My story

Like many people, I have always liked to make sure I'm ahead of the work I need to get done. I have also always found technology a great tool to facilitate and aid me with these duties.

However, when I was in school and going through exams, I discovered that the way many people around me were organising their time didn't suit me. This is because it often involved designating precise times to certain tasks and being overly specific when making plans. This method hindered my ability to accomplish the goals I was setting, as the specificity meant I was overlooking the unpredictable nature of the tasks I was organising, and often ended up having to spend time adjusting my plans because things that I couldn't have prepared for would arise. I realised I was spending too much time rewriting plans and micromanaging the tasks I needed to get done, and that I wasn't working on the important things.

Over time I tried many different planning tools, but none met my needs. Calendars generally require you to input specific times (not to mention the tediousness of having to create new events) and todo lists don't often allow you to visualise plans or assign time to work on tasks. This is why I created Bevl; to facilitate my philosophy of creating visual plans that are not too time-specific, but allow for chunks of time to be assigned to todos.

Philosophy

I believe an effective plan should be accurate enough to guide us, but not so precise that it dictates every moment of our time. If we include too much detail, we will never be able to realistically stick to our goals and will spend more time revising our plans than actually carrying them out. This is bad for both productivity and mental health.

Bevl was created to support this idea that plans should be created without assigning tasks to specific times during the day, but to appoint time to tasks using arbitrary chunks, with the relative sizes of these chunks representing the distribution of our time between the tasks. The goal of this is to have full organisational control, but to prevent us from getting bogged down in details that cause us to overlook the unpredictable nature of our todos (which often result in us taking longer to do things than we planned and therefore cause our plans to constantly need adaptation).