BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Hours Is The Perfect iPhone Time Tracking App And A Natural For The iWatch

This article is more than 9 years old.

Very rarely does an app come out the makes me want to change my habits. I felt that way when Mailbox came out, but after a short sojourn in inbox zero I fell off the wagon. But taking control of my time is even more important to me than eviscerating my email.

So when Jeremy Olson, the lead designer at Apple Design Award-winning app studio Tapity told me about the launch of their new time-tracking app, Hours, I was intrigued. He told me that it was one of the first app to use Facebook's new POP animation engine (which powers Paper), and it has the natural physics that we have come to expect from today's apps. There are already some very good hands on reviews out there, this one from 9to5Mac and this one from TheNextWeb, so let me just focus on what is unique about Hours.

First, yes, the app in an amazingly simple way to jump into time tracking whether its for time management, billable hours or more personal quantified self reasons. You open the app and you are asked to set up your first timer, and off you go. No intro, no splash screen—not even a logo! Just pure function and delightful UI and UX touches.

Second, just keeping track of your time makes you spend it better. It's true. Anand Sharma, created the quantified self project AprilZero for this reason. He writes that he created the app because of his "theory that just by tracking things I could improve them." He is interested in blood levels, body fat, runs, rock climbs, etc., but the same principle applies to everything. In my first couple of days with the app I have already seen a natural consolidation of time spent on individual projects instead of each of them sharding into one another all day long.

Third, the timeline feature really gives you immediate feedback about how fragmented your attention is becoming and gives you immediate signals if you forgot to track a chunk of your day. Hours was developed internally by Tapity and built by  their partner Five Pack Creative over the past three years for the studio's own use (dogfooding!) Consequently they have solved the problems that annoyed them about other time tracking apps. Hours makes it very easy to add or subtract time from a project timer, split a timer between two projects and insert breaks in the middle of time blocks. You can also round your timers to the nearest n-minutes and set alerts to start timers at the beginning of the day and turn them off at the end.

We live in a world of enforced distraction. The majority of app on your iPhone, whether games, social media or even productivity tools, are constantly clamoring for your attention. In the world of free apps, your attention and data are what can be extracted in lieu of money. Tapity's approach with Hours is a corrective to that in two ways. First, it rewards focus over distraction. Sure, you can cheat it, but at the end of the day (as they say) you will feel uneasy that your neatly colored blocks of time were not in fact so neat. The lie made visible can be a corrective as the truth made tangible. Secondly, Hours is not free, it costs $4.99 during the launch sale, and will then go to its $9.99 retail price, but there are no hidden costs or in-app purchases.

Olson tells Federico Viticci at MacStories, "This first launch of Hours is not where I expect to make a huge business. The app will be a Trojan horse into thousands of companies and we hope that pretty soon companies will be asking, how do I get Hours for my whole team? That’s why we are pushing really hard to get a SaaS web product out so that we can be ready for that reaction and turn this thing into a sustainable business with recurring revenue streams." So all of the team functions that one might think are missing from Hours are merely in development for an enterprise version. What this means for individual users is that Hours is uncluttered with social options, but there are plans to make the output from the app directly connected to the services that users might need to enter their billable hours into.

So, on the one hand, Hours is a perfect little app that is incredibly useful—and a pleasure to use. On the other hand, Tapity is preparing much larger flow channels in terms of third-party integrations and enterprise sales that can really get the app into a lot of hands—and make Tapity some real money. It's a very smart growth model, in line with the laws of physics. And, there are two more huge growth channels in the works. First, new extensions features in iOS 8 will make Hours timers accessible through more places on your iPhone, including the lock screen. Second, Hours is exactly the type of minimalist app that will work just great on the forthcoming iWatch. Indeed, Olson tells Viticci, "iOS 8 will be great for Hours but what gets us even more excited is the rumored iWatch. We think Hours will be a killer business app on the iWatch. Frequent, short engagements with an app are exactly the kind of thing the iWatch will excel in so we can’t wait to see what we can do with it."

Instead of focusing on the flow of free, as many app makers have to their detriment, Tapity is banking on the freedom of flow to make Hours a success . The key to this strategy is to remove impediments to flow at every level. So the app itself flows for the user with a wonderfully intuitive UI, third-part integrations will make the data flow out of the app into other apps with large user bases, those large user bases include many businesses that will want to provide Hours for their team to more effectively track (and use) their time. It's a very timely idea.

UPDATE: Tapity's Jeremy Olson just posted a story on Medium about how Hours became a top-grossing app on the Apple App Store.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my website