Why build a time tracking app?

[nelsonic]

A google search for time tracking app
yields "about" _108 Million results_

Widening the search to just Track Time yields _1.36 Billion results_:

Fast Company lists a few of "best" time tracking apps:
http://www.fastcompany.com/3024249/10-time-tracking-apps-that-will-make-you-more-productive-in-2014

If the "problem" of time/activity tracking has been "solved" by so many others,
_WHY_ should we "_re-invent the wheel_" ...?

[iteles]

Yes, for a subset of the population, this problem has already been ’solved’. But we hold certain different beliefs as fundamental that affect how we approach the problem, making both our interactions with the lovely people that use the app and our solution to the various parts of the ’time problem’ different:

• Our ethos is that your time should never be wasted. We believe everything we do should Save. You. Time which you can then spend doing the things you love (you know, the ones you never have time for now).
• Keep it simple. Poor planning and lack of modularity are the mothers of bloated apps. If how you go about doing something in the app isn’t obvious, then it needs to be changed.
• Your data is yours. Which means we don’t sell it. We don’t use it to study you without your knowledge or consent. We don’t give it to your boss. It’s your information and you are in control of who sees any given portion of it and how it’s used (simply and easily, not hidden behind a mass of complicated menus).
• Community driven. We have a lot of ideas for great ways the app can help you track your time, become more productive and more organised (based on the latest science), but we don’t want to give you something you don’t want so we’ll be asking you for your thoughts before we start working on new features. Everything we put out into the world will be voted on by you, the people who use our app. And we hope that once you start using it, you’ll have some great ideas of your own of things you’d like to see built into the app and we can vote on those as a community too.
• Environmental love. No company should be anything short of carbon neutral. The fact that we exist will be positive for the environment, not a detriment.
• No venture capitalists. We don’t want the time app and especially our people to be beholden to the profit-maximising necessities of the typical VC.
• Open source, always. We don’t hide our code away. If you want to contribute to it, please do. If you want to use it as the starting point for something else, that’s fine too - just please give us some kudos for the hard work we’ve put in 😌
• Simple API. The most easy-to-use API means you can quickly integrate the time app features into your own websites, apps and internal flows. If it makes you more productive, we’re happy for you to use it
• No forced updates. I hate it when I love the way an app is now and then it forces me to update to a new version where they have ruined the experience by trying to get the app to do too much and bloated the UI. Don't you? Our plan is to keep things modular enough that if you ❤️ the way the app looks now, you can keep it just the way you want it but still access new features.
• Full transparency. We’re aware this may seem crazy, but we want to be fully transparent about everything we do, from making decisions to finances 😮 We’re an open book 📖
• The latest science. We’ll draw on the most interesting, important and relevant scientific research to help you improve your productivity.
• Accessibility: Whilst we don’t know exactly what this is going to look like yet, we’re counting on our community of users to let us know exactly what they need from day 1

[nelsonic]

@iteles this list is a great starting point. 🌟
How do you feel about adding it to the Why Section of the Readme as an ordered list?
(It would make it easier for others to make contributions/suggestions)
_or_ could we have a MANIFESTO.md...? 😉

[iteles]

Definitely a manifesto. Quite a few of them compete for the top 5 spots though... such hard choices 😬

[nelsonic]

Ordered list. Then, once we've built our MVP and we move on to building other cool tools we can let people vote on which is the most important thing to them.

[howardroark]

Hey!

I have also been thinking about the same problem for quite some time. I think the trick is to not overcomplicate and start with a single objective, which is getting accurate information. I have worked at a number of places where the organization's revenue stem directly from the billable hours of employees. I have seen countless tactics employed to try to encourage people to keep on top of things and record their time accurately. At the end of the day only a small percentage would record daily, most would record weekly, and some even monthly. This leaves you with relatively bunk data. The reality is that only a small subset personality types will be diligent in the endeavour. Most will start off with good habits, but the chaos of daily life quickly erodes them.

A good goal would be to enable people to start a timer and forget about it, and then solve from there. Rather than build an entire platform maybe focus on creating a simple UI that is built around a well thought through object based schema. From there you can sync that object to greater systems or other devices where the user may want to run the same UI (ie. phone, desktop, tablet...).

If the assumption is made that people will be diligent in updating a system at a regular interval then that will be the primary point of failure. I really think that is why any time tracking solution ultimately fails, regardless of how well it is made.

[nelsonic]

http://flopstarter.com/myfirsttimesheet

[iteles]

Our focus has shifted to "personal effectiveness", which certainly includes tracking the time on tasks, but we are not building a "time tracker".
Closing as this issue has yielded our manifesto doc (https://github.com/dwyl/start-here/blob/master/manifesto.md) and is now a little less focal. We will undoubtedly open this again with a slightly different angle at a later date when useful.

[nelsonic]

To clarify: our objective was not to build just a time-tracking app, estimating and tracking time is a component of personal effectiveness. We just realised that in order to help people track how they spend their time, they need to have their notes and "todos" input first.

Thanks for closing the issue @iteles 👍