A no-nonsense, free & opensource task & productivity management tool for growing startups
fluxday was developed by Foradian starting in 2013 and was a critical part of Foradian’s hyper growth and success as a B2B software startup in EdTech space. With a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 323 per cent Foradian was listed in Deloitte Tech Fast50 India consecutively for two years. We secured $2mm in funding and grew the company from a small town startup to globally recognized product company. Behind all these success and growth was a small internal app custom developed by our engineering team and adopted by all team members — fluxday
fluxday is engineered on the concepts of OKR — Objectives and Key Results, invented and made popular by John Doerr. OKRs and OKR tools are used today by many companies, including Google, LinkedIn and Twitter. If you are new to OKR read these article 1, article 2
In fluxday, you can start by creating the departments of your organization and adding the teams in each department. Add users to each team and assign team leads. Each user in fluxday has an OKR that is created for a particular duration. Tasks are created by leads, aligned to an OKR and assigned to team members. A task could be a redesign of your product or trying out a new tool to drive more traffic to your blog. You can also add comments and subtasks on each task. Users log in work done for a task and number of hours put in each day. Team Leads can see tasks assigned to each team member and the number of hours put into it.
With textual and graphical reports from fluxday, get insights into the time put into each task, check the performance of your team members, calculate ROI on that new feature change, take quick decisions and grow your business. Fluxday is designed to provide a simple productivity solution for fast growing teams. Fork it, add features to it, tweak it to your liking and start using it.
fluxday is “your favorite task management system on steroids” with freedom of customization and private hosting
Checkout the official website and/or download and fork fluxday atgithub
Story of fluxday
We started Foradian in 2009 as first generation entrepreneurs without any experience in building and growing a company. First 3 years was about the usual startup struggles, surviving the startup-valley-of-death and establishing product market fit. By 2012 product-market fit was proven forFedena and certain predictable revenue stream was established. That is when we felt the need for a tool to coordinate the tasks of all the team members so that each and every task will be aligned to the goals of the company.
The best teamwork comes from men who are working independently toward one goal in unison. — James Cash Penney
That is when we learnt about OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) and other startups using OKRs. We started implementing the concept through spreadsheets and it picked up momentum. Next step was to choose an app for task management and productivity tracking so that we can reduce the number of daily interruptions to employees to check their work progress. We tried different apps available. There are thousands of apps for managing tasks and projects. But we needed something unique that matched with our culture and process. So we decided to develop a small custom app and fluxday was born. Sooraj T P developed the app based on the design byDeviprasad and guidance by Arvind(co-founder & CTO). I had observed this pattern in other successful companies also. Great leaders develop their custom app for their mission critical system. Read “How Elon Musk Approaches IT at Tesla”
Lessons learned
Implementing a productivity tool is not an easy task. You need a lot of discipline and motivation to use even a simple personal to-do list app daily. So making sure your team members use the productivity tracking system effectively is a herculean task. We understood it, accepted it and simply executed the implementation. That made all the difference.
There will be team members who will hate the system and will not use it. Let them be. But if you can get 90% of the team members to adopt it, you got the greatest law of universe in your favor — mathematics.
Productivity tools should match with your personality type. A planner and visualizer can’t use the same productivity tool to maximum potential.
Are you a prioritizer? A planner? An arranger? Or a visualizer? Once you know, you’ll be able to more effectively manage your work and home life and achieve your goals much more efficiently. Read this HBR article and try the assessment to discover your personal productivity style. Don’t force a productivity system on your team. Develop an organization habit of using a common system with patience, compassion and respect.
Next steps
Today fluxday is not foradian’s secret tool. It is freely available to everyone. You can use it, customize it, enhance it, build a business around it, learn from it or if you don’t like it you can dump it and build another tool from scratch. Fluxday is available under Apache License 2.0 — so that you have the choice to keep the customization done by you as private or public.Download and fork fluxday
“through discipline comes freedom” — Aristotle
