A Manalapan High School junior made good use of his time before the coronavirus pandemic hit, developing a program to help keep people organized, and now others are finding out how well it works.

“I tried to convert it from my personal program to a larger website so I could distribute it to tell students and teachers at other schools they can use it to manage their time,” says Seth Shoneman.

Shoneman, then a sophomore at Manalapan High School, put his skills in action, creating a rough outline of what was to be PlanMee.com -- a simple-to-use organization tool for computers.

“Time management is critical,” says superintendent of the district, Chuck Sampson. “The day is very different than what folks are used to and I think Seth took the bull by the horns here to really make sense of his day in the pandemic.”

Sampson recognized the possibilities of Shoneman’s program throughout the district. 

“He's one example of how the students really have taken ownership of their own learning to make sense of this pandemic and make the most of it,” says Sampson.

Shoneman’s school is on a hybrid schedule. His program was first developed before the pandemic, but being home all last spring, Shoneman had some time to make adjustments and build on his idea. 

The program is best used on a laptop or desktop computers on a Chrome browser. Simply plug in what your schedule will be that day, organize by topic or subject, add in some breaks and that's it. Students and teachers are finding it to be a great tool.

“I can see it becoming an actual tool companies could use in the future,” says Shoneman. “I can make deals with if they want to use it past COVID, have it easily accessible and usable program they can plan anything they need to around using it.”

The program is free and easy to use -- there's even a tutorial video Shoneman put together. Looking ahead, Shoneman says he will continue to develop his program and hopefully be able to sell the platform to all sorts of companies and schools in a post-COVID-19 world.

Shoneman says he also had help from his high school principal and computer skills instructor making PlanMee accessible to the public.