Eating Your Own Cookie
One of the things I like to see when I subscribe to someone’s service is that THEY use their own service. I call this “eating your own cookie”.
We are in the process of redesigning our timesheet. It’s a great design project to sink my teeth into. How to we start something like this? We USE THE TIMESHEET.
Starting this morning everyone around here is responsible for tracking their time in 10 minute intervals – this is going to force us to use the timesheet regularly and get in touch with the painful activity of accurately tracking your time down to the minute.
If you are building web applications, using your own product is KEY. We built FreshBooks to help us manage our web design company and we still use it to manage the billing of a handful of clients we have not let go of…. And after three years, the cookie still tastes good, but with our upgraded timesheet, it’s about to get sweeter.
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9:24 am
What is the benefit of tracking time in 10 minute intervals? On the surface, this appears to be a rather intrusive activity, one which would potentially interrupt any sort of creative or productive ‘flow’. Don’t we all have enough interruptions as it is?
9:56 am
Tom – you’re right…we have enough interruptions. That said, there are many busineses that do track time at ten minute intervals. I know Kathy used to track time in 6 minute intervals when she was at PriceWaterhouseCoopers … lawyers often track time in 10 minute intervals.
For us, we could easily do half hour intervals, but by making our intervals shorter than “necessary”, it will increase the pain factor. If we can increase the pain factor, we’ll be even more in turn with what is REALLY necessary to design a fast, easy and PAINLESS time tracking solution. And that is definitely what we are striving for.
4:42 pm
Does “tracking their time in 10 minute intervals” mean that every ten minutes one has to enter their time? Or, does it mean that when one finishes a task, they enter their time as divisible by 10 minutes (1 hour 20 minutes)? I’m down with shortening the increment, but if I have to stop every ten minutes and enter my time, I’m probably not going to be entering my time. Time Accounting is one of the most important things for management to track, but one of the banes of existence for the people who have to enter it. Make it easier for both and you’ve got yourself a killer app.
5:53 pm
Lance – I totally agree – tracking time can be the “bane of existence for the people” who have to track it…that is the problem we are really trying to solve…we want it to be painless.
With regards to intervals, it can mean either. Honestly it’s a business specific decision. Kathy used to have to track it EVERY 6 minutes at PWC…for our purposes here at FreshBooks we are just tracking in 10 minute intervals (i.e. if I spend 40 minutes on something, I will indicate 40 minutes at ONE time), but again, it really depends on the process of the business in question.
For what it is worth, our current design is not really that good for tracking EVERY 6 or ten minutes, but it’s okay for the cumulative tracking. The new version of FreshBooks will work well (better?!) both ways.
11:34 am
[...] As posted on the FreshBooks blog: [...]
12:41 pm
[...] My prediction is that this movie will really suck, which is of course what everyone is expecting. Now the thing is, what happens if the movie not only sucks, but is just plain boring and lame? Do you think there will be a negative backlash from the blogging community, or will the hype just fizzle out, never to be talked about again? I guess that is the beauty of hyping something months, or even years before it actually comes out. Have I mentioned yet how great FreshBooks new timesheet service (aka Snakes on a Timetrack) is going to be? [...]