Powerful Project Management Tool Using Google Calendar, Mobile App and… Lego

I’m a huge fan of productivity & project management tools. Recently a friend of mine sent me a link to a unique project that found a way to combine paper-based tasks board with a mobile app and … Lego.

In many software companies working with agile methodologies like SCRUM or KANBAN you can see those low-tech looking task boards holding a list of paper-based tasks with different statuses under different columns. Those boards are often more useful than any software out there and provide a visual feel of the project status combined with the simplest update mechanism ever invented: moving the paper from one column to another.

Well, the folks at Vitamins, a design and invention studio, came up with a unique idea to replace the board and paper-based tasks with a Lego-based board. That made the board look much nicer of course but they wanted it to also include a software-side, so they took the idea to the extreme and combined it with a mobile app that captures a picture of the board, scans it, and translates the visual elements into meaningful items in Google Calendar.

 

Here’s how the company describes the project:

• Every row represents a month - we have three on our wall. 
• Every column represents a day of the week. 
• Every person in the studio has their own row - there are six people on ours. 
• Every project has its own color, and we keep a little index hidden away to remember which color represents which project. 
• Each brick represents a half day spent on that particular project.

And here’s a short video describing the idea and the implementation:

Visit the Lego Calendar website