trendpreneur

I’m surprised there aren’t more hits for “time twacking“. It’s a horrible, horrible phrase, but before you string me up for murdering the English language, let me explain.

Time-tracking is a really cool thing to do. Why? Because we have faulty memories, and we like monitoring and planning. Nobody can reasonably be expected to remember by 5pm on Friday what they were doing on Monday afternoon. But knowing where your time over the week goes is invaluable, whether you’re a run-of-the-mill employee, an entrepreneur, or a freelancer juggling clients.

There are some gorgeous time-tracking solutions out there, yet I personally just have an allergy to typing stuff into a web app.

So this is what hit me last night, at 2am, embroiled amidst caffeinated insomniac thoughts of hair dye and giraffes: why isn’t there a Twitter time-tracking app?

Maybe there is. In fact, I hope there is, because I want to use it. Lazyweb?

In case there isn’t, and someone’s out there looking for something to build (hey, that ’someone’ could be myself in a few months’ time.. who knows):

Let me constantly microblog what I’m doing, in an enterprise context, on a private level, so I can look back and figure out what I’ve done. Use hashtags or another way of formatting keywords to mark out specific types of task and use some simple natural language understanding to automatically graph and plot my time.

Aha! A bit of Googling later and I find Tempo and Twistory. Both potential solutions… but without the latter ‘intelligent’ part, in a way.

The problem with all this is it does require discipline. You gotta tell Twitter, or whoever, what you’re doing. Plus, as you can only go back so far with tweets, I’d suggest setting up an API script to archive your tweets at close of work on Friday (or Saturday, or Sunday…). And yet, the advantage of using a fairly free-form entry method – one that’s close at hand, too – and building your own intelligence around it is you can add in extras, like an end-of-day mood summary, comments, notes, etc. Maybe step 1 is to start tracking now, and step 2 to build in the AI later…