Answer an important question with Was It Worth It

Was It Worth It is a new iOS app from independent developer Peter Koraca. It's available now as a free download from the App Store, and is presently enjoying some exposure in the New section of the App Store's Productivity category. Was It Worth It is a productivity tool designed to help people -- particularly freelancers -- manage their time and prioritize tasks and projects more effectively. Rather than being a conventional task list or organizer app, however, Was It Worth It is a retrospective, reflective tool that encourages its users to look back on the projects they have undertaken and determine whether or not their net gain in terms of fun, knowledge and/or money made the project worthwhile. Adding a new project is a simple matter of tapping the Add button in the corner of the screen, at which point the project can be given a title. The title box for each project automatically capitalizes each word, which is slightly irritating for those who prefer to write titles and headlines in AP style, but this is a relatively minor issue and a matter of taste. Once a project has been added, three sliders allow the user to set their perceived "worth" for the project in terms of the three categories mentioned above -- how fun it was, how much knowledge they gained from undertaking the project, and how worthwhile it was in terms of money. All of these values are represented abstractly as a percentage because there is no easy way to quantify how fun something was or how much you learned from it. The three values are averaged in real-time to provide a "total worth" value for the project, also presented as a percentage. The project may then optionally be given a category, and the date of its completion recorded. After recording some projects and their values, the app can organize the information in a variety of different ways. The default view lists all recorded projects in order of total value, highest first. Other views allow the list to be sorted by date or project category, or view lists that purely focus on the fun, knowledge or money values. In all cases, the title bar at the top of the screen displays a bar representing the overall "worth" of all projects that have been recorded to date. The app has a few flaws, largely to do with its attempts to be as "slick" and "smooth" as possible. Everything about the interface animates smoothly rather than simply appearing, which means that the app is considerably slower to update its display than many other productivity apps. The most unfortunate example of this attempt at slickness comes when observing the app's text cursor, which is pretty much never in sync with what the user is actually typing -- letters appear or disappear as they type or delete, and meanwhile the cursor happily slides along smoothly at a constant speed several seconds behind the actual input. The smooth animation of the cursor looks nice, but it comes at the expense of the cursor actually performing the function it is supposed to be performing, which means the attempts to make the app slick and smooth actually end up making it look a bit sloppy. Despite its presentational faults, Was It Worth It has the potential to be a handy tool for self-reflection, though exactly how useful it will be is entirely up to the individual user and how they choose to use it. There are no hard and fast rules for what the values mean or how the user measures the fun, knowledge and monetary values of projects, which may prove confusing to those not used to this sort of thought exercise, but for those interested in honestly reflecting on their own performance, Was It Worth It is well worth a shot, particularly as it's a risk-free free app. You can follow Was It Worth It's progress with AppData, our tracking service for mobile and social apps and developers.

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Answer an important question with Was It Worth It

Pete Davison

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