The power of managing time

We've all heard about 'time is money', which is true in a variety of ways. But think of it in simple terms, let's say you make about 60,000$ while being employed (or perhaps on your own little business 5 days a week)

If you somehow figured to reduce your wasted minutes by 24 minutes a day, you would actually earn about 3,000$ more in the year. That's a simplistic view of how saving time translates immediately to money - but the reality is the ability to better manage our work time, analyze it and improve upon it can create big changes in terms of how you are perceived at workplace, or how you can manage your business by allocating time to where it matters.

Time management is often made to seem like this huge complex concept where you have to track everything you do and kill yourself in the details. In reality, a lot of people do just fine with little adjustments as long as they have a reasonably good view of their work habits. Theoretically, you can say "I know how I spend my day!" but in practice, just seeing a set of numbers or a simple graph can throw surprising results on your work habits. Just tuning it a bit can yield interesting results - for e.g what happens if you turn off outlook email notifications? Try that a few days - and check email only once every 45 minutes. You will probably create yourself a 'free' time of about 20 minutes a day from just that. Then there are other techniques...which is for next time!

Why another time management software? aren't there enough of them?

if you were ever to tell someone 'I'm creating another time management / time tracker software' you'd probably get a dirty look.

"What? Aren't there enough out there?"

Search Google for time tracking software and you'll get hundreds. So the question is, why even create one? That's a question I've asked myself. I then developed it because I think there is always space for something that has benefits that no other software provides. This post isn't going into an advertising lecture - but just that the fact that there exists competition doesn't mean you shouldn't get in. Ultimately it's about differentiation - does my software have benefits that users value?

It's also a mistake in these cases to think of sizing the market - sort of saying if there are X desktops with Windows XP and Vista and Y% of those buy my software, I will be a millionaire! It doesn't quite work that way. My focus will be to see what specific benefits and features of my software users seek - Analytics are a good way to figure that out. That's a starting point.

The good news is that even before my software goes commercial and my site is actually advertised (by different means), it's actually coming on the top search results for specific queries. That means my SEO isn't too bad. I've also had some users email me asking when it will be released - and that also indicates there are benefits that some users value.

To me, that's good enough to keep going.

Coming: How easy is it to create a simple software like a time tracker? not so easy...I discovered!

The first post

As WorkWolf nears its launch date, I thought it fit to finally get a blog up and ready. This isn't going to be one of those 'I did that and I did this', but more focused on the product itself.

If you stumbled here by mistake - at least give a shot to http://www.workwolf.com!