Scratching my own itch

Over the years this has been done in a variety of ways which never really worked that way.  We tried using an accounting tool, a project management tool, and a few other things.  None of these gave us that panacea we wanted, i.e. a simple tool that anyone could use, a way of seeing time breakdown for a specific project, and lastly, a tool that stayed out of our way.  The reasons for other tools failing was generally that time logging was too complicated and long winded, or that the data was not easy to get out again.

So, one evening I decided that I would scratch our own itch.

I set aside an hour to build a simple prototype for a time logging app that did everything we wanted.  It had to be aware of clients and projects, it had to be aware of tasks and the people in the company, and it had to log time in a very simplistic manner whilst providing the data required for any future reporting that might be added in.  Any features that did not enhance the above points was forgotten about.

The following day I had a prototype, and decided to show this to the other developers and to start trying to use it in the real world.  Over the next few days we were able to add features that I hadn't initially thought of quickly and easily, deploying them as they were built – all of which was done around regular day to day work.  After a while we had, what we considered to be, a fairly feature complete time logging solution.

At no point had I sat down and defined a product roadmap, a list of features or done any IA.  I had simply built something that suited my needs iterating the code on a needs basis, tweaking UI here and there, adding the odd feature, so on and so on.  As we were the users, our feedback loop was incredibly quick.

Now, a couple of weeks on, the entire company is now logging time with this tool (Twogger is the name if you're wondering), and the general consensus is that it is the ideal time logging solution for people like us.  It does what we need it to, and nothing else.  It has a laser light focus on the problem of a small agency tracking time.  

Granted, it's not feature complete, and I don't think that we'll ever say it is, as when needs for new functionality emerge, we'll add them, and if they don't, we won't.  There is absolutely no point in feature adding for the hell of it – it only serves to complicate and dilute the original benefits of a simple system, and it's also time spent that you wouldn't necessarily get any benefit from.

Lastly, we've now added multi-tenancy which means we are now able to open up Twogger to other companies wishing to get simple time logging, and any new features as they turn up.  If you're interested in finding out more about twogger, please get in touch.