Lope is the first task manage­ment sys­tem, working with the lean-prin­ci­ple. It con­siders the dura­ti­on of tasks and the time available. You’ll recei­ve war­nings when your workload is full, allo­wing you to can­cel tasks and appoint­ments ear­ly or inten­tio­nal­ly work over­ti­me. Not­hing will be for­got­ten and no dead­lines can be missed. This way the rema­in­der of your work will nice­ly fit your time­ta­ble. Lope prio­ri­ti­zes your tasks the way you would, and only shows you the most important ones at the time, so you’ll never lose track. Lope helps you to always do the right thing. At the same time it’ll allow you to com­ple­te your tasks fas­ter than befo­re becau­se you now plan ahead, have fewer dis­rup­ti­ons and are able to moni­tor your pro­gress. It’s a gre­at fee­ling. You will be able to say “it works”.
Lope is fol­lo­wing insights from Lean Manage­ment. Thus, tar­gets can only be achie­ved by task-reduc­tion. Tasks with vary­ing time requi­re­ments must be careful­ly sized up to be suc­cessful­ly imple­men­ted. Lope is simu­la­ting human beha­viour: Pre­cis­i­on is igno­red every time an esti­ma­te or appro­xi­ma­te is fas­ter and works just as well. That’s why Lope is miss­ing opti­ons that might look nice but aren’t essential.
The key is to con­cen­tra­te on as few tasks at the time as pos­si­ble. With fewer things on your port­fo­lio you keep a bet­ter over­view, work more focus­sed and uti­li­se your time more effec­tively. This work sta­te will impro­ve and increase, once you adapt­ed your work habits.

The­se tricks can help you:

  • Always com­ple­te tasks in one go. Even if that requi­res an addi­tio­nal step. Remai­ning steps often seem minor or less important but none­thel­ess stay on your to-do-list until the task is finished.
  • Tasks and appoint­ments more than two or three weeks in the future should be recor­ded into your calen­dar and only be moved to your acti­ve port­fo­lio once your calen­dar reminds you.
  • Time con­sum­ing tasks should be allo­ca­ted an appro­pria­te slot in your calen­dar to deal with them within that slot.
  • Be con­cise in your inqui­ries and ins­truc­tions. Pre­cis­e­ly com­mu­ni­ca­ted dele­ga­ted work will result in on-time deli­veries or your co-worker will noti­fy you in case of delays or pro­blems. This allows you to eli­mi­na­te remin­ders for sta­tus inqui­ries on your side.
  • Deal­ing with big­ger pro­jects, always con­cen­tra­te on the imme­dia­te task. Once you com­ple­te tho­se you can move on to the next.
  • Things that are not actual­ly neces­sa­ry but that you don’t want to for­get about do not belong on your port­fo­lio. Crea­te a memo-list that you can refer to when you find the time.
  • If you find tasks sit­ting in your ‘top 3’ for a cou­ple of days wit­hout making any head­way, recon­sider if you want to do it at all. If not, you might want to era­se it from your list – real­ly important tasks always come around again by themselves.

An effec­ti­ve port­fo­lio in which all tasks are suc­cessful­ly dealt with within a few days has never more than five to fif­teen tasks.

Your nor­mal work pro­fi­le tells you how much time you have available every day. Lope uses this infor­ma­ti­on to show you on your task over­view how many days it would take you, to com­ple­te all out­stan­ding tasks. This way you’ll always be able to tell the lead time for any new task. In the set­tings menu you can defi­ne the scope of days, within which you will be noti­fied of a too big workload. (The workload will be high­ligh­ted in yel­low or red.)
Your calen­dar has all the infor­ma­ti­on regar­ding your mee­tings. The time during which you are at mee­ting you are not able to work on your port­fo­lio. In order to deter­mi­ne your available work hours, Lope takes the time of your mee­tings off of your total work day. In order to never miss appoint­ments Lope checks the default calen­dar on your smart­phone. You can find that in your pre-instal­led apps. Ide­al­ly you con­nect your default calen­dar to all calen­dar apps you use.
To get rea­li­stic results you have to also record tra­vel time and meal breaks in your calen­dar or allo­ca­te a sui­ta­ble stan­dard time value in your set­tings menu, espe­ci­al­ly if they are rough­ly of the same length every day. Calen­dar ent­ries which are pla­ce­hol­ders or remin­ders but don’t actual­ly requi­re your time can be mark­ed with a signal word like ‘Lope’ or ‘blo­cker’, in order to let Lope know that this time doesn’t need to be deduc­ted. Your indi­vi­du­al signal words can be cho­sen in the set­tings menu.
Appoint­ments, las­ting the who­le day, are auto­ma­ti­cal­ly reco­g­nis­ed as remin­ders rather than real mee­tings. Excep­ti­ons to this are appoint­ments with one or more key words in their title, which you can also cho­se in your set­tings menu, like ‘holi­days’, ‘bank holi­day’ or ‘off’. Such days are not coun­ted as work days. The same effect can be achie­ved if you add appoint­ments to your calen­dar las­ting your who­le dai­ly work time.
For not having to chan­ge your pro­fi­le regu­lar­ly, which would mean unneces­sa­ry effort, you just take your maxi­mum work pro­fi­le. Then you enter addi­tio­nal appoint­ments into your calen­dar, in order to pur­po­seful­ly redu­ce the available time for per­forming your tasks. You can enter the­se dates exact­ly as you need them at dif­fe­rent times for each day or week. For doing so you, you can even use a new calen­dar that nobo­dy can look into, which you sim­ply con­nect with your device’s default calen­dar, too.
In order to be able to work on your task-port­fo­lio, make sure that you don’t have too many appoint­ments in your calen­dar. This is why Lope shows you in the hea­der how your day divi­des into mee­tings and available working hours. You can deci­de in your set­tings menu on the amount of hours you deem as ‘having too many mee­tings’ and that you want to be noti­fied by colour alert. The total time of your mee­tings will then be shown in yel­low or red.
Task manage­ment and calen­dar allow us to not for­get about our tasks. What is the dif­fe­rence? Tasks in our calen­dar have to be com­ple­ted on a cer­tain day at a cer­tain time. Tasks in our task manage­ment sys­tem can be com­ple­ted when it is their turn or if we find the time. The­r­e­fo­re, the task manage­ment pro­fits from more fle­xi­bi­li­ty. You always have to deci­de which sys­tem to use and that tasks are not allo­ca­ted twice. For exam­p­le, tasks that can only be com­ple­ted on a cer­tain day are bet­ter recor­ded in your calendar.
Topics you don’t want to for­get about or which are to be com­ple­ted some­time in the future may eit­her be recor­ded in your calen­dar at a future date or on the memo page in Lope. This way you can’t for­get about it and at the same time make sure that your cur­rent workload is as slim as possible.
 If the prio­ri­ty of a task chan­ges, you can com­for­ta­b­ly move it bet­ween „tasks“ and „memo“. You only need to tick a memo and swi­pe left. A task can also be swi­ped left and be allo­ca­ted to memo.
A time esti­ma­te is a nor­mal part of our dai­ly pri­va­te lives. If we want to eat at 7pm we know that we need to start coo­king 30 minu­tes ear­lier in order to have the spa­ghet­ti rea­dy in time. For the Sun­day roast you bet­ter get star­ted two hours ear­lier. We also con­sider jour­ney times to pick up our kids from the bus or to arri­ve at our holi­day loca­ti­on in time. Time esti­ma­tes don’t only help us to start or finish in time, they also help us to be rea­dy for the next job, so we don’t need to inter­rupt our work con­stant­ly. Esti­ma­tes help us to see the big pic­tu­re of our total workload as well as the scope of cur­rent tasks. In gene­ral, it helps us to plan our days. Ever­y­bo­dy plans their days dif­fer­ent­ly, based on the tasks and time available. Times esti­ma­tes are the­r­e­fo­re ele­men­tal and natu­ral. Lope will make four sug­ges­ti­ons from which you can cho­se. This makes is easier for you and you will noti­ce that this is com­ple­te­ly sufficient.
Nor­mal work rela­ted tasks take up about 7 to 10 minu­tes. Even shorter tasks can be more effec­tively dealt with right away, wit­hout recor­ding them in Lope at all. Lon­ger tasks can be allo­ca­ted 30, 60 or 120 minu­tes in Lope. Even lon­ger tasks can­not be recor­ded becau­se they are not quite com­pre­hen­si­ble and you would post­po­ne them until you find enough time to deal with them com­ple­te­ly or until you deci­de how to tack­le them. Lope will help you with such time inten­si­ve tasks by for­cing you to reser­ve a suf­fi­ci­ent slot in your calen­dar or to break the task down into a num­ber of smal­ler steps which you can then record in Lope. Once you com­ple­ted step one of the big­ger task you can then move on to the next and so on.
Pro­jects con­sist of a num­ber of tasks that we cover one after ano­ther. When plan­ning a pro­ject, at the begin­ning we often have a num­ber of tasks in our heads we want to put down as a remin­der. Some­ti­mes, we later remem­ber tasks that we need to add. Becau­se Lope only ever deals with the cur­rent task of a pro­ject to focus on prio­ri­ties, you can add the extra steps as memos and move them to ‘tasks’ later.
Lope doesn’t distin­gu­ish bet­ween dif­fe­rent cate­go­ries of your tasks. At the end of the day you’re a per­son that wants to deal with all of its tasks, no mat­ter if hob­by, fami­ly or work. If you only want to con­cen­tra­te on one aspect of your life you can sim­ply only record tasks of a cer­tain nature.
Lope uses lean prin­ci­ples to prio­ri­ti­se. That’s why tasks you recei­ve first, get work­ed on first, in order for them to allow a work flow and results you can pro­fit from. It fol­lows the same idea of a queue at the check-out. Also, we pre­fer deal­ing with shorter tasks inter­mit­tent­ly to avo­id have the sum of the tasks over­whelm us. This means that smal­ler and older tasks are of a hig­her priority.
Some­ti­mes it is not enough to com­ple­te tasks, they have to be com­ple­ted to a cer­tain dead­line. If we are late, we might miss some­thing, lose money, peo­p­le inqui­re after the pro­ject or get angry. Becau­se we want to avo­id that, Lope puts the­se tasks at a hig­her prio­ri­ty than others. If we encoun­ter tasks for the first time we can’t anti­ci­pa­te what’s coming and should start a litt­le ear­ly in order to finish cer­tain­ly in time. “First time” tasks are also of a hig­her prio­ri­ty than others. Watch out that you only mark tho­se tasks “fixed end date” that real­ly have a cer­tain dead­line, sin­ce the­se opti­ons might sever­ely limit your fle­xi­bi­li­ty. Lope doesn’t only put the­se tasks at a hig­her prio­ri­ty; it also marks them with a sym­bol. Tasks with a “fixed end date” that are due to finish soon, show a war­ning triangle.
If Lope warns you that you have more work than you are able to deal with, you can dele­te tasks (becau­se you dele­ga­ted them, deci­ded they were not important enough or mark­ed them in your calen­dar for later). Your other opti­on is to inten­tio­nal­ly work over­ti­me in order to catch up, until you reach a workload (cur­rent work port­fo­lio) that you are com­for­ta­ble with.
Any time you com­ple­te a task you have to deci­de what to do next. In order to make your decis­i­on easier Lope only ever shows you tho­se three opti­ons with the hig­hest prio­ri­ty. If you want to see you who­le port­fo­lio you can visit the task menu, which fur­ther splits into open and com­ple­ted tasks. A han­dy short­cut is tap­ping on the workload figu­re at the bot­tom of the today-screen.
You can click any task and chan­ge the con­tent or dura­ti­on. If you don’t want to deal with it at the time you can swi­pe right and click the “later” opti­on. This way it won’t be shown for the next hour and ano­ther task will take its place in your top 3. Once you com­ple­ted a task you can swi­pe it left and click the “com­ple­ted” opti­on. This way the num­ber and dura­ti­on of the tasks com­ple­ted today increa­ses which you can see in the top right corner.
In order to keep you up-to-date, Lope shows you your next three tasks and how much time is left until the next mee­ting. Until then, Lope only shows you tho­se tasks, you are able to finish before­hand, wit­hout having to inter­rupt them as the mee­ting starts.
I you want to see how much you mana­ged to do over the past seven days and how your port­fo­lio deve­lo­ped, you can check the “success”-page. The­re, you’ll also find values and opti­ons to check the past 14 or 30 days. This infor­ma­ti­on will help you to allo­ca­te enough time to your port­fo­lio in future, to dis­co­ver fluc­tua­tions or an incre­asing workload, in order to bet­ter mana­ge your life.

 

Lope shows you all you need to know with one look. You use it when you input new tasks or mark them as com­ple­te. Any time you do that Lope lets you know what is important at the time. Every addi­tio­nal mes­sa­ge would unneces­s­a­ri­ly dis­turb and requi­re you to mul­ti­task, cos­ting you pre­cious time and caus­ing you stress. That is the reason why Lope doesn’t uti­li­se push-notifications.
You can down­load and try Lope for free. Once you log­ged your first 100 tasks, Lope will ask you whe­ther you want to purcha­se the pre­mi­um ver­si­on. With a one-off pay­ment you are then able to use Lope per­ma­nent­ly while your money will be used to fur­ther impro­ve Lope and its functions.
If you want to make sure that the­re is no data loss in case of loss of your pho­ne or the migra­ti­on to a new device, you can save all your data to the cloud. You can find this opti­on in the set­tings menu.
You, as a per­son, are part of many dif­fe­rent groups. It is a chall­enge to bring tog­e­ther all the dif­fe­rent tasks from tho­se envi­ron­ments. If you use Lope as part of an orga­ni­sa­ti­on, their tasks will be view­ed as domi­nant, for­cing you to record your other tasks in dif­fe­rent ways. This quick­ly leads to you losing track of things. Lope in an orga­ni­sa­ti­on will also enable others to allo­ca­te tasks to your workload wit­hout con­sul­ta­ti­on (push). This way you are losing con­trol of your work port­fo­lio. For the­se reasons, you should only use Lope alone.
Lope is the first task manage­ment soft­ware working with lean prin­ci­ples. If you use Lope cor­rect­ly, you will be able to bet­ter mana­ge your workload resul­ting in less last minu­te stress. You will be dis­tur­bed less by others inqui­ring when you will be finis­hed. You won’t feel as over­whel­med but focus­sed on the most important tasks, swift­ly working through them. Becau­se you will bet­ter orga­ni­se your sche­du­le, you will be able to com­ple­te tasks quicker than befo­re and see all your accom­plish­ments in the evening. This is a gre­at fee­ling and it will empower you. Using Lope, you will deal with your tasks as you encoun­ter them and libe­ra­te your life.