I use SmartTime from LCL and think it is a great app, mixing your tasks and calendar in one screen. I particularly like the ability to set multiple alarms via Google calendar. This SmartPlan app seems like it will prove to be every bit as useful as SmartTime Pro.
SmartPlan is advertised as a project / plan manager. It allows you to create a plan or project (let’s use “Plan” for simplicity) and assign tasks / steps required to complete the project. It’s not a project manager app in the vein of Merlin or MS Project, where you have linked activities, but more a task manager to help you break up a big project (planning a party, maybe) into task sized pieces. And in the vein, it looks to shine very brightly.
When you first open the app you are presented with a page of you plans that you are tracking in what I’ll call the “Smart Plans” view, since that’s what is at the to of the screen. They are arrayed as colored boxes on a plain white background. The page is scrollable with finger gestures if you have more plans than will fit on the iPhone screen. There are some samples there for you to look at: “Quick Start Guide”, “Sample Plan Great American Novel”, and a “Sample Freestyle Plan” (which is an option to track you time on various pursuits without being part of a dedicated plan with a deadline). You can also rearrange the plans on the screen by holding with your finger and moving the plan to a new position. So, at this screen you can hit the “+” button to create a new plan, tap a plan to select it and then select “Edit” to edit the particulars of the plan, or double tap a plan to open it to its tasks.
When you create a new plan, you can choose to make it either a “Plan” plan – which is a plan that has a deadline – or a “Freestyle” plan which is essentially a way to track time spent on tasks, calls or meetings that are outside of a structure plan with a deadline. You can also select a color for the plan from a selection of 21 colors via a selection wheel. Also available are the ability to, of course, name your plan, set a start date / time, estimate hours of work to complete the plan, how many hours per week you want to dedicate to working this particular plan and / or set a deadline. The hours per week and deadline are tied together (as they should be): you can select the hours per week you’re willing to allot to the plan and it will establish the deadline or you can pin the plan’s completion to a particular date / time and the app will calculate the number of hours per week you must spend to accomplish the plan, based on your estimated total number of hours the plan will require. To a point, these fields are editable during the duration of the plan (you can’t change the start date once you have actually started a task within the plan, for instance).
Turn the iPhone Sideways are you are presented with a Gantt style chart called “Plan Manager”. This gives you an overview of your plans and how they fit into your workweek. When you tap on a particular plan bar to select it, a header drops down showing some of the information regarding the selected plan: start date, hours per week you intend to work on this plan, how many hours total you intend the plan to take to accomplish and the end date of the plan. The number of hours you plan to work each week is editable by selecting and dragging the end of the plan bar right or left, even if you have selected a deadline for the plan; in other words your deadline is editable at this screen. What’s missing is the title of the plan, so you are forced to either remember the color coding you select when you first create the plan or turn the iPhone back to portrait to see the title. I think it would be handy to be able to see the name of the plan in the Plan Manager view. Another thing I would like to see is that by double tapping on the plan Gantt, the plan would open in detail or task view. In the Plan Manager view, once you have selected the particular plan Gantt, you can move it into the future (as long as you haven’t started any of the tasks involved with the plan) and you can stretch out the length of time alloted to complete the plan. This does not increase the total number of hours required to complete the plan but rather reduces the hours per week required to accomplish your plan. The only way to change the number of hours the plan will (or is expected to) require is through the edit screen.
Double tap on a plan in the “SmartPlans” view and the plan opens to the detail or task list view. Here, you list your individual tasks that will be required to accomplish this particular plan. The plan initially has a “TBD” (for “to be determined”, I’m sure) task which has as its duration the entire plan duration you entered in the initial plan set up. You enter your first task, set a duration and this is then deducted from the estimated plan duration you entered when you first created the plan. As you enter subsequent tasks, the TBD duration becomes progressively shorter as actual tasks are allotted time.
You can enter tasks in any order they occur to you. If you enter a task that you think needs to move to precede another task, you can do so by simply tapping and holding on the task and moving it up in the list. I find that this only works in the direction of moving a task up in the list, not down. And, it helps to move the task slightly to the left first, before moving it up so as not confuse the app with the other moving gesture, which is to group tasks.
If you move a task up and over a task above (or below, as this seems to work in either direction), the app asks if you want to group the tasks. Select “OK” and you now have a grouped task. You double tap on this group and a drawer opens, from which you can then select a task or add more tasks to the group. There is only this one level of grouping and while the anal organizational part of me wants more depth to the task sub grouping the reasonable part of me expects that this single layer of grouping is enough to work well.
There are timers for tracking each task. They can be started and run concurrently with other tasks or successively. There are icons that tell you the status of task timers, whether running, paused or completed. If you need to quit SmartPlans, as when a call comes in or you exit the app to work with something else, when you return to the app it asks you to whether you want to “resume” or “continue” the timer(s). “Resume” will have the effect of having paused the timer while “Continue” will act as having the timer keep going for the time you were away from SmartPlans. As the timers accumulate time across the tasks of any particular plan you’re working, a progress bar keeps track of your percentage completion for the plan on the opening “SmartPlans” page.
Some random thoughts on the app and its functionality, in no particular order:
On the website they tout the “continuum” of the apps, but I don’t think there is an actual “migration” of info from one of their apps to another. All three apps (SN, ST, SP) have “tasks”, so when does a task in note module graduate to a tack in ST and when does it go further and become a task in SP. This I don’t really understand – am I keeping separate task lists across two or three apps? I think this screams for a desktop app to organize across the iPhone apps.There should be a way to export the timers to a spreadsheet file in order to further manipulate. Otherwise, if I’m billing a client on an hourly basis I’m tracking time both in the SP app and a separate time billing app. Seems this could be combined somehow.
When you open a task group by double tapping on the group and then go to edit a task within the group by tapping once then selecting edit, when you click save on the edit, the app returns to the previous view of the tasks within in the plan, but the group drawer is now closed. This should remain open through the task editing process
Within the view of the tasks within a plan, double tapping an individual task selects then deselects the task. To edit, you must tap the task once, then tap the “edit” button. I don’t know why the developers would not have the double tap act as open to edit the task, which seems more intuitive.
I think this is going to prove to be a real useful app in organizing one’s time and keeping one focussed on advancing their plans and goals.
(This appeared in our Forum by one of our users. The original post is here. Feel free to comment. )
