"Once you start fighting with Maven, it’ll never return to the rosy days when your relationship was young."
The key is, you don't start fighting with Maven.
"The philosophy of Tai Chi Chuan is that if one uses hardness to resist violent force, then both sides are certain to be injured at least to some degree. Such injury, according to tai chi theory, is a natural consequence of meeting brute force with brute force. Instead, students are taught not to directly fight or resist an incoming force, but to meet it in softness and follow its motion while remaining in physical contact until the incoming force of attack exhausts itself or can be safely redirected, meeting yang with yin." (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai_chi_chuan)
If you fight with Maven, you will lose. If you meet it in softness and follow its motion you will attain build enlightenment...
It has a reminder, but it's not random. You tell it how many minutes you want to spend meditating each day, and then configure a reminder time. At that time a notification appears in the tool bar if you haven't met your target. You can configure the notification message to make it something that motivates you.
You can also configure what time your day starts. If you often meditate just before bed, and don't go to bed until after midnight, you can offset the start of day. I have mine set to 2am, for example.
Last but not least, it has a simple widget that displays the length of the current chain (the number of consecutive days you have met your target), your longest ever chain, and a representation of the proportion of the target you've met today. When you miss a day, the current chain resets to zero.
All this combined works well for me. I recently broke a chain of 369 days because I was really ill. It wasn't a decision I took lightly. I'm on a run of 31 days now - less than a year to go to beat my record!
I wrote https://market.android.com/details?id=com.nwalex.meditation because I wanted to motivate myself to meditate more regularly. Prior to having the app, I'd manage maybe 10 days in a row, before finding some reason to skip a day (too busy, too tired, etc). Now I very rarely skip a day. As to whether or not it works long term, I've been using it for over a year, and it's still working for me. But then, it is custom built for my personality. My competitive nature means I never want to 'break the chain'. YMMV.
The key is, you don't start fighting with Maven.
"The philosophy of Tai Chi Chuan is that if one uses hardness to resist violent force, then both sides are certain to be injured at least to some degree. Such injury, according to tai chi theory, is a natural consequence of meeting brute force with brute force. Instead, students are taught not to directly fight or resist an incoming force, but to meet it in softness and follow its motion while remaining in physical contact until the incoming force of attack exhausts itself or can be safely redirected, meeting yang with yin." (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai_chi_chuan)
If you fight with Maven, you will lose. If you meet it in softness and follow its motion you will attain build enlightenment...