When we were in the earliest stages of planning the future of our product, we were looking at the pain points of our users. And one huge one kept coming up, again and again: they hated timesheets. With an almost pathological passion. But they were seen as a necessary evil – because studios needed to keep track of time used and money spent to manage their businesses. It seemed an intractable problem.
But after digging down to the real core of the issue, we found a solution: people hated timesheets because they were laborious, time-consuming and (most importantly) offered no reward for the time invested. So we decided to flip the script: we’d make time tracking less work, and offer the user something for their effort.
But after digging down to the real core of the issue, we found a solution: people hated timesheets because they were laborious, time-consuming and (most importantly) offered no reward for the time invested. So we decided to flip the script: we’d make time tracking less work, and offer the user something for their effort.
How Streamtime’s to-do lists work.
The first step (making time tracking less work for the user) was surprisingly simple in retrospect. Estimates for how long each task should take were already being created by job managers in the form of job plans. All we had to do was was create some smart algorithms that would identify from the job plan who needed to do what, figure out how important each task was based on deadlines and job priorities, and use this information to pre-populate the user’s time tracker with best-guess estimates of what they’d need to do (and when).
In Streamtime, this all happens automatically – when a job is set to ‘scheduled’ in the job management part of the system, the appropriate tasks will automatically be added to each user’s weekly to-do list (around their existing tasks). If we still used timesheets, it’d be the equivalent of having your timesheets filled out for you.
So that was the ‘less work’ half sorted – but how could we possibly offer something for the user in return? The answer was the Zeigarnik effect (for those of you who don’t remember, that’s the subconscious brain’s insistent need to have a specific plan in place to achieve your desires). By ditching the timesheet model and adopting pre-populated to-do lists instead, we’re able to provide every user freedom from the Zeigarnik effect – because they now never have to remember what they need to do (or when they need to do it). With time management taken care of for them (in an intuitive, fun-to-use way), they’re free to focus their minds on creative endeavours.
