After creating SmartTime, many of our users told us two different things: They loved our Smart Tasks, but also wanted to have a task list that was not “smart.” And they wanted a way to manage multiple projects or plans. “You know how SmartTime finds time for your different tasks? I want something that can find time for my different projects, each of which is made up of multiple tasks, and each of which has a deadline.”
That was a tall order. We were already at work on part of that request; we designed a notes and to do manager that allows you to group items intuitively from a desktop interface, and add multimedia attachments such as photos and voice notes. It’s called SmartNotes and debuted last week in the top 50 of over 3,000 business apps on the iTunes Store.
Here were some of the challenges that remained for the other requests:
1. How to manage the time lines of multiple tasks in a project or plan? Surely it would be impossible create a project manager like MS Project, and squeeze it into an iPhone?
2. Most of us don’t just have one project that we are working on. We don’t even work on them in one place. We have projects and plans for one or more businesses or jobs, and we also have projects and plans at home. How to manage multiple plans?
3. How do we make a plan designer and manager that works for the average user? The soccer mom? The small business owner? The person who is too busy to get into the complex relationships of a project manager, but who still needs to keep everything in order?
4. How do we keep a balance of work and life? How do we keep our plans and projects from taking control of everything?
Simplify, simplify, simplify
These are the four questions that shaped the design of SmartPlans. In design, there are two things that guide us: (1) We tend to think outside of the box, and (2) necessity is the mother of invention. By necessity, we had to simplify project management down to the tasks that only one person works on. After all, the iPhone is an individual device. That, in turn, allowed us to create a more simple, intuitive interface that the non-geek could use and understand.
The TBD Task
The hardest thing about creating a plan – whether it is to write the Great American Novel, or learn to play Mozart’s 5th, or design a new iPhone App – is to break that plan up into individual tasks. We make that easy with a nifty device called the “TBD Task.” When you create a new plan, you estimate roughly how long that plan will take you to accomplish. Say, you estimate 80 hours. We then create a “TBD Task” that is 80 hours long. Then each time you add a task to the plan, we reduce the duration of the “TBD Task” by that amount. Add the task “do novel research - 6 hours” then the TBD Task becomes 74 hours. You can delete the TBD Task at any point in time, but it acts as a handy place-holder while you are putting your plan together.
It’s all about Timing
We then came up with the idea of the Timer, which is so important to SmartPlans that you can access it almost anywhere. Anytime you start work on a task, just tap on the Timer. It keeps track of how much time you spend on any item. This also turns some powerful gears in the app that give you feedback on the progress of each task. It’s not quite the “burn rate,” but it’s awfully close. The cool thing about the Timer is that you can use it quickly and easily. Suppose you have SmartPlans open, and your phone rings. You don’t know who it is, but you do want to start recording the time of the call. Just tap on the Timer and it starts recording, and creates a task for you automatically. You can tell it where to go later.
Plan Manager: there’s nothing like it
Then came the finishing touch – the Plan Manager. Using our experience from the landscape calendars in SmartTime, we designed the Plan Manager with a wide view. Just flip the iPhone sideways and you have all of your plans under your thumb – literally! Not only does it show a time line of each of your plans, but it shows how much time per week each plan is taking. You decide how much time you want to spend each week on the sum total of your plans, then you manage that with your fingers in Plan Manager. Drag plans laterally to change their start and stop dates. Drag one end of a plan to extend its length, and the background “work balance” chart reflects the change by decreasing the number of hours per week that you spend on that plan.
Manage People, too
Sometimes you don’t need a structured plan but you do want keep track of tasks and calls as they happen, ad hoc, for different clients, contacts, or even family members. So we created a Free-form Plan that allows you to use the Timer to just capture the time that you spend working on a client, and keep it summarized in one place. Nifty!
It’s so simple, we’re wondering why nobody else thought of it. Kind of like SmartTime – which is currently the #5 business app in the iTunes App Store.
