Why did we create LogMyTask (LMT)? This the first blog post from LMT team and I guess it is the appropriate place to answer this question.

I always wanted to use a simple web based time-tracking tool. I googled for a simple tool, but found that most of them are overly complex and have things like integrated invoicing, etc. I wanted something that is as simple as using Twitter. Something wherein I could just enter the answer to “What am I doing?” in a single input field and it would automatically do time tracking for me. I could use my Twitter account but most of my regular tasks would be mundane and not interesting enough to be a part of the Twitter timeline. Also, Twitter is not the right tool for time tracking. I would like to get statistics on how much time I have spent on a particular group of tasks. Lastly, I am a rather visual person and I would like to see my updates in a calendar view to get a quick idea on where am I spending time.

We quickly figured out that such a tool might be useful in a team environment as well. Let me give you a brief background on product development at my company Webyog, the creators of LMT. Webyog is the developer of several widely used MySQL Management and Monitoring Tools and popular Silverlight and WPF charting control Visifire. While we don’t strictly follow any particular software development methodology, we do borrow a few principles from Agile development. In particular, we have self organizing small teams (2-6 people) doing iterative development. We meet every two weeks to figure out what we should be doing (from our issue database) for the next couple of weeks. Once we decide that, each team member picks up tasks that he or she would deliver in the next two weeks. At the end of two weeks, we usually release a public beta of our product. Of course, we end up spending 20%-30% of the time on unplanned issues – usually bug fixes or support issues that require immediate attention. Note that we don’t decide the in which order would the team members execute their task. That is best decided by the person who takes up the task. At the same time, team members would like to know: What are their coworkers doing right now? Are they working on planned or unplanned issues? They would also like to get some statistics of how much time the team is spending on a specific group of tasks. Last but not the least, such data plotted on a calendar view will be absolutely fantastic.

LMT was created to address these specific requirements – time tracking at the individual level and Twitter style simple communication at the team level using a single point of data entry.

We could use time-sheets, but we hate time-sheets at Webyog. Time-sheets are not great for communicating in real time. Time-sheets are boring and people generally use them to fulfill the requirements of an organization wide process.

You might ask how LMT is different from some “Twitter for Enterprise” products. Yes, some of these products are great. They are just a bit complex for our requirements as they try to do a lot of things. We didn’t want this application to replace our existing communication tools. We are very happy with using phones, mail, IM and Skype for communication. We were blown away by Google Wave demo and we will probably use it when its available. No, we are also not suffering from Not Invented Here syndrome! At the time we started LMT, we couldn’t come across any product that provides Twitter-type simplicity for data entry and can still answer the following questions:

• How much time am I spending on a particular task?
• What is keeping me busy?
• What my coworkers are spending time on?
• What group of tasks are consuming the majority of my coworkers’ time?