Voloplan, an AI-powered task manager

Background

From the Latin volo: I want, I intend.

Voloplan is a startup I’m co-founding with a former Issuu colleague: a task planner, a calendar and an AI thought partner in one view of work and personal life. It’s two things at once. It’s a product researched, designed and built end to end with AI tools, and it’s our own business, built to scale. It’s currently in beta.

Problem

People’s to-dos are scattered across their whole life, and no tool shows them together.

Work tasks live in team boards and work calendars, family plans in group chats, errands in notes apps, on paper and in people’s heads. For someone in a demanding season of life, like a working parent of young children, these priorities compete for the same hours but never appear in the same place. That makes it hard to coordinate with a partner, family and friends, or to notice which part of life keeps losing.

Desired outcome

See your whole plate, and stay in charge of it.

Outcome for the user See every part of life in one plan, get tasks out of their head in seconds, and see honestly where intent and action drift apart.

Product output One board for every life area, an agent you talk to, and a weekly look at plan versus reality.

Outcome for the business A product people come back to every week, on a backend that scales, that can grow into a sustainable business.

Solution

How the workflow changed.

Before

Tasks come up at work, at home and in the group chat
Each lands in a different app, or stays in your head
Priorities compete without being seen together
Something slips, and nobody sees which part of life is losing

After

Tasks come up anywhere
Brain-dump them to Volo
Approve dated tasks, sorted by life area
See work and life side by side on one board
Reflect each week on plan versus reality

Where it broke downWhat changed

One board for every part of life, and an agent that helps you steer.

Work and personal tasks sit on one taskboard, sorted into life areas people name themselves, like Work, Kids, Partner, Health or Home. People talk to Volo on the go, and it turns what they say into dated tasks, sorted into life areas, that they approve. Calendars connect to the life area they belong to, and a weekly check-in compares how each area moved, so people see where they’re building momentum and where they’ve stalled.

Screens from the Voloplan beta.

All names and tasks are sample data.

Talk to Volo on the go, then approve the plan Say or type everything on your mind. Volo turns it into dated tasks, sorts each one into its life area, and nothing lands on the board until you approve it. It’s designed for your phone, so a task you think of at school pickup goes straight into the plan instead of into yet another app.

Volo, the agent, says it has turned the text into tasks: ten sample tasks such as a board deck, a quarterly review, a permission slip and swim lessons, each with a due date, above approve these tasks and continue chatting buttons and a message field with a microphone

Work and life on one board The three tasks that matter most today sit on top, with everything else lined up behind them by day, work and personal side by side.

The Voloplan taskboard with sample data: top three tasks (a permission slip, a quarterly review and school pickup), a weekly progress tile, life area filters for work, partner, kids, health and home, and columns for overdue, today, tomorrow and Wednesday

Every calendar in the life area it belongs to Connect a calendar to one life area or to all of them, so meetings, kids’ schedules and personal plans sit next to the tasks they relate to.

Volo asks whether to bring calendars in: an all life areas card with a connect Google Calendar button, then one card each for work, partner, kids, health and home, plus a custom area, with continue and skip for now

See where you’re moving, and where you’ve stalled Each week, every life area shows how much got done and how much attention it took, so the gap between plan and reality is visible, and Volo reflects on it with you.

The life areas view with sample data: progress bars for work, health, kids, partner and home, each with its share of focus, overdue counts and a trend arrow, and a note that attention leaned toward work this week

Volo: a character, not a chatbot A lot of the work went into Volo itself: a character inspired by the owls of Greek mythology, drawn by hand rather than built by a machine. It blinks while you answer, hops when you finish your first task, and radiates a sunburst while it organizes your plan. Each animation has one job in the product.

The Volo motion library, playing: five animations of Volo’s round navy face, a momentum trail where Volo bounces at the end of a dotted path, shapes flowing into Volo and coming out as tasks, a sunburst loader, a blink for the quiz, and a celebration bounce for the first finished task

Results

Outcome

Voloplan is live in beta with dozens of testers, and their feedback was strong enough for us to scale it into a real product, with a sharper focus on families.

Dozens of testers Of different ages and life stages, validating our assumptions in a live beta

Very positive Feedback from the testers who engaged with the tool

Scaling up Building a backend with engineers that can hold tens of thousands of users

Our own planner Both founders plan their own work and family life in it

We’ve tested Voloplan with dozens of people of different ages and stages of life. Feedback has been very positive among the people who engaged with it, and that’s what convinced us to take Voloplan further. My co-founder and I also plan our own work and family responsibilities in it every day.

The biggest learning so far: the product isn’t the code. It’s the understanding of how people see their own lives, their problems and their priorities, and that only comes from sitting with them.

Process

The research, decisions and steps behind the result.

An AI-powered task manager