Work Manager

In this post I want to talk about one of our first iPhone/Android projects: Work Manager. Our idea was to make a mobile application for professionals that want to manage their working time in order to better spend it in properly having their work done. The application was intended to help professionals to identify their roles in their companies and set a number of goals to achieve related to these areas. Professionals would then learn whether they spend their working time on the matters that really are important for them, or just dealing with urgent problems that don't let them progress in their career. In this way, they would be able to prioritize their activities and concentrate on those that truly allow for their professional development.

The Work Manager application was designed to provide several tools for organizing and managing the working time:

• A Planner to allow professionals to focus on the way they want to improve at work and promote their career.
• A Weekly Calendar that includes the tasks the professional wants to work on, as well as the already fixed appointments and meetings.
• A Work Tracking tool, a timer for each of the tasks assigned to that working day, and to identify where our time is truly spent.
• An Analysis tool to evaluate our working performance.
• A Share Module that allows professionals to export and share different results of their work management.

However, after several weeks working on the design, we decided to stop further developments on the project. Why? Because it is supposed that our company is devoted to the development of mobile applications based on social network, and Work Manager was not social at all. One option could be to extend our Share Module to share our data or the analysis results with peer professionals on an on-line community. Trying to improve their working effectiveness on their own can sometimes be hard to do, so could encourage professionals to join a community where they can support each other on the process and at the same time share tips and comments on how to better perform. However, we thought that this social addenda was too week to justify the effort behind an application like Work Manger.

So, we have decided to ask for help to the community. That is, we have decided to open our Work Manager application, and see what other people think about the project. And why not, perhaps somebody comes up with a nice idea about how to make it more social. And since we want to practice what we preach, if we like the result of this open query we will make the final Work Manager product open source (GPL based).

You can donwload the Work Manager current design documentation from here.

Also, you can read and join to our discussion forum.

Thanks in advance for your help.