WorkSimple: Making ‘To-Do’ Lists Easy

I’ve been a habitual list maker as long as I can remember. Although my planner is color coded for birthdays, appointments, bills due and payday, papers get lost and ink runs together. In an effort to help people like me, the team at WorkSimple created an easy-to-use platform to keep track of projects while sharing accomplishments with co-workers. Founder and CEO Morgan Norman said the main focus was a way to track all the good things happening within a company at any given time. “Work Simple is really helping you have a position and view of what is being accomplished,” said Norman. “If it (your goal) fell down due to lack of effort or too many things on your plate, it provides visibility to share and get feedback.” Norman said the greatest challenge for Work Simple was making the app easy to use while still being productive and valuable at the same time. In my opinion, they accomplished their goal by developing a simple and efficient process:

• Define a goal
• Break the goal down into different tasks that need to be done
• Share your new goal with your co-workers, supervisor, HR director and anyone else appropriate on your team.
• Take suggestions and feedback.
• Work on the goal task by task

If you’re confused on any part of the process, there is a helpful Vimeo series that covers every WorkSimple feature.

WorkSimple Basics – Creating Goals from WorkSimple on Vimeo.

The team also added game theory to the process: All users have a ‘Work Story,’ which is a graphical representation of their goal achieving history displayed as a chart that is intended to keep users motivated as completed goals stack up and are listed on the Work Story page. Once the user finishes an individual goal and it is certified as complete, Work Simple rewards the user with a virtual ribbon and allows the user to cross promote their completed goal to LinkedIn. For a one-man show or just one person in the company, Work Simple is free. For a team or department, the cost is $5 per person. For an entire company, $9 a person will get you more advanced administration controls. Each new level offers new features but even the individual plan for free offers the option to invite co-workers to share in the progress. Besides keeping track of movement within a company, Norma sees Work Simple as the next generation of performance management and reviews. “This is real time work performance,” said Norman. “You can go in and make requests of where you want an employee to go, suggest things someone needs to learn and other ways to help. We’re trying to move the workforce management into something like Facebook, where it’s socially based.”