Greetings, my name is Artem, and I am a Product Owner at DueFocus. Throughout my career, I have been concerned about my efficiency. I understand that this problem is not unique because many people are familiar with the feeling of constant burnout and the pressure of an inexhaustible stream of tasks. These factors affect the workflow, plunge into the procrastination doom loop, and ultimately reduce productivity. In this case, I wasn’t able to activate my inner potential and successfully achieve my goals at work and in life. Even when I thought that I was effectively managing my time, in most cases such management was diminished to the accomplishment of minor priority tasks and simulating violent activity.
Similar activities led to:
- the inefficiency
- stress increase
- lack of career growth
- the impossibility of enhancing the internal potential
- trampling sensation
Realizing this, I tried to find ways to increase productivity by diving and testing various methodologies. Also, having shared my problem, I found a team of like-minded people with the same pain-points, and we decided to create an application that could help us.
At first, we tried to increase productivity through time management but often didn’t achieve the desired result. The catch was that productivity isn’t about time management, it’s about attention management. Our attention is the most valuable resource we have. We should audit it daily and make sure it reflects your purposes.
We dreamed about a tool that can manage not only time but also focus, attention. Show how, and on what actions people spend time during the day, and whether these actions are productive or not.
Our team asked this question and subsequently took up the solution to this problem. We set ourselves the goal of finding a way to manage current and over priority tasks with maximum efficiency, completely dependent on the psychology of a person, person’s needs and behavior. 2 years passed and, finally, we have found it.
Now we would like to share it with you. Based on the research, the first step on this path is the unification of time management, as well as the definition of norms and rules for the effectiveness of each person’s actions.
Our team was inspired by the work of Cal Newport, who outlined the basics of his ideas in several books, in particular in: “Deep Work — Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World”. However, we decided to dive deeper by projecting his theories and parallel studies in the field of human labor into everyday workflow and to implement a tool for calculating these norms. Having developed our algorithm, we succeeded in measuring how deeply and for how long a person can plunge into his Deep focus during the day, i.e. give maximum efficiency in the process of fulfilling intellectual or creative tasks, despite such distractions as parallel tasks, corporate culture, authentic business processes, and so familiar to us Social media, communication with colleagues, etc.
Thanks to your participation, we create analytics of intellectual labor to determine the individual capabilities of each role and its standards. These standards help to establish not only a personal balance in the work but also a balance in the relationship between the contractor and the employer. We believe that we are creating a product that is useful both for self-management and for teams.
The product that currently has:
- multivariate scenarios of time and efficiency tracking
- real-time analytics of all actions
- accurate and easy to read reporting
- proof of work
- personal metrics of Deep Focus (KPI & AMP (Autonomy Mastery Purpose)
- API integrations with the most popular and familiar task managers
- time management as a habit
- embedding in business processes
Our tool suggests periods of rest and indicates periods when it is worth to focus because the key to productivity is the balance between effort and break time, between deep and shallow work. We are positive that our daily activities form habits that impact success. In the future, based on the data, we would like to classify all roles according to Newport’s Deep Work Scheduling Philosophy (Monastic/Bimodal/Rhythmic/Journalistic) to accurately identify the most effective periods for each person and the best time of interaction for teams. Also, we will determine the appropriate type of workload for each role. Our team wants, knows how and builds a smart application that already helped us and we are convinced that will help you. Time is on your side with DueFocus