Would You Buy This Product?

16 Responses to “Would You Buy This Product?”

1. Zach on February 28th, 2009 6:14 am

   Sounds very interesting, I’d definitely demo it. If it worked I’d buy it for my whole team.

   I’m concerned that it would have to be very very smart to be effective. For example, how would it know which client I’m working on when I’ve got X11 up and I’m ssh’ed into a box and I su from one user to another? Does it track that? Or when I’m in firefox and four tabs are for one client while another is for a second client… how does it know? If it solves those problems unobtrusively you’ve got a goldmine on your hands.

2. John on February 28th, 2009 1:06 pm

   Zach,

   Thanks for your comments. The aim is to evolve into a product that does what you describe. Of course, I’ve got a little bit of expectation management to do here – it wouldn’t be able to do what you describe on version 1 out of the box. Version 1 tracks URLs and document paths and wouldn’t have any other way of knowing what you’re doing, so it wouldn’t track commands you enter from the terminal. However, depending on the uniqueness of the URLs you are visiting in Firefox, it might track these. The app allows you to review your day or week. In this review, you can tell it that the time on page X was for client Y. Then it will remember this for future. This is how it knows what is for what client, but you’ll only have to tell it once.

   In the future, I have plans for some pretty advanced automation to inform the first guess – if you had a project in Basecamp with contacts attached, or if the contacts for a project were in your address book, it would try and decipher a company name from the URL or the contents of the page you visited, then look at what project this company was associated with.

   But this is all pretty far off – version 1 would concentrate on the basics for GUI users. The system would require a little setting up – you have to tell it where your documents are for project X, but this would be a 3 click process. And for URLs as I’ve said, you would need to check the guesses the software makes on a regular basis, but this would be integrated with looking at your results and you’d only have to tell the app once – it would then remember.

   One of the things I have planned for version 1 is a plugin architecture. You would be able to write plugins for any application that is a non-document application (apps like Address Book and, oh, the Terminal). The point of the plugin would be to provide something my app can associate with a project and would provide this using scripting. The details of this are sketchy in my head at the moment, but it might be possible to track the time you spend between certain terminal commands by running a search of the bash history…

   The principle behind my app would be to take all the information available and interpret it to get meaningful time data and to do this all in the background. Therefore, on an abstract level, the only barriers to this would be that the information required to make a decision was not available, or the interpretation was just too hard. And what your describing in the terminal sounds like it would be challenging, but possible as the software evolves.

   I want to make something that’s far more intelligent than any software I’ve seen. I’m expecting the barriers to achieving this to be substantial, otherwise why isn’t anyone doing it now? But I have some ideas on how to achieve a basic level of intelligence by doing some pretty simple things, and I’m mocking up a really rough prototype now to test my ideas as I keep thinking that what I’m trying to do isn’t possible for some reason I’ve not thought of. If having a basic level of intelligence to track time is as easy as I’m thinking, I’m puzzled why it hasn’t been done long ago. There may well be something I’m missing.

   Anyway, enough of my gibber jabber. Thanks for your feedback – it’s nice to hear someone say “If it could do X and Y, then I’d buy it”. It proves that there’s a need. Now the only question is “Is it possible?”. Which I’ll find out shortly. I’ll keep you updated – I should know whether there’s a future for the idea in about a month.

   John.

3. cornelius on March 9th, 2009 1:57 am

   I’ve tried slife which sounds like the only time tracker out there like what you are building. I really wish you the best success for this. I’m just a little pessimistic about the “automatic” nature of this. It seems like it would take a lot of work to teach the software what software/urls/folders are for what project. The speed at which projects come and go would seem to make that process never-ending.

   Also, I really don’t care about exporting this data into other apps. I use Harvest but whenever entering time into it I need to tweak it anyways. Imported time would still need to be gone over manually.

   Here’s my dream time tracking app idea. It’s dirt simple. The application would track time spent in each Space on OS X. It would be up to the user to ensure that the projects they’re working on are segregated into individual spaces. The app would not just track the Space number but the apps used within that space and, when possible, the files accessed. But that information would only there so that if the user forgot what he/she was working on in a particular Space, the app list might provide some clues. I’d have be sure to diligently keep my projects separated, but that’s all it would take to track my time.

   I’d love to hear what you think of this idea. Perhaps there are technical limitations preventing this sort of thing, but it seems like it might be easier to build than something like Slife.

4. John on March 9th, 2009 11:11 pm

   Thanks for your comments, Cornelius. You make several excellent points and I’ll address them one by one.

   I’ve tried slife which sounds like the only time tracker out there like what you are building. I really wish you the best success for this. I’m just a little pessimistic about the “automatic” nature of this. It seems like it would take a lot of work to teach the software what software/urls/folders are for what project. The speed at which projects come and go would seem to make that process never-ending.

   Yes, you’re right, Slife and RescueTime are two of my closest competitors. I can totally understand you being pessimistic about how realistic my goals are. I’m the first to say that this is a very ambitious project, and even I am not 100% certain I can pull it off. However, I am confident I can get a lot closer to a low friction system than anything else I’ve tried.

   In terms of the amount of work to keep the system working, I’ll address your 3 items individually – software/URLs/folders as I think you’ve broken them down perfectly.

   1. Folders

   You’d be able to have individual project folders which would be tracked for open documents as I’ve mentioned in my previous comment. You’re right to say that this means every time a project is created, this would have to be added to Lapsus (the name of my time tracker). This would indeed be a hassle. I have a trick up my sleeve for this – as well as project folders, you could add a project container folder. This would be a folder which held all your projects of a certain kind – e.g. Graphic Design projects or Web Design projects. This would then track any project within this folder. This would mean any time a project was created Lapsus would start tracking with no action required.

   2. Software

   Any non document based app would come under this category. So software like Mail, iTunes, Address Book, iCal, iChat, Daylite etc etc. From a business perspective, I think most of these apps would either be unproductive, or could be categorised under Overheads – Contact and Calendar management being two of the most obvious examples. Lapsus would come with a built in Overheads project which would track these kinds of interactions.

   However, there are examples of apps like Mail which could be used in a productive context. To cope with this, I’d use a system of plugins that could be developed by anyone. The plugin would gather some information on which to base the decision of what project to assign the time to. For example, the plugin might ask iChat via Applescript what contact the user is chatting to. Each project would have a group linked to it in Address Book. The contact would be looked up in the Address Book and if that contact belonged to a specific group, it would assign the time chatting to that contact to that project. This is, of course, pretty advanced stuff and might not be in version 1, but it’s totally feasible with the technology. In the example that Zach gave below, there would be a plugin for the Terminal to detect when the user is sshed into a specific IP or URL. This parameter would then act as the key which could be associated with a project.

   3. URLs

   This would be the most difficult aspect to get right. I don’t expect to fully nail it on version 1, but I’m confident I can make significant improvements over current systems. The software will guess at what project the user is working on, using a complex series of rules behind the scenes. These rules would take into account things like what search terms were entered into Google if doing a search, what links were clicked from which page, what URL the user was looking at and what the last productive project was and a predefined list of URLs that were likely to be productive or unproductive.

   The key element that defines success or failure, I think, will be the interface to change any incorrect guesses. My aim is to provide the checking of guesses alongside the reviews of time that the user would want to do anyway. I’ve already put an awful lot of thought into this part of the interface and I’ve not committed any pixels to the screen yet. Once the user corrects incorrect guesses and tells Lapsus “all the guesses you have made are correct”, these URLs will be remembered for next time. And I’m hoping that the project container system will mean certain URLs can be remembered for types of project, which means that when a new project is created, it will inherit all the URLs associated with that kind of a project. So stackoverflow.com, for example, would be associated with Programming Projects. When stackoverflow.com is visited, Lapsus would decide what project within Programming Projects would be most likely for the user to have worked on – this would be a combination of recent projects and time spent in a project. It would automatically choose the most active recent project to assign the time to.

   Here’s my dream time tracking app idea. It’s dirt simple. The application would track time spent in each Space on OS X. It would be up to the user to ensure that the projects they’re working on are segregated into individual spaces. The app would not just track the Space number but the apps used within that space and, when possible, the files accessed. But that information would only there so that if the user forgot what he/she was working on in a particular Space, the app list might provide some clues. I’d have be sure to diligently keep my projects separated, but that’s all it would take to track my time.

   I’d love to hear what you think of this idea. Perhaps there are technical limitations preventing this sort of thing, but it seems like it might be easier to build than something like Slife.

   It’s an interesting idea and I totally agree with your sentiment – this sounds a lot easier to build than what I’m going for. However, my focus with this project is not to make an application that makes my life programming it easy, but that makes the users life easier. There’s far too many applications saying “hey, if you want me to work for you, you need to change the way you use a computer”. I’m obsessed about making a app that lets the user do what they normally do and still providing value. If I didn’t have a problem with users changing their workflows to suit an application, I wouldn’t be making the software at all and I’d be happy using a stopwatch system.

   Your Spaces system at first sounds attractive, but on further consideration I see some aspects that would drive me round the twist. First, there’s the simple fact of how you remember what’s in each space. If projects are being churned out every few weeks, this could get pretty confusing pretty fast. You might just get used to remembering one Space was for a project, then it would be gone and a different project would take its place. They say it takes 28 days to make or break a habit. In the computer world it’s less, but it still takes significant time for my brain to remember something like this. There’s a risk you could end up doing a “Spaces crawl” – a bit like the pub crawl but with more dizzying, stomach churning animation and less alcohol.

   Then there’s the huge issue of window management. In my opinion, current window management solutions are pathetic. I really hate having a jumble of windows over one another with no snapping, tiling, proper maximise or the ability to set up a saved workspace. And I’m afraid to say I think your system would make it even worse. I think you might spend half your time moving windows from one Space to another. Then there’s the issue of having different documents in the same application in different Spaces. This would be really confusing. For me, anyway.

   So in summary I still think my system can be done. That’s not to say it’s going to be easy. And I’m still skeptical about the feasibility of it all, and I’m building the thing. But I really really want to have a go at building a truly next gen time tracker and now’s the time to do it. One last thing – when I think of the task ahead of me, I do wonder if what I’m aiming for is possible. But then I think of all the information my computer knows about what I’m doing. It knows an awful lot about what I do, and I’m hesitant to say that all this information cannot be tapped to provide an intelligent time tracker. It may well be pretty dumb in version 1, but I know that personally I’d rather have a dumb tracker that at least captures the time I work on my project documents reliably than any stopwatch system on the planet.

   Thanks for your suggestions and interest and I’ll let you know when the software is in Beta so you can decide for yourself if it can be successful.

5. cornelius on March 10th, 2009 6:45 pm

   Thanks for your in-depth reply.

   Regarding the Spaces idea, this plan appeals to me because I wouldn’t have to change the way I work that much. I already use Spaces to split off different projects. I usually only use about four spaces at a time – one for email, one for procrastination, and two or three for open projects. The first two are always in the same spaces so that’s easy. The others I swap out all the time. At the end of the day, or twice per day, if I could review my “time sheets” in this new app, it wouldn’t be hard to tag each space with the project I have been working on. A project may be in space 4 one day and space 3 on another but it’s not likely to change during the day.

   Personally, I’d like something really simple and then use that to augment my “real” time tracking system (Harvest). Harvest records tasks and projects and people, this other app would track total time in front of the computer (including procrastination) and give me a macro view of how I’m spending my time. I don’t think Slife or your app could very easily track “tasks” as well as projects so this couldn’t be a total solution. But if I knew that between noon and 3pm I was sometimes working on a specific feature I could look at the time I spent in that project’s space and see right away exactly how much cumulative time was spent on that feature, then enter that into Harvest.

   Obviously, if you don’t like using spaces, my idea wouldn’t be very useful. I hope I don’t sound too discouraging, I totally agree that time tracking should be automatic and shouldn’t require turning timers off and on. I just have my own agenda .

   There is a huge need for something like this! Please let me know when the software is ready for testing, I’d love to try it out.

6. John on March 14th, 2009 7:14 pm

   It’s interesting that you use Spaces for keeping track of what project you’re working on. It’s a shame that more people including myself don’t do this naturally as it certainly would keep the internal mechanics of my system much simpler.

   Of course you have your own agenda – that’s totally expected and understandable. As I’ve said in my earlier comments, I too have my own agenda which I’ve obsessed over for rather a long time now – I’ve had this idea in my head for the last 5 years, all the time thinking “someone else is bound to do this soon”.

   You make a very good point about my app not being able to track tasks. It certainly won’t do this in version 1, but in some far flung future version it’s a feature I’m really keen to add, as it would complete the circle with the GTD methodology. It could look at tasks entered by something like Things or iCal and allow you to assign certain key words to certain apps. I could talk at length about my ideas for this, but it’s a long way off and I’m in danger of talking about features which may well never see the light of day, but hopefully you get a sense that I’ve got loads of ambitions about where I take the app after basic functionality.

   Thanks for your comments and I certainly will let you know when something’s ready to be Beta tested. Meanwhile, I’d better get back to coding…

7. Kel on March 16th, 2009 3:33 pm

   I haven’t had to track my own time much, but I can see how this software would be useful, and also how hard it would be to make it work. I know when I was working, I would keep my current e-learning open the whole time, to work on during breaks between assignments. But it still would be helpful to know how much time I had each assignment’s file open for, and then I could just subtract that from the time I had the e-learning up for to estimate timing. Sounds good.

8. John on March 16th, 2009 11:04 pm

   Kelkel – for the situation you describe, unless I’m missing something, my software would be able to tell you exactly how long you’d been working on any one assignment. It tracks the active document, which means that when you switch away from that window, it would stop tracking it. So my app would deal with the situation you describe pretty well – it’s the more complex situations that are harder to deal with, such as 4 different tabs in Firefox being for 4 different projects etc.

9. Synaptic Mishap » Blog Archive » Under the Ice - A Productivity Story on March 22nd, 2009 10:11 pm

   [...] well as programming my own time tracking application (oh, the irony), I’m also a Maths tutor and analogies have also served me well in [...]

10. Synaptic Mishap » Blog Archive » The Future of the Desktop on April 11th, 2009 8:36 pm

    [...] A bit of background to my application as it’s relevant – Lapsus will track your time without timers. It automatically collects information about the active window in the background whilst you work then associates this with a project you’re working on. This time information can then be sent to various web applications for invoicing, reporting or collaboration. You can read a bit more here. [...]

11. Don on September 6th, 2009 8:42 am

    I would use this even early in development while the implementation is partial and flawed, along with what we’re already using: a more straightforward “take notes” tool (currently, the rather horrid implementation of time tracking in to do lists in Basecamp).

    So anytime you have something that is remotely usable, I’d use it as a supplement until it is functional and stable enough to do more.

    As you can tell from my comment I really do want to do my time tracking this way. I have trained myself to use an inadequate tool reliably but could benefit even from having the extra perspective to check against. So don’t hesitate to use me as an alpha subject.

12. John on September 11th, 2009 1:32 am

    Thanks for the comment, Don. Your enthusiasm for the product is really encouraging. It’s nice to know I am building something at least some in the community actually want.

    I find your comment

    “I have trained myself to use an inadequate tool reliably…”

    particularly interesting. That’s exactly how I feel about all those people who have trained themselves to use a timer. And I’ve heard many more who tried to exercise that discipline and failed. Understandably, many of them actually feel bad about themselves, and see this discipline as the only way they’ll ever be able to keep track on where their time is going. It can be really hard to remember where a timer is at. And it shouldn’t be this hard to track your time.

    This is a failing with technology, not with the people.

    I’m really hoping my implementation can remove this pain. Thanks again for your comment.

13. Patrick Smith on September 14th, 2009 5:54 pm

    I’d love a Mac version of timesnapper.com – it sits in the background and takes occassional screenshots.

    So it’s not so much “time tracking” as “time reconstruction” – you review the screenshots and log what you were working on.

    It seems like a simple implementation that enables detailed tracking.

14. John on September 15th, 2009 3:47 pm

    I’m not keen on the way TimeSnapper works. The main problem I have with the workflow is that you’re entering the data. You’ve got to look at hundreds of screenshots to figure out what you were doing. If it were me using the software, I can see that I’d put off logging the time data – it sounds like too much hard work and I’m just really lazy.

    What I want to do with Lapsus is more along the lines of getting the computer to intelligently decide what you were working on. It’s the computer that should do this hard work. Then the user can look at this and approve the data or adjust as necessary. I’ve got a target of 80% accuracy out of the box. That means the user will only have to enter data for 20% of the times. And the data entry will be really, really easy – almost enjoyable! And for that 20%, Lapsus should learn, so that a month after starting using Lapsus, the corrections should be few and far between.

    I just can’t get excited about a time tracker that’s based around data entry. Once Lapsus matures I may well build in screenshots of windows, but it’ll be a nice extra, not a core feature.

    Anyway, thanks for your comments. It’s useful to know that there are users who’d like a Mac version of TimeSnapper.

15. wSos on October 1st, 2009 1:19 pm

    Depends on what price range we’re looking at. If it was free I would hesitate to download and use. When priced reasonably would have any objections either.

16. Under the Ice – A Productivity Story - Synaptic Mishap on August 5th, 2010 11:10 am

    [...] well as programming my own time tracking application (oh, the irony), I’m also a Maths tutor and analogies have also served me well in [...]

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