“In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.”
— Béla Bartók
The landscape of web-based time tracking, task management, and project management tools has become a little noisy. It seems that each month another company is throwing their app into the fray and hoping for the best. While those of us behind Intervals believe this to be a good thing, because it offers the small business more options in finding a solution that will fit them best, it has become interesting to watch how various web-based offerings are going about differentiating themselves. It is not uncommon to see a web-based tool using the words “rethought,” “redefined,” or “revolutionary” in their taglines.
Revolutionary? That’s a big word. There are wars named after that word. But a web-based app? The dictionary has this to say about revolution:
Revolution: a drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving
While probably meant to invoke buzz, such big words usually don’t amount to much more than a fleeting flurry of retweets. Revolutionary is what the guys at 37signals did with Basecamp. They created an entire culture around the way small businesses think and get things done online. Building a web-based app that does one thing different than Basecamp is not revolutionary, it’s just different.
We’ve never been ones to self-apply such lofty words to a product like Intervals because, well, Intervals is not revolutionary. It is, however, evolutionary. Our goal from the very beginning has been to create and evolve a web-based project management tool that learns from its customers and adapts to small business trends. Evolution is defined differently than revolution:
Evolution: development: a process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage (especially a more advanced or mature stage)
Intervals start out being different from Basecamp and its ilk, and continues to be different in many ways. While we haven’t rethought, redefined, or revolutionized the landscape, we have built a solid application that provides a fresh and different perspective on small business project management workflow. For example, Intervals was one of the first apps out there to combine task management and time tracking with powerful project management and reporting features. While other web-based apps are starting to catch up in these areas, Intervals continues to evolve its core trinity of time, task and project management.
How, exactly, is Intervals evolutionary? We incorporate our customers ideas into our application. We launch new updates every few weeks. We are constantly tweaking and tuning the app to run faster. We continue to enhance the interface making Intervals even easier to use. And while we have a road map guiding our next few rounds of features, we are responsive to an ever fluctuating landscape and are known to rethink and redefine our own decisions and processes to make Intervals a better web-based project management application.
Intervals has and always will be focused on tracking time, managing tasks, and managing projects. Our goal is not to change up how this is done, but to make it easier to incorporate into the workflow of a typical small business. Intervals is built on small business methodologies that were developed in our nine-plus years as a web design and development agency. As those methodologies continue to evolve, so will Intervals.
