My story: why Wastime exists

This didn't start in a single day. And there was no one big event after which everything suddenly went bad, either.

It was more that, for a few years in a row, tiredness kept piling up inside me. Work was moving along, tasks got done, days filled up with something. At the same time, anxiety about money and about work joined the tiredness, and it wasn't an empty fear, at one point I was one step away from losing my job. Add to that living abroad, having emigrated for work, in a country where everything close to me stayed far away. And the constant feeling that I'm busy every day, but by the evening I can't remember what with.

In September 2024 all of this turned acute. One evening, around September 18, I caught myself thinking something simple and unpleasant. That I was sort of swiping through my own life, the same way I swipe through my Instagram feed. And this is where the question came up. Simple at first glance, but a fairly painful one.

“How much time do I waste every day?”

Here I'd like to give some kind of definition for the word “waste”. It sounds strong, but what do I actually mean by it? In reality it's a subjective and personal thing, and everyone decides for themselves what counts as “waste” for them. To be honest, for me personally it's more about situational things I do in the moment that I shouldn't be doing at this point in my life, under the circumstances I'm in.

Back then, in September, I of course didn't put it that clearly. It was more a feeling that something was off, and every time I found an explanation for it. Well, I'm tired. Well, everyone lives like this. Only those explanations didn't make it any easier. I wanted to understand what was happening and where it was taking me. Something inside was telling me pretty clearly that I couldn't keep going like this. And that it was time to figure out what in all of this was actually in my hands.

A planner instead of fooling myself

I started with the simplest thing. I took an ordinary paper planner and began writing down where the time actually goes. No complicated system. Just as it is:

• scrolling Reels and short videos,
• social media,
• news,
• games,
• mindless wandering around the internet,
• that morning inertia when I can’t start anything for hours and I just keep scrolling my phone.

For about ten days I kept these entries pretty diligently. Individual days became clearer, each one showed how much had leaked away. But the scale I still couldn't see. An hour gone today, so what? Is that a lot or a little? A one-off slip, or is it always like this? What happens if this goes on for years?

What I was missing was a tool that would show, next to today's hour, its continuation. What happens if I give this one hour every day.

Sometimes we really are tired and really do want quiet, and that's fine. What scared me was something else, autopilot. When I don't choose how to spend the evening, I just fall into the usual funnel and come to late at night, with a heavy head and the feeling that the day went somewhere.

Why I built a prototype

I have an engineering degree, and for the last 9 years I've worked in IT as a backend/fullstack developer. So the thought “build yourself a small tool” felt natural. And anyway, to be honest, I've always dreamed of making an app. Basically, that dream was what kept me inspired as an engineer.

I built it over a weekend. Saturday and Sunday, the first version, twenty hours or so, maybe even less. I wasn't launching a product and had no plans to. It was purely my own tool, to deal with my own pain and see what was going on in numbers. I showed it to my wife, and for about the next year I don't think I told anyone else about the project at all.

I like numbers for one reason. They don't shame you and they don't moralize. They just show the scale, and then you decide for yourself whether to leave everything as it is or change something.

The first screen and the click

I still remember the first screen clearly. There was no design. Only numbers and the captions under them. If I keep spending 10-15 hours a week on the usual “small stuff”, then over ten years that turns into about 6,500 hours. That's around 270 days. Almost nine months of pure time. My first reaction was very simple, word for word – “No f*cking way”.

That's when something clicked. Nine months doesn't fit into “oh well, it happens” anymore. Even if some of those hours went to that same quiet I really did need, the rest is a piece of life that I either throw into the void or keep for myself.

At first it was called simply Waste, after its first task. Then it became clear that this wasn't only about lost hours, and Waste became Wastime. You can read the word in different ways. From “Waste”, as in time wasted. Or from “Was”, as in time that already was. I call it both ways myself, so call it whichever way suits you. For me it's a personal tool and a reminder to myself that life is finite, and every day is worth something.

Two years later

Two years have passed since that first screen. That weekend version has grown into an app I now show to more people than just my wife. At first I had no plans to publish it. But at some point I caught the thought that this way of looking at your time might be useful to someone else. Not to everyone, of course. But to a person who ended up in a similar spot.

I don't believe in “productivity for productivity's sake”. What matters to me is clarity. When you see where your life is going, you at least get a chance to choose again, what to keep and what to change. And I'll be really happy if these tools end up helping someone besides me.

Keep feeling.