In a world where “multitasking” is the greatest lie ever sold, a new company hopes to provide automated assistance with fitting the tasks in your growing to-do lists into your calendar like a masterful game of Tetris. Timeflow integrates with your Google account and automatically populates your calendar with blocks of time dedicated to your tasks based on existing calendar events, assignment deadlines, and estimated task duration.
Users connect with their Google account and input their tasks with a title, deadline, amount of time you wish to spend on the task, and its priority level (in comparison to your other tasks).
You can view just your list of tasks, or view Timeflow’s automated working schedule in a calendar or daily task list forms.
As you work, you log your time spent on the task in Timeflow. The app then calculates how much time remains and shimmies the task around in your schedule to reflect the time you still have left until completion.
If you’ve completed the task early, simply mark it as done, and Timeflow reflects that in the calendar as well.
Timeflow can be helpful for individual users who would like some help with daily time and task management. But it can also be a key tool for team-based project management. If you’re part of an organization (within Timeflow’s system), you can see your colleague’s schedules and which tasks are assigned to each of you.
Full administrative access allows you to customize the schedules of your teammates if given permission to do so in their account settings.
There are some functionalities missing or buggy that would really make Timeflow feel like an integral part of your workflow.
For example, adding an event to your Google calendar does auto-populate into the Timeflow calendar, but if a task is already scheduled during that time, Timeflow doesn’t reschedule it. You have to go in and manually reschedule that task. For someone with a flexible or unpredictable daily schedule, Timeflow’s task scheduling becomes a mere suggestion rather than automation, easily interrupted by a last-minute meeting or unexpected change of plans.
Additionally, Timeflow schedules tasks back-to-back with little to no breathing room within the full span of your working hours. For those of us who need some time to stretch our legs and our brains between tasks (and sometimes even during a single task, I say, as I sit back down from my second walk around the house since starting this article), using Timeflow will require you to build that break time into the total time spent on each task.
At the moment, Timeflow is free to use. It even offers a Demo Project so that you can get an idea of how the task management process works without having to sink time into adding your actual list of current tasks.
Having launched only two weeks ago and still in Beta, there is plenty of room for Timeflow to make future adjustments with user input. If you’re someone who struggles to look at your task list and turn it into an actionable plan, Timeflow may be the automated assistant that you’ve been looking for all along.
