Simplicity
Ten minutes is enough to grasp the basics and start running your own affairs — personal, private or professional. You copy a Google Slides file to your Drive, open it, and read the notes on the first slide. Then you run the installer from the menu. The script starts working in the background on Google's servers, at intervals. Five minutes later you will watch the board come alive: cards get their ID numbers, records appear in the spreadsheet, the counters begin to show where you stand.
Shime rests on applications you probably already know and use every day. There is no new program to learn — you only need to be able to create, label and drag a rectangle on a slide.
Ten minutes to learn it. Years to master the craft of managing your work.
The look
You take in the whole board at a glance instead of scrolling through lists. The work is adding, moving and removing cards, not ticking off rows.
The background colour of a card tells you which area of life the task belongs to. The border colour tells you how urgent it is. A grey card has not moved for two weeks; a red one means the deadline has passed or falls today. You read the state of the board before you read a single word.
The grey and the red are applied by Shime itself, without you lifting a finger.
The life cycle of a task and the layout of the slide were designed to help you finish what you have already started, in keeping with the Kanban rule:
Stop starting, start finishing.
But Shime is not a standard Kanban board. It is a good deal more.
You choose the background theme yourself: light, dark, or one of your own. A board you enjoy opening is a board you come back to.
Versatility
Professional, private and personal tasks can sit side by side on one board, told apart by colour. Or keep Shime for work alone and leave the rest outside it. You can also plan habit training or recurring commitments.
One place, one application, for a single area of life or for all of them — as you prefer.
Usefulness
Time measured, not guessed.You put a task in the NOW field, set a block of time — a Pomodoro, say — and Shime starts recording. Not a figure typed in from memory at the end of the day, but the time that actually passed, recorded in sessions, every five minutes.
Material for your invoices.The records go straight into hourly invoices and client reports. Nothing has to be reconstructed from memory or from the calendar.
Nothing slips away.A task that has not moved for two weeks marks itself. So does a deadline coming due. A card taken off the board by mistake does not go unnoticed.
It works without you.The scanner runs every five minutes on Google's side, whether or not your file is open. It counts down the time, flags what is overdue and refreshes the counters.
Security
Everything that makes up Shime sits on your own Google account. There is no intermediary server and no account with another provider.
Security rests on Google's infrastructure and on your own settings: two-step verification, a strong password, careful sharing. The same level of protection as your mail and your files on Drive.
The script comes inside the file you download. You can read it before installing, or hand it to anyone you like for a second opinion.
Availability
The same board on your computer, tablet and phone. On a computer, the full version in a browser. On a tablet and a phone, as far as the app allows.
Mark the files as available offline and you can work without an internet connection, just as you would with Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. While you are offline the scanner will not update the board on your device. The changes arrive once the connection comes back. Five minutes later the board and the database agree.
Working with AI
Everything you write in Shime, along with the scanner's own records, lands in an ordinary Google Sheet. You can sum it, filter it and build your own reports.
Once a few weeks have given you a first history of your own work, you can take it further.
Share the spreadsheet with an AI assistant. Shime supplies the data, the AI draws the conclusions: bottlenecks, where the hours go, what has been stuck for three weeks, what to plan for next week and what for tomorrow, how much to invoice for last month. From those records an AI can write reports and tell you what is coming.
Free
Shime costs nothing and asks for no subscription. A Google account is all you need.
That's it!