...And there was morning

The other night some colleagues and I were enjoying a fine Cognac around the dining room table. We are all "tech" guys of one sort or another and were having a quasi-philosophical discussion on the way of the world and how online applications and automation have completely changed the way the world works and communicates. We pondered further on how much the internet has integrated into just about every facet of our lives in one way or another.

We found a few areas that may be improved and then I sent a message to all my 1800 linkedin contacts asking their opinion. The question sounded like "...with all the automation and online apps available today...if there was one thing in your life or business that wasn't already automated but you would love to automate or bring online what would it be?"

You can imagine the answers... People want to automate their jobs, bosses, wives, want to get a month worth salary for a day work effort... However some replies were interesting and inline with my and my friends' thoughts. The areas for automation were in:

- electronic kitchen devices to help people find recipes and make better and various dishes
- online travel reports that somehow included receipts acceptable to accounting for faster travel reimbursement
- pattern / trend development
- a washer and dryer that was capable of sending an IM/SMS/Email when the cycles were done and a web access to the controls, so one can start it before he leaves the office
- an automatic inventory of the food in the kitchen that updates a shopping list which is provided to an online grocery and the missing basics (milk, fruits, vegetables, etc.) are automatically delivered

However the best advice was given by Bruno Roques: "Definitely time sheets. Trying to remember what you've spent your time on every end of month and filling manually an Excel sheet with hours per project is the most boring non creative but essential thing I know".

And then Nathalie Toussaint added "I work on several projects per day so I would love a widget that time monitors my computer activities (the files or mail I open/create/work on ...) . At the end of the week, my time sheet automatically opens and I can associate files/mails, or web addresses to projects."

The time management idea looked so intriguing so we immediately started our research. We found few different types of online project management software, time attendance and time management applications, few timecard (timeclock) and time sheet web sites. Some of them looked nice but they all required end users to enter their hours manually. And that is exactly the point we wanted to eliminate. We are very, very lazy people :) We also firmly believe that laziness is the catalyst of technological progress. Only a very lazy person could have even had the inclination to invent a wheel... So we couldn't sit idly by while thousands (or maybe millions) of people manually type their timesheets... We decided to completely automate it. Stay tuned for updates.