"timeBro is the first time tracker that I don't hate"
Why the digital agency Distancify relies on automatic time tracking — Interview with CTO Kristoffer Lindvall
Hi Kristoffer. What is your job at Distancify — and what kind of company are you?
Kristoffer: I’m the CTO and co-founder of Distancify, a digital agency specialized in eCommerce solutions.
Why is accurate time tracking important for your business?
Kristoffer: Our business model differs slightly from that of our peers because we generally don’t charge hours. By breaking down projects into small pieces and estimating them accurately, we’re allowing the customers to pick and choose which features they want. Since the estimations serve as a fixed price per feature, there’s very little financial risk for customers. However, this poses a problem for us because we need to follow up on our costs. This is where time tracking is crucial.
As a team, we care a lot about efficiency, and we are always looking for ways to improve ourselves. Being able to see what we’re spending time on helps us a lot in this area.
What problem did you have with time tracking?
Kristoffer: Since we don’t strictly need to log times to put food on the table, it’s an easy thing to miss or “shortcut” out of.
Many time trackers are built on the idea that you need to start/stop a stopwatch, or simply remember how much time you’ve spent on a task. I think we’ve all been in a situation before, where we were reviewing timesheets only to find records of working on a single task for 24 hours because we forgot to press the stopwatch.
In my job as CTO, I very often get interrupted during work as well, which just amplifies the start/stop issues of conventional timers.
I think we all found records of working on a single task for 24 hours before because we forgot to press the stopwatch.
How was timeBro able to solve the problem?
Kristoffer: timeBro makes logging times a breeze, so there’s really no reason not to do it. It also lets you personally see what kind of “time thieves” you’re dealing with (e-mail, colleagues storming into the office, Facebook, etc). Of course, the built-in privacy oft the tool helps adoption as well. Personal improvement can only come from within and cannot be imposed by the company
You don’t forget to turn on or turn off a timer. I trust timeBro tracking my times in the background, and at the end of the day, I can create the time reports accordingly.
I would like to point out another benefit of timeBro as well. We’re a distributed company, and informing colleagues of what’s going on is very important to avoid self-bias (it’s difficult to see what others are doing when you, literally, don’t see them). So every day people write up a little status report on what they have been working on and their progress. timeBro is really helpful in this case as well, as it helps you remember a lot of the small but important things that happen throughout the day.
What doubts did you have before trying timeBro?
Kristoffer: I was concerned that it would be just another window tracker that I install and forget, never to look at again. But the insights are actually very useful. The zoom feature of the memory aid is genius.
The zoom feature of the memory aid is genius.
If a friend asked you why they should try timeBro - what would you tell them?
Kristoffer: It’s pretty much the first time tracker that I don’t hate. It strikes a good balance between being an automated tracker, while at the same time allowing you to create structured time entries, which you want to keep for the future. Most apps I’ve tried before are either or.
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