nielsmouthaan

Years ago, I used to work as an iOS developer for a digital agency. Each Friday, I was asked to submit my hours for that week. I estimated these hours by examining emails, reviewing commits, and finding attended meetings. Like many, I experienced it as a tedious task. Yet, it was of great importance for invoicing and budgeting purposes.

I started looking for apps to help me. Most time tracking apps required me to toggle timers when switching between tasks. I often forgot to do this, making the resulting timesheets inaccurate. Other solutions followed an "automatic" approach by tracking the apps I used, documents I wrote, and the websites I visited. Not knowing what happened with that data, I felt those apps could potentially harm my and my co-workers' privacy.

Working on my thesis and conducting quantitative research, I realised that data sampling could be a great alternative for tracking time. Daily is the resulting implementation of that approach. It works by asking what the user is working on, and provides a better way to track time without the hassle of toggling timers. It also protects the privacy of the user by not collecting data other than what the user has explicitly provided.

Fast-forwarding to 2020, thousands of employees, freelancers, founders, and other professionals working in various industries are tracking their time using Daily. They use its timesheets to submit hours, create invoices, or simply increase their productivity.

This week I’ve published another significant update. This time I’ve radically improved Daily’s exporting capability. This makes it easier than ever to import tracked hours in invoicing suits, HR portals or good-old-fashioned spreadsheet apps. Hope you like using Daily as much as I do!