Description: Sunrise3 Research Personal Projects Manager is a simple Pocket PC application designed to help you better manage your personal projects.

The application allows you to keep track of your projects, their names, descriptions, due dates and statuses. It also lets you create multiple project plans for your projects; you can modify project plans, add new revisions of project plan and delete project plans you no longer need.

Personal Projects Manager also keeps track of project status changes. You can enter project status records whenever project status changes, or when you need to make a note of events related to the project; e.g., you can create project status change record to record somebody's phone number or address, important URL, or simply your thoughts or ideas regarding the project.

The application uses its own data engine, designed to provide reliable and secure data storage. You can set password to the database, in which case the data is stored in encrypted form (API cryptography services used to encrypt and decrypt the data). You can make backup copies of the database, which you can then copy to another location (desktop PC, flash memory card etc) to ensure the safety of you data if your PDA's battery runs out.

The application comes with help system, describing in detail all functions of the application and the 3-steps project management system recommended to be used with the application (see the next section).


Personal Projects Management:
Writing a book, painting a picture, learning to play piano, studying French are all examples of personal projects: they are typically worked on in the spare time, do not require large investments, and do not bring large payoffs (if any). At the same time, many personal projects may lead to discovering new opportunities; the book you wrote can become a bestseller, your translations from French can become a source of a stable income, and piano lessons may eventually lead you to start professional performing or composing. Unfortunately, many personal projects fail when we loose focus, become swamped by pile of everyday tasks or start another project without completing ones already started. The proposed system can help you to avoid these and many other typical mistakes.

In order to maximize the benefits of the application, we recommend you to follow simple 3-step system:

• Create a project


Create a new project in the system as soon as you start one. Name the project, describe the goals, benefits and potential pitfalls of the project in detail and specify the project due date. Please note that the program would not allow you to enter a project unless it has a due date; our expirience shows that if something does not have a due date, it will most likely never be completed. If you do not know exact due date, take a guess. You will be able to change the due date at any time.


• Create a project plan


Project plan consists of project plan description, which is a free text field, and project plan date. You must create project plan at the time of creating new project. You can change project plan description at any time; you can also create new or delete existing project plans, which will allow you to make correct your plans while having records about all changes you make.


• Review active projects regularly and make notes about changes in projects statuses


Project status records consist of status date and status change description, which is a free text field. The regular review of all active projects will allow you to stay focused on existing projects, and historical information from project status records will help you with making projections about projects completion dates. Personally, we feel that the best time for projects review is over the weekend, when your brain is less overwhelmed with the routine. Of course, other people might have different preferences; the only requirement is the regularity of the reviews.