Left Coast Logic was founded five years ago. In “technology years,” that means we are middle-aged! Over this time we’ve given much thought to the meaning of “true productivity.” To help celebrate our 5th anniversary, we are producing a 5-part blog series about productivity. Each part represents one of the five building blocks towards achieving true productivity in the technological age. Not coincidentally, each part also represents a step that we have taken towards achieving that goal with our own products.
We are also celebrating two important members of our team who have been with us from the very beginning: Trung and Truc. Each of them personifies what is special about what we do, and how we do it.
Trung is our lead iOS developer. He joined us in early 2008 and was a key part of the team that created SmartTime™, our ambitious first product that represented our vision for an integrated calendar. It’s helpful to remember that back in April 2008, there were no iOS developers. The word “app” didn’t even have meaning. Every step we took was new ground. Trung and Nang took a crazy idea – combining tasks and events – and made it into a piece of software with a unique tumbling view, that could run on an iPhone. One million downloads later, SmartTime is still going strong. Trung has also been the lead behind other key developments including SmartPlans (the top-selling multi-project planner for iPhone and iPad), SmartCal and its connected successor SmartDay for iPhone, and the upcoming SmartDay for iPad. Our team has grown and not all of the original members are still with us, but here is one measure of confidence: each and every developer who left us for other pastures, has continued to work on projects for us. Tin, who developed SmartNotes, left to create his own business, but worked many nights as the lead on ScrapBook for iPad. Nang, who teamed with Trung on SmartTime, recently left to start a family pharmacy but just released a major update to SmartTime. And Thien, who created SmartDay for Mac literally from scratch, moved to Australia but has already done maintenance work on some of our iOS apps and will be involved in one of our next projects. There’s a reason people like to work for us. I think it’s the way we integrate.
Speaking of which – Truc is, quite literally, our integrator. Our small team works in a big house. And she keeps us together – integrated, one might say. Every morning when the roosters are calling, Truc goes to the local market to shop for fresh produce for our lunch meal. Then she gets us all kick-started with kick-ass iced coffee: deep, dark, slow-dripped to perfection, and guaranteed to make everyone happy in the morning. Come lunch time, she has prepared a sumptuous three-course meal consisting of fresh vegetables, a meat or fish, a hearty soup, and fresh fruit for desert. Our entire team eats around a large table and enjoys ‘non work’ time together.
Our daily lunch is symbolic of integration, connectivity, sharing, collaboration, and social productivity – the five building blocks of “true productivity” – a state where people are using technology in a simple and harmonious way, not just to ‘get things done,’ but to do things better. We’ll be talking about these in the next four installments. But first let’s continue with integration.
Integration
I’ve always been interested in productivity. In high school, I kept hand-drawn charts on graph paper stuck to my wall that depicted various daily recordable statistics that I thought might be related to my own productivity: hours of sleep each night (and times of sleep and wake), eating patterns, temperature variations, hours of sunlight, exercise patterns, sports events, even snowfall at my favorite ski resorts. My favorite book was a short story by John Cheever called “The Geometry of Love” in which the protagonist applies geometric principles to his own marital problems and, believing he has solved them, begins to rely on geometry whenever things become unpleasant. This spurred me to take a statistics course in college where I came across a really cool tool called regression analysis: take any two (or more) sets of data, drop them into a magical machine, and it spits out a number that informs you, in precise percentage terms, how much they are related. I thought I had found the holy grail.
Only later did I learn that this geometry is flawed because, alas, we are humans, not robots. (Nevertheless, my favorite film is Blade Runner and my favorite television series Battlestar Galactica.) I realized that the answer to ‘harnessing numbers’ must lie somewhere between Cheever’s Geometry, and fun but ultimately meaningless geometries such as Tetris. It occurred to me that we could design a productivity app by taking some simple logical assumptions, adding in some clever math, and applying them to the human need. Actually, in this case, it was my own need – the need to combine tasks and events together into an integrated timeline.
My partner, James, and I used this to create our first app, SmartTime, based on the premise that Tasks and Events should not be segregated into ‘calendar’ (in the left corner) and ‘list’ (in the right corner). By applying some simple concepts of adaptive logic, for the first time ever we could build a software application on a pocketable device (the iPhone) that combines one’s task list directly into the calendar, schedule tasks into one’s free time, and updates them whenever something happens – such as the passage of time or the completion of a task. This is something that cannot be done on a static sheet of paper, so to us it was a “true” use of technology – as opposed to, say, an online calendar that merely displays information the same way that a piece of paper can. Integrating tasks and events into one tumbling, scrolling view makes perfect sense to me because that’s how my day looks: event, event, task, task, task, event, task, event, task task task,and so on. Personally – and maybe it’s just me – I’d rather track and plan my activities in a dynamic timeline, than get virtual whiplash watching a tennis match that features my own thoughts as the tennis ball. Evidently, more than just a few others also agree with this concept: SmartTime, and its connected cousin SmartDay, have achieved over 1 million downloads over the past few years.
Next: Connectivity
