Friday, March 22, 2013

Managing the most important project of our life called "LIFE" !


Introduction:
These days it is so common to have most of our everyday tasks and searches done online through hundreds of websites and services.
So many of our everyday tasks starting from searching for house/property ,looking for good travel deals , searching for reviews on school for kids , looking for reviews of household items or buying them online , looking for job also including searching for matrimonial alliances or business partners happens over the internet. Come to think of it , we are spending so much time online ..
Haven't we all  spent hours together on the internet - searching and then saving the data relevant to us either copy pasting info or saving them as bookmarks or taking printouts.


What if your whole online experience during different stages of our life can be integrated & managed by something like a "Life Project Manager" .

We have so many tools help manage our profession life .. why don't we give the same importance to the most important project of our life called "LIFE" !


Some Concepts:
Currently our web browsers do not really keep a context of what we are looking for at all times , even if they do, they do it to collect information to suggest good ads or for their business needs or analysis.

A "life project manager" would ideally have at least the following concepts :

Create a life project:
We could have a desktop/hosted tool , that is built on a user centric manner , that allows the user to
create specific personal projects . The project could deal with anything like a job search that he is pursuing or
a online property related search , or  maybe just collecting review on a particular interest .

Collect ,customize and store meaningful data:

Allows him to collects as much data from various online resources from within the tool . The data collected can
be stored in this tool ,along with the user comments or his own research and analysis in one single place.
For Eg : During a house  search process , the user might have collected more info or updated data on a current property by actually visiting the site , he will combine the online and his current research data and store it in the tool in a project which he could call "My House Search"  .

Sharing /Collecting Review  :
The user can chose to share specific projects like "My House Search"  with his family/friends to either help him review his options or just to help them with their own property search.


Create Multiple projects:At any point of time , there will be so many things happening in your life .
You could be searching for a new property and at the same time you would be looking for a new school for your kid
or thinking of changing you job .
You could creating multiple projects of your life in this tool and track them and work on them as and when you have time.Since this will contain the records of all your past work and research on that area and you can discontinue and resume at any point.

Further enhancements :

  1. We could have a online sharing mechanism to look at the important experiences of people in our circle and re-use  some of their resources or at least learn from their experience.
         For Eg. : we would definitely like to know the experiences of school search or reviews of    
         different schools  from the parents and we would definitely learn from their project "school"
    
     2.We would enter our personal details like location or addresses , personal preferences, stage of 
          life etc  in this tool , that can help in customizing our search experience on the net.


Some more Use Cases : 

Authors /Writers :
Assuming that the author/writer is working on many books/articles simultaneously
he would have collected lot of material /emails /suggestions from different people
and also from the internet for each of this. The tool can allow him to create
different projects for each of his works and then then track each of them
along with the data collected for that item.

Setting up a house :
This is really choatic project if not managed well. There will be so many things to buy online
to read reviews and collect opinion , get the best deals online and track several items like
interior design , plumbing ,electrical works etc.
All the online activity on each of these items and its result can be individually stored and tracked
with this tool.


Conclusion :
On the whole we know the internet is a huge ocean of data and resources that are waiting to be explored . But many a times this often leads to very unorganized or chaotic browsing patterns and very less meaningful data collected or atleast stored for future reference or sharing.

The tool will hopefully try to reduce the chaos in our "online" life and better manage the most important projects of our life.

Long live the internet!

3 comments:

  1. Excellent Idea !!! I would advise prototyping and ready to offer all the help.

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  2. Great idea, Vidya! I really liked the use cases you have created. At a time when the whole world seems to be moving computing on the cloud, this contrarian idea putting more computing on the much neglected desktop stands tall.

    It would be great if you can create visual impressions of some of the usecases. For example, what can be a sample visual representation of my browsing history at the end of a day? All the best.

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