The Work Gadget


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A Tour of The Work Gadget

Introduction Message

Add A Belief

Fill in a Judge Your Neighbor Worksheet

Choosing a Statement to Work On from ‘My Work’

Doing the 4 Questions and Turnarounds

Automatic Recovery

The Statement Picker

Keeping Track of ‘My Work’

Available Space

Deleting and Archiving Work

About Security and Privacy

About the Author

A Tour of The Work Gadget

Introduction Message

The Work Gadget was designed to do The Work of Byron Katie in a way that closely resembles using the original Judge Your Neighbor Worksheet (JYNW) and the One Belief at a Time worksheet. There are lots of resources online that help show how to do The Work. I am not a facilitator, so I am not qualified to guide or facilitate doing The Work. If you visit thework.com, you can find a list of qualified facilitators as well as links to download all the worksheets needed to do The Work if you prefer pen and paper over The Work Gadget in any specific situation. This Gadget is simply designed to keep your work all in one place and help navigate you through The Work in a structured, predictable way. Because it works reasonably well on a computer, tablet or phone, a user can log out of their workspace on one device and pick up where they left off on another. I found accessibility to be important when doing The Work for me, so I created The Work Gadget so I would be able to do The Work whenever I had an opportunity. Then, I thought it might be nice to share the tool, so I expanded it to handle multiple users. I hope you enjoy using it. I’ve enjoyed building it.


Add A Belief

Menu option: Add A Belief. Type in any single belief you want to question, it will add it to your “My Work” section. Add as many as you’d like to be able to question later.


Fill in a Judge Your Neighbor Worksheet

Menu option: Fill in a JYNW. Fill out the JYNW form the same as you would an official JYNW form from thework.com. Choose SEE DEMO to get a walk through of how to use the power of The Work Gadget to help streamline the process of filling in a worksheet. If you don't see the SEE DEMO button under the Fill In JYNW menu option, you can turn it on under Help/Other - Preferences


Choosing a Statement to Work On from ‘My Work’

Now, to start doing The Work on this worksheet, we can pick any statement. Let’s pick “I want Jim to think about me”... The Gadget will allow you to do these statements in any order…, so we click or tap on that one.


Doing the 4 Questions and Turnarounds

Now we are actually doing The Work. If you are familiar with The Work, you simply do what you usually do and click YES or NO for the first two questions. Take your time. (NEW TO THE WORK? MAYBE START WITH thework.com to see how it works!)

If the answer to the first question is NO, the second question is redundant, so it automatically answers NO for the second question and advances on to question 3.

It’s now a matter of answering the questions as prescribed by Byron Katie. The Gadget presents the 4 questions and turnarounds, plus the opportunity to add any additional turnarounds and notes at the end. The Gadget also tries its best not to lose any of your work, so if I were to ‘add a belief’ or ‘fill in a JYNW’ or any of the other menu options while in the middle of this turnaround, the gadget should bring me back to it after I complete the other task.


Automatic Recovery

Look at what happens if I sign out right now without clicking continue…and then sign back in… The Gadget knows I haven’t hit continue, so takes me back where I left off, just in case I logged out accidentally.

I can then complete the turnaround to my satisfaction and click/tap continue. The gadget performs this recovery if you feel like you need to quickly capture a new statement or worksheet by those menu options, it will bring you back where you left off. So when inspiration strikes, go ahead and add a new statement or worksheet, you shouldn’t use your current work or place.


The Statement Picker

When The Work Gadget was just an idea in my head, I had a vision of being able to review My Work and quickly and easily cherry pick further statements that may be triggers or that I may otherwise want to work on. So, at any time, any sentence in a “current work” page can be selected to add as its own statement, like this…

You can’t see the mouse on the screen in this screenshot, but it illustrates that holding the mouse over any sentence in completed work reveals it is a link to ‘pick’ that statement. So if I click (or tap on a phone or tablet) on that particular sentence… I get…

So, I can change this statement any way I want to suit my needs, so I’ll change it to what really triggers me… like so…

I’ve changed it to what I’m really thinking, what REALLY triggers me in a way that I can most effectively question it, I have also clicked “Group with ‘The dog barking next door’”, this way the statement will stay grouped with the worksheet that I picked it from. I could have also just left that box unchecked to put it in the list of standalone statements.

When I add this statement to my work, I find that I can click a link to return to work.

When I ‘return to my work’ with that link, the statement picker closes and I am right back in the same work statement I was before. In this way, we can feel free to pick statements out as we see them in current and reviewed work, knowing they will be added for future work options while never really interrupting what we are involved with.


Keeping Track of ‘My Work’

Statements that have been started but not finished are shown subtly highlighted like so…

 

        

Finished statements are shown with a green checkmark. If I work on the statement “Jim shouldn’t have a dog” and fully complete the 4 questions and turnarounds,  it looks like this…


Available Space

As you do the work, available storage space is indicated at the bottom of most pages. As it approaches 0%, you will have to delete completed work to free up some space.

Verified Workspaces have about 5 times the capacity of Anonymous Workspaces. (You can convert an Anonymous Workspace to a Verified workspace at any time and get that extra space)


Deleting and Archiving Work

Menu option: Archive/Delete. When deleting work from a Workspace;

DELETE - will Permanently Delete associated work without confirmation.

ARD - (Verified workspaces only) Archive to email, Remote Delete - This emails a copy of the associated worksheet/statement to your email address. When you receive the archive email, clicking on the Delete link at the top of the email will permanently delete the work from The Gadget. This way, you are guaranteed to receive an archive copy before your work is deleted from The Gadget. If you do not receive the email (or avoid or forget to click the delete link in the email), The Gadget will undelete that work after 24 hours and put it back in circulation under ‘My Work’. At that point, you can try the ARD process again for that statement/worksheet or permanently delete it directly from within the Gadget using the DELETE feature. Work waiting for ARD (waiting for you to click that delete link in the archive email you received) still counts toward your storage limit until it is permanently deleted by either method.  


About Security and Privacy

The Work Gadget is built with general security in mind. Secure encryption between the server and your browser means nobody can eavesdrop on the line. On the server end, all work is saved in encoded format. That means that during regular database management and software development, all of your work is not readable by a human. I am also the only human who has access to The Work Gadget behind the scenes (a one man show, see About The Author.)

The Pledge of Privacy: All of The Work you do in the gadget is encoded in the database specifically so maintenance and development can continue without a concern about accidentally reading any of it. All that is seen at the database level is garbled text. Even though I have the ability to decode the information, I would feel pretty guilty if I did, so pledge that I won't.

This is what it all looks like to me.

With all this in mind, I cannot guarantee the gadget is 100% secure, so please use it knowing the inherent risks of using any online app. You may also delete your work at any time. When work is deleted, whether in the delete section or using the Archive to Email and Delete link in a Verified Workspace, it is permanently gone and unretrievable.


About the Author

I am known as The Gadget Man to some, because I’ve spent most of my life puttering around with technology and finding ways to make it work for me. I have spent a few decades in IT management, software development and even worked as a security guard for a while. Security and Privacy come naturally to me because I was raised to respect others’ privacy and keep my nose out of other people’s business. Conceiving of and building The Work Gadget is just an extension of that general way of life, and I hope the gadget can help people more easily and naturally question their own thoughts. To build it for myself was a hobby. To make it available for everyone was like a hobby combined with public service. Isn’t that kind of cool?

Rick.



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