Recurring events and reminders

Best relief from coordination overhead can be achieved by using Geeboard to coordinate recurring tasks – those tasks we do once or more a week, every week.

Last time I gave the “swim practice” board example. Ron's group practices twice a week.

Recreating a board twice a week seems like far too much overhead, and reminding everybody to use the board is super menacing. So we've created recurring events and reminders.

Let's have another look at the swim board from the last post:

notice the top ellipse around “board settings”. If you can't guess what page you'll see after clicking it – don't worry! The next screen shot will be of the board settings page.

The second ellipse surrounds the recurring event time line – the time for the next event.

So – users can define that the board has recurring events, in which case the board is reset about two hours after the event. After reset the user decisions are reset (allowing users to decide what they want to do at the next event), and the recurring event title shows the time for the next event.

So, let's have a look at the board settings page, as promised earlier:

again – fairly simple! The users can define the days and the hour in which the event takes place.

The second row allows the users to set when a reminder will be sent to all of the boards' users.

The reminder must be sent before the event, of course.

In this case, this is what the reminder email looks like, in the user's email box at 7:00 or a tad later. This is actually a reminder from my gmail. (didn't get an email? Check your spam folder).

Clicking the link will take you to the board, to review and update.

tune in for the next post, about inviting users to the board.

What is Geeboard – the swimming practice example

Geeboard is a web site for small group coordination for specific tasks.

Which tasks? Mainly those nasty tasks that require calling more than one person more than once, and where the calls are not part of the fun. Why “where the calls are not part of the fun”? Well, if you enjoy making the calls to coordinate a task , why try to reduce the amount of calls?

We all have things we need or want to do, that require more communications than we like to do.

We've started this because Ron, one of our beloved founders, needed to coordinate rides for swim practice twice a week. There are five members in the group, all going to the practice, and taking turns as drivers. They needed to know who is driving, and who is coming.

This is what ron's board looks like: (names changed)

is this elf language? No! It's hebrew. I'm assuming by the time non hebrew readers get here, I will have already changed the images to an English (more cosmopolitic I guess) layout.

So, what have we here? I hope the board is self explanatory. This is actually a super simple application – on the right table column are user names, and the left column shows the user's decision – arriving/not arriving/maybe/not set.

Every user can edit his and other users' decisions. That is for a reason – some people might not be connected to the internet at some time, and we want others to be able to update on their behalf.

The key word is simplicity – because if this isn't simpler than picking up the phone – why bother to use it?

The chat on the right is a nice extra – but this board's users don't usually use it – this super simple board does the job remarkably well.

Tune in for my next post – about recurring events and reminder mails.