We're excited to announce the release of version 5.9.4, which focuses on addressing some of the performance issues that have been reported.

Performance Improvements 🖥️

Removed specific animations that were causing large CPU and GPU spikes for certain users. While this is not a comprehensive fix for all performance issues, it should significantly improve the experience for many users.

Need More Help? 💡

If you're still experiencing performance issues, we recommend checking out this article with tips that have been reported to help: https://intercom.help/centered/en/articles/7135543-known-issue-high-cpu-and-memory-usage

As always, we appreciate your feedback and support. Your input helps us continue to improve the Centered app experience.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please don't hesitate to reach out to our support team in the app or by sending an email to .

Thank you for using Centered! 🎉

We would like to firstly apologize for any inconvenience users have been having with Spotify playback and announce the release of Centered version 5.9.3, which includes a temporary fix for the Spotify connectivity issue some of you have been experiencing during Flow Sessions.

What's new in Centered 5.9.3:

Improved Spotify Connectivity: We have implemented a temporary solution to address the sound-dropping issue when using Spotify in Centered. You can now enjoy uninterrupted music during your Flow Sessions.

While playing Spotify playlists in Centered, you will need to adjust the volume in the Spotify app itself or manually using your computer's volume adjustment. The volume control feature within Centered is temporarily disabled for Spotify playlists due to the ongoing issue.

This does not affect Centered specific playlists, as volume control should continue to work for those playlists.

We are closely monitoring any progress Spotify makes on this issue and hope to find a permanent solution to restore full volume control functionality for Spotify playlists within Centered in the near future.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your understanding. Your feedback is important to us, so please continue to share your experiences with our team.

Thank you for your continued support and have a great week!

We're excited to announce the release of Centered version 5.9.1! Here are the latest updates and features:

: When you hit a five-day streak, you can now share your weekly Streak rewards with your friends and colleagues. This feature is perfect for celebrating your productivity and encouraging others to stay on track.

: We've added a new feature that allows users to easily toggle chat on and off for a specific person in the chat window. Now, you no longer have to navigate all the way to the upper right to click on the X button to close the chat window. Simply click on the person's name in the chat and the chat will toggle on or off for that person.

: Group admins can now share the Leaderboard of Leaderboards with their members, which will allow everyone to see who is leading in different categories and how they stack up against each other. This feature is perfect for promoting friendly competition and encouraging productivity within the group.

: We've fixed a bug that caused the time spent on a task to not display properly in the Task panel. Now, when you complete a task, you'll see the time spent on it displayed correctly.

: We've updated the names of our plans to better reflect their intended users. The free plan is now called the Student plan, which is perfect for students or anyone looking to try out the app before committing to a paid plan. We've also updated the images around this plan to make it more clear and more user-friendly.

: We've added a new 7-day productivity score to the main screen, which will give users a quick snapshot of their productivity over the past week. This feature is perfect for those who want to track their progress and stay motivated.

: For our Pro users, we've added new Pro pills that will appear next to their names in the app. These pills are a visual representation of their Pro status and serve as a reminder of the additional features and benefits they have access to.

: We've also made some improvements to the backend of the app and squashed some minor bugs.

We hope you enjoy the latest updates and improvements to Centered!

As always, please let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions for future updates.

🎉

Ready to show off your accomplishments? Centered has made it super easy to let your friends know what you've been up to.

Now you can share your completed tasks directly to your Group Chat and brag about all your achievements!

You didn't think we would forget about the Leaderboard, did you?

Not only have we made it a breeze to switch between Day, Week, Month, and All-time views, but we've also included a super handy button so you can download the Leaderboard and show it to the world!

Working with your friends and teammates has never been more fun - let's get to it with Private Groups!

With Private Groups, you'll have access to:

Yes, yes...we know this isn't technically a new feature, but we felt we did our very best to hide it from you, so we've decided to make up for that and make it more easily accessible.

If you haven't tried this before, then you are in for a real treat (and some great coach lines that you may not have heard yet.)

Just start a session, scan the code using your phone's camera and press START on the web page and to use your phone during your Centered Session.

This release also includes a few improvements and fixes, such as:

You will now earn rewards each day you complete a meaningful work session with Centered!

The game is simple:

When it comes to productivity, consistency is key. The spirit behind this new streak is to help you stay motivated to go through your tasks faster, with Centered!

Glad you asked!

Rewards are random and come in different size and shape, such as:

Centered has a lot of features and settings. It can be fine-tuned to match needs.

But for newcomers, that can be overwhelming!

This release brings a new onboarding experience that aims to be simpler.

This release also includes a few cosmetic changes and fixes, such as:

Are you mostly using your calendar to schedule your work?

Great news then: this release introduces ! You can now drag & drop your tasks in your calendar to plan your day.

You can unschedule a task by removing it from the calendar.

Reschedule or re-estimate your tasks directly from the task itself, and see what you can realistically achieve today!

The end of the day/week/year is a good moment to take a step back and see all that you have accomplished.

To help you do so, you can now , right on your home page!

It's a heatmap of your past sessions, which is handy to identify patterns and tracking habits 🌱

Someone comes at your desk and you suddenly need to mute the music? We got you!

It used to take at least 2 clicks to do so. Now , right from the bottom-right of your player!

You may also notice that your coach will be a bit less chatty at the end of your session.

if you don't like your coach to prompt support words while you work, you can disable that from settings.

It stopped working recently because we were using an old version of the API that got removed. Now we are using the latest and your Todoist integration should work again!

This release includes other little fixes and improvements around, such as preventing you to accidentally update your task when you navigate the settings with your keyboard 🧑‍💻

Feeling overwhelmed? Need help getting organized with all of your tasks and meetings?

Go to the group to schedule a Session with one of the Centered Experts. You will learn helpful tips to get more work done and a free month of Centered Pro.

This is only one of the many changes 5.5.0 brings…

Follow along with Ulf as he guides you across the changes in this short video 🍹

… or read along!

You can now send all kind of images and PDF files through the chat.

Super handy when working in a Buddy Session with a teammate!

Need to work with a colleague right now?

Click "Start an Instant Buddy Session with a Friend", pick an approximate duration, and share the link to start working together.

If you have integrated Centered with Slack, you can even fire instant Buddy Sessions from there with .

Are you into keyboard shortcuts? We are. No joke, some of us are even deep into mechanical keyboards that look like butterflies 🦋

Thus, we started giving some more love to the butterflies here.

Check out the keyboard shortcuts you can use—or press (of course!).

And here is a pro-tip: while working in a Session, if you think "oh, I need to do that next", then

Finally, a couple of things have been changed to make Centered smoother to use:

If for any reason you can't download Centered's Windows/Mac Desktop application, we have great news for you:

Of course, some features such as App Awareness won't work there. But it's a good workaround if you are a Linux user or your company has some strict policies about desktop applications.

Follow along with Ulf as he guides you across the changes in this short video 🍹

… or read along!

You can access the web version of Centered from https://centered.app/app

We recommend you use the Desktop App if you can, since our A.I. coach can't nudge you away from distractions from your browser. But it's still a good workaround to plan your day, chat with your buddies, or drop in a work session.

Have you noticed Cassidy's pinned note in the screenshot above?

Well, now you can react to these with your favorite emojis!

:

Speaking about the Chat, another feature landed in this release: . No Centered Blue ✔️ required 👐

, directly from the Calendar. That's handy to switch between "I want to see who's available to work with" vs. "I just want to see my calendar" modes.

And if you like the "Keep me off my phone" feature, you can now use it when working in a Buddy Session too!

Have you connected Centered with Todoist, Linear, or Asana yet?

If you did, notice that a new button appeared in the settings: "Refresh Tasks"

When you suspect your tasks to be out-of-sync, with your connected account.

In the early days of Centered, we used to play peaceful videos in the background when you work. We have moved to rotating photo background instead, to preserve your bandwidth.

However, if you are a Pro user and have no issue with bandwidth, you may want to turn this back ON to enjoy these cool videos again!

This release brings a lot of improvements in the UI, in particular around working together and planning your days.

You can follow Ulf as he guides you across the changes in this short video 🍹

… or read along!

They are now always accessible on the left panel. It's way easier now to try and pick a different group and coach. Also, feel free to re-order them as you like.

With the new chat panel, it's simpler to keep in touch with your friends and see if they are currently working.

The Buddy Sessions feature really helps a lot of you get your work done. It brings accountability and a social dimension to Centered. 👥

Hence, we made a couple of improvements here:

so you and your buddy both know what to do, when.

We have made the end-of-session clearer too! 🔔

If you have a lot of tasks to juggle, we have good news for you:

We moved away from the concept of as "sections where you can drop tasks". It quickly becomes difficult and cumbersome to manage. We aimed to make it better…

So we reduced the clutter in Tasks to only keep the main sections:

If you were using , fear not: they are still here under the hood.

Instead of having sections in the UI that you need to scroll, buckets are now acting like tags would.

With the Search field, Type in the name of your bucket, or prefix your search with to only show tasks that are in this bucket!

Finally, to have more real estate. It doesn't rely on the tasks panel to be open, and you can select to see 1, 3, or 7 days ahead.

If you are a Group leader and you have a Discord community, this is for you!

You can now to get useful messages when your people are using Centered to get work done:

The post is particularly sweet if you want to fuel an healthy competition around productive work in your community.

This patch fixes a bug with the break timer that would show the time you have worked instead of counting down the break time you have left. ⏱️