Transcript
Daryl: Now Jo, you’ve developed an app that’s going to sort our lives out.
Jo: I have.
Sarah: Please! Tell us more.
Daryl: Well, the kids are back at school. We’ve got a pregnant woman in the studio with us. She’s got a bit of baby brain or that’s what she’s calling it.
Sarah: Oh, well that’s my excuse.
Daryl: We all need to be a bit more organised. How does all this work?
Jo: Awesome. Well thank you for having me on your show. It’s great to meet you guys. Yes. I have created an app called Life Sorted, which is designed to do exactly as the name says. Coordinate your family life and your personal life in an app that everybody can access. So it basically is a shared calendar to-do list, birthdays, shopping, all of that sort of stuff, that the whole family can access across all devices.
Sarah: Oh yes. The birthdays. That’s where I fail. If you don’t write it down, you don’t know when they’re coming, do you? So, this is good for grocery items for your husband to see at work? You can pick them up on the way home Dads, if you’re all connected. How easy is it to use Jo?
Jo: It is so easy to use. You should be able to get your family set up in a couple of minutes. So one person will download the app, create a family account, pop in all the rest of the family with their email addresses, which will then fire them off an invite, they accept the invite, download the app, and then they’re also in that environment. So you’ve got a bunch of different views that make it really, really easy to use. I’ve designed it so that children with, devices can also use the app and start taking a little bit of ownership of their own schedule. So yeah, it’s super easy.
Daryl: Now Jo, we’ve got a couple of family groups, which just tend to get a bit wild, where we all talk. How is this different to just a standard online calendar?
Jo: Well, it’s the fact that it is centralised is the key. I mean, the reason that I created the app in the first place is that I come from the tech world, so I’ve had online digital calendars for a long time, but the problem is I was the only person that could see it. So I was constantly having to check in with the rest of the family and update them on where they needed to be at, what they needed to have with them. And when plans changed, I was the only one that has access to that. So the idea is that it stops all those conversations around what everybody’s doing because everybody can just look in the app and see, and they can update things themselves. So it sends reminders, reminds your kids to get ready for tennis – to pack the tennis racket the night before. It reminds them straight after school so that they don’t forget. If plans change and somebody else is picking them up, you can just pop a little chat message in and that will shoot a notification straight through about that event. So the idea is that it avoids all those what I consider boring conversations around what everybody’s doing and what’s coming up next rather than just being where we are and enjoying what we’re doing in the moment.
Daryl: Now Jo, is it something that kids are going to be OK with or are they going, hmmm you know, this is an old people’s thing?
Jo: Well, it’s not snapchat. But, as some people have said to me, “If you could you send notifications to snapchat that would be great!” Now there’s a good idea. Having said that, for my family, if it’s not in Life Sorted, it doesn’t happen. My children are older, they’re teenagers. If they run out of toilet paper or toothpaste, they need to put it into the Life Sorted shopping list, then whoever next gets to the shops can grab it. It’s to their benefit to start using it, basically.
Daryl: These are the situation this morning Jo, I went to make a coffee and there was no milk. You know, everyone look around right. There wasn’t even an empty container in there, which is usually a sign that there is no milk.
Sarah: So, I think your kids would send a message, “Dad, we need more (they call you Daryl don’t they?) Daryl, we need more milk.”
Daryl: It does make sense. And we’ve tried to use it in various ways, but this puts it all together. So, how do people do it? How do we download it? Where do we get it from?
Sarah: Yes, I’m getting my phone right now.
Jo: Oh awesome. Thank you. Well, if you’re on your computer, your laptop, you can go to lifesorted.com and you can sign up on the web. This is an important thing to point out is it’s not just a mobile app. It is available as an application in your browser. So you just open up chrome or safari or internet explorer and you’ve got a full version of it on your desktop. So, I pretty much have that open on one of my tabs all the time. Or, you can go to any of the app stores, so either the Apple Store or the Google Playstore and just search for Life Sorted. And there’s a tablet app and a mobile app in both of those environments. And then there’s also the desktop. So, it’s just one family account for the whole family for all devices.
Daryl: Beautiful. Jo Burgess it’s been a pleasure.