The task is legendarily unpopular. In almost every company employees have to record their hours so that work efforts can be estimated as correctly as possible. That makes the task as important as it is unpopular. What if recording work times was easy? And intuitive enough to be fun? These were the questions we tackled as part of an experiment.
EXPERIMENT - Timesheets are so much fun (if you use the right tool)
Our focus: Timeular. The startup from Innsbruck has developed an entire time tracking suite to track and report hours. Spectacular centerpiece: an 8-sided dice, each side of which stands for a different activity. The operation is intuitive. If you write an email to customer x, you turn up the side for customer x up. If you make a phone call to customer y, you rotate the dice further.
Our focus: Timeular. The startup from Innsbruck has developed an entire time tracking suite to track and report hours. Spectacular centerpiece: an 8-sided dice, each side of which stands for a different activity. The operation is intuitive. If you write an email to customer x, you turn up the side for customer x up. If you make a phone call to customer y, you rotate the dice further.
You work, the dice measures
Timeular contains a gyro sensor and is coupled with the user’s martphone. Position and duration are transferred into a companion app on the fly. To make sure you don’t get confused, the tracker comes with a selection of different stickers with common symbols as well as a pen, and an eraser.
From now on, it is up to the user to ensure that the tracking is measured correctly. Especially in the first few days, we had to remind ourselves again and again to turn the cube when changing the activity. In hectic office life, it often happens that you quickly reply to an incoming mail and forget to turn the cube for this action. But even this supposedly short mail quickly became 10 minutes of working time. It is practical that the cube is on the desk and reminds you again and again.
Don’t forget to roll
Now and then the turning slipped our minds for a longer period of time. However, it was getting better and better. Fortunately, you can manually adjust the time entry in the app if necessary.
If the tracking is to be stopped, the cube simply must be placed in the included “base station”. The sensors automatically detects that time tracking should be stopped based on the slanted positioning of the cube. However, if users want to know, for example, how many minutes a day they spend taking breaks, drinking coffee or smoking, they can dedicate a separate segment for this purpose.
We have a result
The Timeular cube is a tool that is fun and easy to use. How accurate the time recording will be, depends on the user. Above all, it's cool to have a tool that is tangible and provides a bit of creative appeal on the "dull" desk landscape.
Especially for employees or freelancers who just work on a limited number of projects, the cube helps not only with time tracking, but also with structuring the daily work routine.
On the other hand, many colleagues, quickly reach their limits with eight trackable jobs. Especially since billings and records are becoming more and more detailed these days. This increases administration, and the work-fun-ratio becomes less favorable.
Header and teaser images by Timeular.