Announcing Effectiv

February 12, 2018

Today I am excited to announce Effectiv, a side project I have been working on during the last couple of months. Effectiv is a productivity tool based on Scrum helping you to find focus and making you 1% better every day. It encourages working on clearly-defined, short-term goals and enables to keep track of the progress along the way.

  • The idea behind Effectiv arises from the Scrum methodology I learned while working as a software engineer. In Scrum, work is organized in Sprints. A sprint is a working unit during which you focus on a reasonable yet meaningful set of pre-selected tasks. During such sprint, you only focus on completing these tasks, nothing else.

  • Although Scrum is practiced mostly by teams in software companies, I have always found the values behind it compelling to apply them also in my personal life. Finding focus in the noise of life, let's say.

    The idea is certainly not new. On Lifehack, Dustin Wax wrote in his blog post “Scrum for One” the following motivation:

  • “The whole point is, through a process of constant self-awareness, to identify what’s holding us back, how we can work around it, and where the next few days or weeks should take us. Consider, then, 'Scrum for One.'”

  • Unfortunately, most Scrum software tools today are focused towards teams and overly complicated for personal usage. Therefore, I decided to build Effectiv.

    Effectiv is developed specifically for individuals to help them focus on the things that matter. It is a web app with a simple, clean and intuitive interface. The tool allows you to create and organize tasks, and to take them on during a sprint.

  • As from today, the alpha version is available for invited users. If you are excited about this and want to be invited too, send me a message on Twitter @effectiv_app.

    Over the next couple of weeks, I expect to wrap things up for a full release. At the moment, some features for keeping track of progress are still lacking, as well as a landing page and payment flow.

    In the longer run, my ambitions are to grow Effectiv into a personal assistant that pro-actively helps you achieve goals and find focus through Scrum. An app (or maybe bot) should make the tool more easily accessible and integrations with other platforms should make it more integrated into your life.

    If you want to follow my progress or be notified of upcoming releases, sign up here or follow @effectiv_app on Twitter.