Time Tackle: What if your calendar is synced to help you achieve your goals?

Towards the end of his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at North South University, Syam Anupom became involved in writing blog posts as an extra-curricular activity. 

His posts caught the attention of someone from Silicon Valley who then reached out to him.

"I was always passionate about programming and in 2007, a Silicon Valley company contacted me and offered me work. Back then, internet connectivity in Bangladesh was not as good as it is now. There was nothing like Zoom and we mostly communicated via emails. But I was excited about the offer and took on the challenge, and worked remotely for three months," Syam shared with The Business Standard about one of his earliest job experiences.  

An experienced distributed systems engineer, Syam has worked at prestigious companies such as Netflix, Evernote, Disney and the MIT Media Lab. 

He founded TimeTackle - a start-up that analyses Google calendar data to match a team's time with the company goals and therefore optimise the time. 

Timetackle can be used by CEOs or those in similar positions with lots of meetings in their schedule, and TimeTackle helps them distribute their time equally and efficiently. 

It will even help the busy users squeeze in some time for personal activities such as going to the gym and so on.    

TimeTackle got accepted in Silicon Valley's biggest start-up incubator "Y Combinator".

Hard works paved the way

For those three months that a young Syam worked from Bangladesh, he did not take any holidays. 

"I worked 24/7 and gradually reached out to my friends and classmates who also began to work with me. In 2009, we became a team of 30 to 35 people working from Bangladesh. The times were different and we accepted whatever was thrown at us and just worked really hard. The start-up that we were working for got acquired by Playdom - a social game company which was eventually acquired by Disney," said Syam.  

In 2010, The Walt Disney Company acquired Playdom in a record deal worth USD 763.2 million. After this, Syam moved to Silicon Valley where he worked for Disney for quite a while. 

"Our work is to give you a report on your time - show you how much of your time you are spending with your family, how much time you are spending talking to customers, or at fundraising events, etc" --Syam Anupom, founder of Time Tackle

Then, he finished his Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois and joined another start-up called Evernote where he led the Data/ML platform team. From here, he went to Netflix where he worked for three years. 

We asked Syam where the concept of TimeTackle came from. 

He replied, "In the US or other western countries, everything tends to happen through a calendar - all the meetings and what not. You know, sometimes people would not even talk to you if you are not on their calendar! So, over time, the calendar became a sort of database of how people are spending their time and who they are interacting with." 

"For those who have, say, eight to 10 meetings throughout the day, it becomes necessary for them to add their personal activities to their calendar. When so much of your time is occupied by the calendar, you begin to protect that time or else someone might come and take it away from you. 

"It is very natural for people like CEOs in the US to spend a lot of time in meetings. Our work is to give you a report on your time - show you how much of your time you are spending with your family, how much time you are spending talking to customers, or at fundraising events, etc," he explained. 

Syam Anupom, founder of Time Tackle. Sketch/TBS

Time management coach and accountability partner 

TimeTackle is essentially a person's time management coach, said Syam.

"In fact, we are also your accountability partner. Suppose, you want to have dinner with your family every Wednesday night but you cannot seem to manage time for it because you have a packed schedule. What we do is we help you align your priorities with your goals so you get to have sufficient space to do things like spending time with your family. We will also help you have a more well-organised routine," he said.

At present, TimeTackle has five members in the team along with Syam, three of whom are working remotely from Bangladesh. The current number of registered users is around 1,25,000. 

When it started, TimeTackle was more like a side project for Syam, so the users were not asked to pay anything. However, at the moment there are 650 paid users. Most TimeTackle users are CEOs, executives and teams such as sales, internal support, IT, etc. – ones who usually have a lot of meetings. 

"Our users are inbound; we do not reach out to them. We mostly got known through word-of-mouth. We never ran any advertisements even," Syam informed us. 

Unlike other start-ups, there is no TimeTackle app for mobile phones. If you want to use TimeTackle, you would have to visit the website www.timetackle.com and sign up. 

Your Google calendar will be connected to TimeTackle which will then analyse data and create reports and charts. 

TimeTackle provides service, much like Netflix, so users have to pay a monthly fee which starts from USD50 for a team and USD30 for an individual user.  

The demand for time management actually increased during the Covid-19 pandemic. For the last six months that Syam had been running TimeTackle full-time, he witnessed a lot of interest from companies. Cutting down on meetings became a need for them.

Although now people have adjusted to a pandemic life and are not as frantically looking to manage time, Syam believes that the problems in cutting down on meetings will always exist.   

"Despite the pandemic, TimeTackle is still going strong and we believe we are going to keep performing well in the market," he concluded.