{"id":1160,"date":"2011-01-31T11:11:38","date_gmt":"2011-01-31T19:11:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/?p=1160"},"modified":"2015-09-06T08:09:57","modified_gmt":"2015-09-06T15:09:57","slug":"rethinking-time-sink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/?p=1160","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking Time Sink"},"content":{"rendered":"

What follows is a bit of backstory on Time Sink<\/a>, our utility that tracks how you spend your time using your Mac. If you’d rather skip the backstory, here’s the executive summary version: effective immediately, we’re cutting the price of Time Sink to just $5<\/b> ($4.99 on the App Store<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Why are we doing this? In short, because we think Time Sink is a very cool little utility, and we’d love to see more people using it. For the longer version, read the details that follow.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, there was a little app named Time Sink<\/a>. This handy utility tracks every open window on your Mac, recording both foreground and background time for those windows. After it’s been running for some time, Time Sink provides an excellent picture as to how you spend your time on your Mac. If you haven’t tried it yet, Time Sink really is an amazing little app—it answers the “where did my day go?” question with ease, even though you may not want to know the answer! <\/p>\n

When we released Time Sink three months ago, we had a vision as to who the customer would be: those people who need to account for their time for billing or reporting purposes, as well as those who are just interested in the details of their technical lives. We intentionally kept the program light, with no integrated billing or defined project tracking tools, focusing on creating a clean interface and set-and-forget operation. (Time Sink does export data for use in spreadsheets and databases, which is how we saw users using its data if they needed to create invoices or do more with the data.)<\/p>\n

Now, three months into its existence, we’re finding that Time Sink isn’t quite right for either of the groups we thought would be interested in it. Those who need to account for their time need more features than Time Sink provides—billing and project-centered features are the two big items that really need to be supported for these users.<\/p>\n

For those interested in the technical details of their lives, $19 was simply too steep a price to pay for what was essentially a toy to them. It’s one thing to be curious about where your time goes, but another thing entirely to fork over $19 to answer the question when you really don’t need<\/em> to know the answer.<\/p>\n

So what are we planning on doing about Time Sink’s shortcomings? In the near term, adding both billing and project-centric features will be complex and time consuming, and we’re not yet ready (given Time Sink’s sales to date) to make that investment. However, we realize these features are a key element of a time tracking application for professional users. So we know we need to get them done if we’re going to reach this group of buyers.<\/p>\n

As for the technical hobbyists just interested in where their time is going…that’s why we’ve dropped the price to $5. We think this strikes a fair balance between affordability and providing a decent return to help us fund the future investments we’d like to make in Time Sink.<\/p>\n

So if you’ve been waffling about Time Sink, now’s the time to give it another look-see. If you’re a professional user, its features may not be perfect for you today, but perhaps what’s there now is worth $5 to you. If you’re a hobbyist, you may find it very enlightening to see just where your time does go—who knows, maybe you’ll identify a time sink that will free up time for additional activities. And now, it’ll only cost you $5 to find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What follows is a bit of backstory on Time Sink, our utility that tracks how you spend your time using your Mac. If you’d rather skip the backstory, here’s the executive summary version: effective immediately, we’re cutting the price of Time Sink to just $5 ($4.99 on the App Store). Why are we doing this? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,4,25],"tags":[],"coauthors":[21,22],"class_list":["post-1160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-macappstore","category-products","category-time-sink"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1160"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3588,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1160\/revisions\/3588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1160"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=1160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}