“Time is money.” We have heard this from childhood. But I disagree. Time is much more than money. How a person spends his time on an average day is a good indicator of his personality. The value of time is understood only when it’s gone.
Gone are the days when our lives were simpler. We had limited things to waste our time when we were bored. Even the “wasteful” activities of the past like playing outside all day were not so wasteful as they taught us valuable life skills, and developed our physical abilities. But now, a major part of the world is hooked onto the internet, and technology. Our social circle and communities are shrinking. Yet our social media life, time on the internet, and screens are ballooning to unsustainable levels. We spend so much time on things we don’t need, things we don’t need to learn, know, hear or see. We don’t even have control over what we see. Things are shown to us based on our “preferences or likes, dislikes”. At least that’s what we end up believing. But in the end, when we take a deep breath and introspect, we realise how wasteful we were with our “time”. This realisation is rare. It doesn’t last long. We usually end up falling into the same routine of a wasteful dopamine-chasing lifestyle. To get out of this routine is hard. But I have managed to get out of this in the past. However, a few months ago I felt like I was falling into the same trap again.
So, to get out of this trap, I needed to follow the same technique I had used the first time. But then I realised, I could develop a mobile app to help me execute my plan. And that’s when I thought of building Time Overflow. The first user of this app is myself. Building it and publishing it to the Google Play store is part of my learning.
So what’s the idea behind Time overflow?
The idea is simple. I used to log time whenever I do any work. Suppose my plan is to study for next hour, I will sit to study. But I will look at the time before studying. And then at the end of the session, I used to log time honestly. Honest time logging is key. Suppose I opened my mobile and opened instagram for 5 minutes, I will deduct atleast 6-7 minutes from the time I logged. This, I used to do for day after day. What I realised from that experience was, it was very hard to achieve 300 minutes of consistent productive minutes day after day. We overrate how productive we are and we underestimate how wasteful we are. That’s just the nature of human consciousness. That realisation was a reality check for me. But what I achieved with daily time logging was exceptional. I managed to get out of youtube procrastination, social media procrastination. I even deactivated my facebook, instagram. I started reading books in free time. I never compromised on essential part of my life like spending time with family, daily workouts, cooking food for myself, etc. With this practice, I became a much better version of myself. I had white boards in my room to log time.
Times have changed since then. Time overflow is an attempt to bring that idea and practice to a mobile application but with some extra features, analytics.
The app is simple.
There are three tabs. Tracker, Analytics, Tutorial.
Analog clock is there to make you aware of time while logging. In this digital age, I still feel nothing beats analog clock. They are much better than these new age smart watches. Anyways, when user clicks on Log Your Time, he/she is taken to Time Logging View. Here, the user can quickly enter the name of the activity. And enter time in hours and minutes, or total minutes also. Like 90 minutes workout. And then categorise the activity as either productive, wasteful or neutral. There is slide to log option.
Once you start logging activities for the day, you’ll see a list of activities alog with a horizontal bar depicting a visual representation of how things are going today. You can also long press to multi-select and then delete the activities you want.
Users can customize key preference settings, with the most crucial being the ability to set daily targets. These targets help determine if your day was productive, wasteful, or neutral. It's advisable to begin with easy, lenient daily targets. Once you consistently meet these targets, you can gradually aim for more challenging ones. Note that new targets take effect the following day, as they are designed to evolve over time. Daily productivity is assessed based on the targets set for that specific day, rather than the current target. Users can take backup of their data by exporting them via email. Users can also enable reminder notifications which are sent at convient time set by users. By default, these notifications aren’t enabled.
Once you start logging your time, you can view analytics by switching to the analytics tab. This is where users often face the reality of their time usage. The analytics tab contains several widgets, each designed to show time usage in different ways. The first widget is a simple graph displaying daily time spent (on the y-axis) versus days (on the x-axis). The second widget shows weekly progress. It's not uncommon for people to start losing energy as they approach Thursday and Friday.
The next widget is likely the most feature-rich: the activity calendar. Each day is marked as productive, neutral, or wasteful based on the targets set for that day. Users can also designate days as holidays. These color codes provide a quick overview of past performance. Additionally, each day contains a record and history of activities, functioning as a mini time diary. While it's not intended to replace a traditional diary, it's a handy way to keep track of what you were doing on different days of the calendar.
Last but not the least, there is all time data and a productive badge based on overall performance of users.
I have planned more widgets for future releases. You can also share suggestions to improve these widgets or propose a completely new widget of your own. I will try to include these suggestions in future updates.
Users in closed testing have reported a decrease in their wasteful time usage after regularly using this app. The most significant reduction occurs in the use of social media apps. One user mentioned switching to listening to helpful podcasts instead of watching short videos once he realized how much time he was wasting on them. During the closed testing, I was also in Hyderabad for more than a week. The drop in productivity while in a metro city was quite significant. I wasn't able to register even a single productive day! Needless to say, working from home is far superior to working from the office. Just commuting to work was costing me more than 2.5 hours a day!
Time Overflow's purpose is to make users aware of these small things they might already know but tend to forget quickly. Once users create these records and start visualizing them, they become much more equipped and motivated to make informed decisions and cut out wasteful time usage. Time matters! Don’t let it slip away. Don’t let it overflow. It’s too precious too little.
Don’t forget to download and start using this app today!