The problem: School administrators face many competing demands for their time during the day and can often find it difficult to spend the time needed on high-priority issues that will result in better education outcomes for students. Off-the-shelf time management applications focus largely on payroll-related matters and are not designed to address the needs of school administrators. 

The innovation: Jobi Lawrence, a longtime education consultant from Johnston, developed a patent-pending smartphone application, Time ReDesigned. The app is designed to help school administrators monitor their daily activities and reallocate their time toward activities that best serve students. The app collects data throughout the school administrator’s day regarding his or her activities, feeds the data to the interactive online dashboard via a series of predetermined “buckets” to sort data, and then builds an action plan for reallocating time in ways that will improve student outcomes. The company currently has nearly 150 beta users across 13 states, and Lawrence has presented the concept to educators at three national conferences this year along with a statewide conference. Versions for teachers and students, and possibly an app for business users, are also under consideration. 

How it happened: “The idea really came from a project I was hired to do,” said Lawrence, who  works as an education consultant with school districts and state departments of education throughout the country, and is a tenured professor of education at William Penn University. A school district she was working with noticed that one of its elementary schools was achieving above-average results with its at-risk learners, and they were trying to determine why the school was doing so much better than others in the district. “It really came down to the idea of time and re-prioritizing time,” she said. “Everything in this building was focused on doing what was right for the kids at the right time. So the need bubbled up for a tool for someone to see how their time was being prioritized, and helping them make decisions to reallocate time, and then going back to see if they actually made the decisions they committed to making.” 

Lawrence contracted with software development firm DWebware in Johnston to build the app, which was designed with input from a user acceptance team of principals, teachers and administrators from 13 states, primarily Iowa. Time ReDesigned went live with the software in May, and recruited 146 administrators from 13 states to provide feedback to improve the app. Those users became Time ReDesigned’s initial customers.  

The app will be individually licensed, so a district could purchase the number it needs for its number of administrators. “Or if a principal finds us at a conference, they could purchase it at the building level,” Lawrence said. “We’re even seeing administrators buy it with their own funds, because school district funds are really tight.” 

The payoff: The company received a $25,000 Proof of Commercial Relevance grant from the Iowa Economic Development Authority in January, which enabled it to expand its marketing activities. Additionally, the Iowa Innovation Corp. sponsored a grant writer to complete an application for a Small Business Innovation Research grant with the National Science Foundation. If approved this fall, Time ReDesigned would receive a $225,000 NSF grant and a matching $50,000 grant from Iowa Innovation Corp. The company now has a staff of seven part-time employees. 

“It would be great to see us in the next couple of years have users in every state,” Lawrence said. “We know that word of mouth is very effective in this niche market, so being able to leverage people in every state will be important to getting a foothold in that state.” 

Lawrence is also exploring potential markets beyond education. “We’ve had a lot of interest from the business sector,” she said. “So we may pivot from the education sector next and then come back to a student and teacher version at a later stage.”