Battling sleep deprivation, isolation and mental health issues are just part of daily reality for many of the estimated 3.8m shift workers in the UK, unable to tune out when they clock off.
Eight years ago, the founder behind Manchester-based tech for good app developer MyBuzz Technologies set out to change things.
Chris Pimlott’s brother-in-law was struggling to plan his life around work, working a four-on, four-off shift pattern at Manchester Airport’s Border Force.
“It was really difficult to plan family time. He has a big family and trying to connect everyone together when he just didn’t know when he was working and didn’t know when he was able to do things or plan forward, is really hard when you’re in that kind of rota,” Matt Jones, commercial director at MyBuzz Technologies, told Prolific North.
With over 20 years of experience as a commercial software developer and product manager working for the likes of HP, Pimlott decided to create a simple, colour-coded shift planning app. He called it MyShiftPlanner, initially just to help his brother-in-law, and added it onto the App Store for free.
iPhone or Android phone calendars might be great for scheduling daily, weekly, monthly or even annual repeating events but the difficulty was scheduling anything beyond that for complex shift patterns.
What had started out as a bit of a “technical exercise”, three months later the app had already racked up 10,000 downloads.
“Suddenly, he thought ‘Hang on a minute, there’s a need here.’ I think we were either the first or certainly one of the first of those types of apps appearing on the App Store.”
Running a marketing consultancy with a friend, Jones first bumped into Pimlott as the duo were working at the same coworking space in Stockport. After hearing about the app and Pimlott’s vision to take the app forward and improve the health and wellbeing of those working in the shift working industry, he officially came on board five years ago.
