Lately I’ve been obsessed with tracking applications. I find it fascinating to have statistics after logging my food, weight, distance travelled, time spent or financial transactions in an application. Not only statistics, but suggestions on improving the numbers.

I think a tracking system can be applied to anything and would be an incredible tool to improve efficiency and performance. Unfortunately tracking applications are pretty bad. I still haven’t found a simple, useful money tracking application. Mint could be a nice choice, but unfortunately I can’t use it from Romania. The same goes for task management, where Wunderlist is the best app I’ve used so far, but it still doesn’t cover my needs, which need less features and more speed, and preferably another level of tracking.

I would like to offer my clients and my potential clients a clear picture of my schedule, productivity and even my mood levels. I’d like to gather information about my tasks, an almost live task progress, project status (ahead of schedule, on time, behind schedule, work paused) and maybe an efficiency rating to quantify how fast a certain task has been finished.

This kind of transparency should be an amazing feature for clients, because they’ll be able to see the progress on their applications, when I’ll resume work on their applications, what I’m working on and how am I performing. This added pressure will also force me to work faster and write higher quality code.

I’ll try creating applications to allow this kind of transparency. The plan is to have multiple levels of transparency, and maybe charging a little extra for more transparency. I’ll see if this works as planned.