Change Up The Daily Grind With Work+
Work+ (Free) by Tender Creative is a perfect companion app for anyone that works from home.
As someone that works from home most of the time, it can get a little…tiresome, right? Sometimes you just need a change of pace from being at home all the time. But what if you don’t want to drive around town looking for a place that suits your needs? That’s where Work+ comes in.
On the first launch of the app, it will prompt you for your location. A tutorial overlay will show up as well, to show you the basics. I thought it was cute, but the app seems intuitive and friendly enough that this is not necessarily needed.
There are two option to finding a new place to work. You can search by keywords, or you can Explore. With the Explore feature, you can adjust some settings, such as: how long you plan to stay there, needs (WiFi, Table, Food), haves (laptop, large groups), beverages (coffee, tea, alcohol – hey, that sounds good), noise level, transportation (walking, public transport, or driving distance), and other settings (outside, artful ambience, dog friendly). Search results will be displayed according to distance from your current location.
When you find a place you want to go to, you can see the address and phone number of the venue, along with a button to call them. You can also add them as favorites for future reference.
If you are already at the venue, the app has an added bonus – it can help you keep track of how long you have been working at the location. Just tap on the “Start Working” button and it will start. While it’s in this mode, you can’t do anything else in the app. However, it will keep running in the background, so your time is still tracked if you need to do other things on your device.
For those days when you just want to see what’s available around you, just take a look at the Nearby tab. You’ll see where you are, and you will see red pins for locations that are possible spots for you to work. You can adjust the distance from anywhere from a quarter-mile to 10 miles, and search for specific categories, such as your standard tea room or coffee shop to more unusual places like bars, and even scenic places like lakes, museums, and more. Heck, you can even work at a cemetery, if that’s what you’re into…
When it comes time at the end of the month to see how much work you’ve done out of the house, Work+ keeps a log of all of your tracked time (assuming that you don’t forget to use it though). It’s nice to see how much time you have spent outside of the house to work, because believe me, you end up being tired of being at home a lot.
If you are an avid Foursquare user, you can also log in to your account for even better results when searching for a place. An added bonus is that the app can automatically check you in on Foursquare when you start working at a venue. No need to use separate apps! Pretty nifty.
I stumbled upon this little gem the other day while just browsing the App Store. Quite frankly, I’m glad I did! It’s an amazing little utility app that is great for anyone that works from home (I know there are a lot more people that do that nowadays). It’s also free, so no reason to not have it if you telecommute.
