with these updates, you know that back in May I started working to get the system to understand sentiment and emotions of a
message sent to the system. As of now, I have this in what I would call a beta phase 1. If the system recognizes a message as having
a negative sentiment and an emotion associated with anger, sadness, fear, or disgust, then the system will attempt to follow-up with you and
offer to you a few resources that may be able to help.
Please note, I recognize the system is still getting a few false-positives. Meaning, sometimes a message is a gratitude entry that contains words
that trigger a recognition of negative sentiment and an emotion other than joy. In these situations, the system is going to still reach out with
suggestions.
I plan to continue to improve this over time. However, I wanted to get it launched so that it could begin attempt to help users.
This is a feature request that has been made by at least 20 subscribers. It is the ability to save your favorite mediations so that you can
recall them and listen to them when you want. This update is restricted to paid subscribers.
However, as a paid subscriber, you now have the ability to save up to 10 of your favorite meditations in your own, personal meditation library. Once
a meditation is in your library, you can access your library and play any of the meditations in your library at any time.
Being this has been requested multiple times, I hope those who were wanting this feature see the new abilities. For those of you who have been
waiting for this, sorry for the delay - this took a decent amount of development to make happen. Thanks for your patience.
UPDATED ON 6/2/2022 : This update is in place but has partially been halted. At this time, I am looking for a few
coaches, counselors, or therapists to help me test this functionality a bit before releasing it to everyone. Specifically,
I believe I still have a few tweaks to make before the code is accurately identifying concerning messages.
I will enter another update once this has progressed further.
...the original update from 5/29 follows...
I have been working on integrations to allow the chatbot to understand emotion and sentiment of messages. Now, if you are a Group
Owner or Admin, and you are a verified coach, counselor, therapist, or psychologist, you have a new option to notify you when a
member of your group sends a concerning message.
This functionality will be tweaked more as my goal is to only alert on the most concerning messages; however, at this time if the
chatbot recognizes the message has a negative emotion as well as a negative sentiment, it will notify the Group Admin of the message.
The Group Admin can then sign in to their account and view the message in question on the Group configuration screen.
If you are a Group Admin and do not see this option, please email me
and be certain to include your email address.
As always, please reach out to Marc with any questions.
I uncovered through scanning the error logs that if a user cancelled their subscription, then joined again at a later date, much of the system would not work properly for them. I believe this issue affected a handful of users. As of this writing, the bug is corrected in development and should be deployed to production by May 29th.
This update is restricted to paid subscribers only. Paid subscribers
can now request a meditation by a specific voice talent. For instance, if you really like Marisa's meditations, then you can specifically
ask for a meditation by Marisa via a text (SMS) request. Many users have reached out indicating their preference for a specific voice talent.
Because of those requests, I wanted to make a way for users to be able to make such a request. Due to SMS costs, this is limited to one request per day.
One additional note about this new feature is that the request searches all types of mediations for matches. Meaning, and still using Marisa as an example,
if you make a request for a meditation by Marisa, the system does not limit the search to "on-demand" meditations. Instead, the system will scan for all
meditations by Marisa from the daily library, the on-demand library, the anxiety meditations, and the breathing exercises. In the past, these libraries were
all segregated in their delivery. So much work needed to be done to ensure a request would scan all of the different types of meditations.
Because Take 2 Minutes does not have testers, if you experience any errors when requesting any meditations, I would greatly appreciate reaching out
to me and letting me know so that I can correct it for everyone else. I always spend much time testing my changes; however, with only one tester (me),
sometimes I can overlook small bugs and I greatly appreciate the feedback from the community of users.
In the past, a few links that you could request via SMS would create a web session for you, but others would not. The most obvious example would be
if you texted "log me in", a website session would be created so that you were signed in to your account and could access your diary and other activities.
However, if you texted "daily meditation" a link would be sent to you allowing you to access the daily meditation and allowing you to add personal notes
but you were not fully signed in. Thus, after the meditation, if you wanted to access your personal diary, you would need to go through the sign in process.
This has been changed at this time so that all (or nearly all) links sent to you via text (SMS) create a website session for your account, allowing you
do to other things besides the activity that was sent via SMS.
NOTE: The SMS links that are sent include this message, but if you are reading this here, it is worth repeating...
Do not share links that are texted to you from Take2Minutes.org. Those links can access your personal data in Take 2 Minutes.
I continue to tweak the chatbot's understanding of emotion and sentiment almost every day. The chatbot is now evaluating every gratitude journal entry
as well as all SMS messages sent that are not understood. The goal is for the chatbot to have a good understanding of when a message is concerning.
Once that is accomplished, I can take actions on those messages; such as alerting a counselor if the user is part of a group, or sending back
a meaningful response with suggestions for activities to help.
This is definitely a time-consuming process to make improvements on the understanding to ensure as high a percent of accuracy as I can achieve before
activating the functionality.
I began working towards the system being able to evaluate emotion and sentiment from gratitude journal entries. Currently these new steps are only being performed on gratitude journal entries sent via text (SMS). This is only the first step of many to make this a useful feature. The ultimate goal is for the system to recognize a user that is struggling and better suggest activities to help the user. I'll post future updates to this functionality as the updates are completed.
In March I organized a focus group to evaluate the efficacy of the activities with Take 2 Minutes. The group participants started by completing a mDES questionnaire to establish
their baseline ratio of positivity to negativity. Then, each participant completed a 15 day Three Good Things exercise and a 21 day gratitude journaling exercise. At the conclusion of
the month, 31 days later, they each completed another mDES questionnaire.
The results of the mDES questionnaires were very clear that the activities helped each person who fully participated move to a more positive mindset.
The results and focus group data will be used to improve the functionality of Take 2 Minutes and I will possibly consider offering future focus groups.
A bunch of administrative changes and additions were made over the past few days to help me support users. Nothing of any real value to end-users except giving me the ability to better assist when assistance is needed with the system.
The Groups functionality is growing in popularity and it has been my focus of many updates. As more coaches, counselors, therapists, groups,
companies, and clinicians are purchasing Group license plans that give them licenses for their clients, I realized it would be beneficial to show you,
the group admin/owner which of your clients has full access to Take 2 Minutes. More to the point, as some users purchase a 10 pack of licenses, but
invite 15 of their clients to use Take 2 Minutes, it was not clear to them which users had full access and were consuming one of their licenses and
which were simply using the free-service plan. Obviously, you can have both clients with a full-service license and clients on a free-service plan;
however, the clients on a free plan will have limits to their usage. As such, it was important for you to be albe to see which clients had which service plan.
For much of that description, I realized I was referencing the clinician/client relationship for the Groups functionality; however, all of the same
ideas apply for any usage of the Groups functionality. For instance, if you are a business with a 20-pack of licenses but you recently hired your
21st employee, it is beneficial for you to see the entire group and who may not be covered by your licenses.
In this update were also small bug fixes that were recognized which resulted in a new user being added to a Group and not receiving a license even though
the group owner/admin had available licenses. This small bug should be corrected, but I will continue to monitor in the event it persists.
I have recently engaged a handful of writers to begin producing new content for the articles and stories
section. My hopes are to release new content once to twice per week and ensure all content is relevant to the users of Take 2 Minutes.
With the new content coming, I am making small improvements to that section, such as: the ability for signed-in users to
vote on an article, and the ability for all users to filter the articles by author.
Part of the goal of Take 2 Minutes is to showcase others who provide content and assistance to Take 2 Minutes. You will
see this in areas such as the meditations, where I show the author and/or who voiced the meditation. Similarly,
I have added a biography of each author that is included at the top of their writings. These authors do a great job
in providing meaningful content to Take 2 Minutes and I greatly appreciate their work.
Also as part of this update, I added a Sneak Peak section showcasing the next, upcoming article and it's release date.
This will allow you to see the next article and see it the article interests you. As a future update, I am considering
allowing paid subscribers to get a notification of articles when they are released. Obviously, just like all of the
activities, this is something you would configure if desired.
An earlier update allowed group owners/admins to send text messages through the system to their group members.
This is an addition to that functionality to allow a group admin/owner to include a link to one of a few activities.
It was recognized that group owners/admins were asking group members, for instance, to take a flourishing scale test.
In some cases it was found the user did not know how to initiate that test. So I added some options to simply
create and send a link with messages to group members.
Groups functionality updated to allow group owners/admins to send text messages through the system to their group members.
This was found to be an important update during the March Focus Group activities because group owners/admins may need to
make suggestions about activities or send follow-up to group members. This allows the group administrators todo so without
sending a text message through their, personal mobile device which would expose their, personal telephone number. It is
essentially a means of communication with group members through the T2M system.
The groups overview screen was updated to allow the group owners/admins to see the reminders and activities each group
member is setup to receive. This gives the group owner/admin a quick-glance view of which activity reminders are setup
for each group member; thus, if you have asked everyone to partake in a three good things exercise, you can quickly
see who has and who has not setup that activity.
The first version of, what is now, Take 2 Minutes was developed in 2015. In 2017, I began having talks around what needed to
be done to help more people. In 2018, I was lucky enough to meet many knowledgeable psychologists and have many discussions
around activities in the field of Positive Psychology. I spent much of 2018 and 2019 heavily developing the first version of
Take 2 Minutes. In 2020, Take 2 Minutes was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. The product has been in a constant state of
development and really came into a robust, solid product in late 2021.
Ironically, in early 2021 I started a change log page, but I did not keep it up as needed. Somewhere along the way, the
entries were lost as I did not maintain the page. Hopefully, this time I can make it a habit to continually update this
page as I make enhancements - which happen weekly if not daily.
My initial launch notes were short: (1) Basic information about the company, team, and goals available on the website. (2) The ability for new users to signup for positive messages was working. (3) The ability for existing users to login to edit profile settings. (4) Expanded instructions and information about features of positive message settings.
Disclaimer:
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