Norway’s own Mathias Mikkelsen is storming into the busy arena of time tracking apps with Timely. He’s looking to approach the service in a new way that seeks to leave competitors like Harvest and Freckle in the dust by changing the way people log their hours and frees them up to actually get on with the work they are paid to do.
Timely’s method of time tracking is to work from people’s existing schedules rather than make them create and fill in details of events after they’ve happened. Seems quite obvious and sensible now that’s someone has suggested it.
“Every time tracking app out there uses the same concept; you log hours backwards in time. I want to flip that around. Instead of asking ‘what did you do this week?’, I’m asking ‘what are you planning on doing this week?’ As a result, you’ll spend seconds logging hours. All you have to do is to move your existing schedule to Timely.” Said Mathias, the aforementioned founder of Timely.
Self-owned and currently bootstrapping development, this seems to be a labour of, if not love, then certainly passion. Describing himself as ‘on a quest to rid the world of time tracking’ and also saying, “I hate time tracking. It’s time to end this madness”, Mathias appears to have worked hard to perfect his vision for Timely, the first version was launched in May but unsatisfied that it only did the same things as the competition he went back to the drawing board until an idea that satisfied was found.
Once they had settled on basing the app around scheduling it all came together and now it’s straightforward to understand and use. Migrate your schedule to Timely and you can easily drag appointments around inside its calendar-like layout adjusting things on the fly as they happen, editing times and details quickly. A complete iOS 7-only iPhone app has been developed alongside the desktop program which gives you full mobile control; create an account, manage the subscription, start a timer and estimate hours, it’s all there.
Mathias also said, “My inspiration for Timely came from a marketing agency I used to work at – getting everyone to fill out their timesheets was a big problem. It got to the stage where we’d have to fill out timesheets on a Friday evening before social events were allowed to begin.” No longer Mathias, no longer.
