Meeting someone that only works on one topic at a time has become quite rare. If you were to ask around in a busy coffee shop filled with 100 people looking at their laptop screens, only seven would tell you that they have one project that they focus on exclusively. Forty-four would say that they have between two and five topics that keep them busy. Forty-nine people - the biggest group - are tackling more than five projects at a given point in time. That is an awful lot of hats.

‘Wearing a lot of different hats’ is a fashion trend that persists. Many people thrive when they have different ‘plates to spin’, and I personally see many benefits in it. There’s an old adage that if you want something done well then you should give it to the busiest person. Managing multiple things in parallel is, however, a challenge to organization and coordination. Our work tools do not reflect the complexity of today’s multi-faceted responsibilities.

Wearing the hats of different organizations.

Typically, with more and more responsibilities you take on, the number of tools you have to use increases. This is particularly the case when you work for different companies in parallel, or have clients that insist that you join them on platform XYZ. Often, you either adopt new tools, or you have to create an additional account for a tool that you already use. As a result, you have dozens of browser tabs open that you have to stay on top of. Also, you have to constantly swap between accounts, which requires you to logout of account 1 and login to account 2.

Wearing the hats for different responsibilities within one organization.

If you work mainly in one organization, your online work may be contained in a smaller number of tools and accounts. However, an increase of the number of responsibilities, for example through an increasing number of projects, different tasks, or groups of people to interact with, makes it harder to stay on top of your affairs. Work content of different topic, relevance and urgency is increasing clogging up your communication channels and data silos. It becomes much harder to locate important information and fulfil your different responsibilities to your own satisfaction.

Wearing the private hat and the work hat.

Even if you are working in one dimension, the content that comes through your inbox, calendars and files host is mixed. At the core of it, having your private conversations and exchanges for example with a spouse next to a conversation with work contacts can be distracting, as it mixes different interaction patterns. It feels as if having these two sets of interaction separated would help us to maintain a healthy work/life balance.

Enter livil…

livil is built to help people who wear a lot of different hats. We want to support you by providing you with simple structure and holistic transparency. This is accomplished through centralization and compartmentalization:

The content from all of the different tools with all of the accounts you hold there is available to work on in one central place. You can get a broad overview of what happened with all alerts and notifications in one place.

Your content can then be compartmentalized (or ‘filtered’) however you would like - for example by topic, task or project. Search across your tools and accounts and find the content you need instantly. This allows you to hone in deeply on a particular responsibility of yours when required, with any noise being filtered out.

Centralization ensures that all content is available, right there and then. Compartmentalization ensures that you see the relevant content when you need it. Together, this allows us all to maintain sanity and wear all of our hats with style.