It's been a big undertaking, but today we have launched Thrive, our new online tool for managing tasks, teams and time.
Businesses make and lose money in the present, not the past. Thrive helps you to estimate, schedule and manage work across your team via personalised daily todo lists that allow you to track tasks & time against budgets, scopes & deadlines in realtime.
We've got a 60 second video above to help explain it all.
There are already some really cool companies working across different creative disciplines who are using Thrive, and we're now looking for more companies to come on board and try it out.
Thrive is based upon the premise that no matter what business you are in, time is the window through which you experience the world, and as a business asset it is perishable.
Thrive will help you to plan how you use the time you have available across your team with a view to improve the way you spend it to achieve the goals of your business.
If you are a professional service firm and treat time as billable this is of fundamental importance to pay attention to. If you make products then you have to manage how you leverage the time you have to make the best products possible.
Thrive creates a personalised daily todo list for each user which is called a 'Today List'. When you manage a project with Thrive you schedule tasks to your users and these tasks appear on each persons Today List based on what deadlines are coming up and what jobs they are assigned to work on.
Work is scheduled using a Liquid Time philosophy to visualise how to allocate tasks across your team based on what time they have available. This helps you answer the often murky "when can we do something by?" question.
As a Thrive user completes tasks on their Today List new tasks are added to the list based on the remaining time in each working day. As tasks are completed your project plans are updated automatically and in realtime to reflect the amount of work that has been done and what is still to go. This means that your project plans are always in sync with reality, and not a dangerously out of date sketch of it.
In a business sense Time = Money and in a scientific sense if you can't measure something you can't hope to control it. This is where Thrive steps up and gives you the tools to take control of the business you work in and to better focus the way you spend your day to achieve the goals and deliverables you have in your sights.
Thrive helps you migrate from the reporting paradigm of looking back at what happened to being able to see what is about to happen across your projects and your business. Armed with this insight you are better able to determine how to best spend the time you have to make sure that potential profits never become definite loses.
You can use it within your company as well as with freelancers and external partners who can log in regardless of their timezone or location. This helps to integrate and streamline the way you work, no matter who you choose to work with. You can also control how much or how little each user can see or do.
We feel that simplicity is important too so with Thrive you enter a task only once and we help you manage it from estimating time and cost through to building scopes of work that can be scheduled to create a timing plan of work that is then assigned to a users, tracked for progress and profit margin and then analysed for improving future process and performance.
We all hate filling out time sheets too and that is why with Thrive they become a by-product of ticking off items on your Today List instead of silly forms that you have to fill out long after you have forgotten what it was you were working on.
We're also hard at work on our roadmap of where we see the app heading over the next 12 months, and we'd like to get your feedback on board to help inform how we progress.
Your first task is to sign up for an account on the Thrive beta programme.
