Timeful

» see timeful.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The problem Timeful picked is real and everybody has it. A calendar knows about meetings, which other people put there, and a to-do list knows about intentions, which nobody has scheduled. The gap between those two is where most of what you meant to do goes to die, and the app's whole reason for existing was to close it: read the empty space in the week, and put the intentions into it at times you were plausibly going to honor.

The founding team was unusual for a productivity app. Dan Ariely is the behavioral economist who wrote Predictably Irrational, Yoav Shoham is a Stanford professor on the artificial intelligence side, and Jacob Bank was a Stanford PhD student who ran the company. They raised close to $7 million before shipping anything, led by Khosla Ventures with Kleiner Perkins and Data Collective alongside, and the pitch was that the scheduling would be a model rather than a set of rules.

The iPhone app went live on 31 July 2014. Google announced it had bought the company on 4 May 2015, said the technology would go into Calendar and Inbox, and stopped development. Fourteen months after launch, the app was off the store and the servers were off.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it worked ~

You connected an existing calendar, Exchange or Google, and then added the things you owed yourself. Timeful put both on one surface and proposed times, learning from what you accepted and what you pushed. Habits were first-class: a thing you wanted to do three times a week was a different object from a task with a deadline, and the app kept trying to place it rather than letting it sit in a list going stale.

The behavioral part was the point. Ariely's argument was that people are not bad at knowing what they should do, they are bad at deciding when, and that a piece of software willing to make that decision for you removes the moment where the intention gets dropped.

~ what google bought ~

An acqui-hire with a working model attached. Twenty or so people went over, Bank became a product manager on Calendar, and on 12 April 2016 Google Calendar added Goals, which asks you what you want to do more of and then finds room for it and moves it when you defer. That is Timeful, rebuilt inside a calendar a billion people already had.

Which is also the reason the standalone app is a footnote. It existed for fourteen months, on one phone platform, among the people who read technology blogs about time management. I was in Ankara doing engineering work with an Android phone in my pocket, and the first time any of this reached me it had no name on it, no launch coverage attached, and no founders. It was a suggestion inside a Google app.

~ the goodbye page ~

Timeful's last homepage is a clean piece of writing and worth reading for the sequence alone. At the end of August the app would come off the App Store. At the end of September the servers would go off permanently. There was an export tool, and a line telling you to use it before 30 September if you wanted your data.

Then the part most shutdown notices do not bother with: after the servers went down, user data would be deleted permanently, and would not be accessible by Google or anyone else. The note thanks the community, says the team will miss making the app, and signs off with "until the end of time".

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