About Wasted Time

Background

Wasted Time started as a joke between a group of consultants, many years ago when I did consulting for IBM. We were sitting around a conference room table, waiting for the customer to show up, and realized that they were 8 minutes late. At our billing rate, we could easily all go out for a beer that evening on the money they wasted.

The idea was to put a big clock on the table that counted up the cost of the meeting, and when everyone got there, we’d hit a button and find out the tab that was covered that night.

Many years later, I was testing out an early prototype of the app, while on an all hands call within Software Group, and it took 10 minutes to get started with eventually over 900 people on the call. If we took the ramp up of attendees, and the fully burdened rate, it was easily a $4,000 waste to get started and over $40,000 in employee time wasted sitting in that meeting. I had to get this app to the app store.

Basic Features

Overall the app is very simple, there are four major tabs:

  1. Meeting – This is the main view. Here you add attendees, create to do items, and see running cost of the meeting.
  2. Setup – This is required, you have to identify if you will provide a hourly or a yearly (Salaried) cost to help calculate the waste.
  3. Totals – You can see a running total of the cost of all your meetings, the cost of your time, and a lifetime of the app, running total.
  4. Help – This provides a simple set of instructions on how to use the app. It also provides information on the version of the app. If you ever need support, please provide me with the version and build.

You can see an example of the totals screen here:

Totals Screen Shot (macOS)

Platforms

When I started building the app, it was only for iOS. Over the years, I added new screen sizes, so that it would run better on iPadOS. Eventually, I rewrote the app from the ground up in SwiftUI, which allowed me to make versions for macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and in early 2024 visionOS. Each of these versions is based on the same code, but with minor UX changes for the environment.

One big change I would like to make in the future is to re-release the app with a new identifier, so I can have one build and one App Store entry showing all the versions. Unfortunately, over the years, all the versions got mixed up, so I have different versions for watchOS and visionOS.

Downloads

You can download Wasted Time on the various Apple App Stores at:

I’d love to hear what you think.