While there’s no shortage of general productivity tools in the App Store, Day Flow has thrown its hat into the time-management ring with a nice little iPhone app to help track what you do with your days. Here’s how it works.
Things kick off with a single figure on the homescreen – the number of hours remaining in your day. You then select a category to allocate your current activity to, though it’s worth noting here that you’ll probably want to edit these.
Indeed, within Settings, you can change all the tags to suit what you do, and also edit the default duration of the countdown timer. As things stand, when you hit the little ‘plus’ sign to add a new activity, it will count down from 1-hour – that may be long enough for many tasks, but not all. You swipe right to stop the timer, and the next one will automatically start if you have it lined up. For example, you may wish to go seamlessly from ‘Travel’ to ‘Exercise’.
If your planned activity takes longer than you originally anticipated, you can just hit the little arrow button to the right of it to increase the allocated time.
Throughout the course of your day, the colors for each activity adapt to suit the duration, and over time it helps you visualize your daily activities to help you decide where to reallocate resources if you spend too much time traveling or walking, for example. You can also set ‘goals’ for each activity-type, meaning you can indicate that you wish to spend no longer than 2% of your day eating, and Day Flow’s efficiency graphs serves up weekly and daily reports of how you are doing.
Though Day Flow lacks some of the deeper functionality of something like Time Planner, it is beautifully designed and its simplified feature-set will likely appeal to many. It’s completely free too.
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