Many people don't like to spend a lot of time doing things that don't contribute directly to their paycheck. Finclock is an attempt to make business projects as painless and automatic as possible. Finclock is a project management system for business. A project consists of a specification, a plan, and a budget. The specification is what the client wants. The plan describes how the project will be done. The budget is how much money the client has available, and how much of that budget will be allocated to this project and how long it will last. Finclock lets you specify, plan, and budget a project without leaving your desk. The specification is put into a word processor, a plan is put into a spreadsheet, and a budget is put into a database. When you work on something in one of these programs, Finclock keeps track of what you do, and when. That way, when it's time to go talk to the client, you know what you've done.

In an economy where no one knows what the other is going to do, all you can do is make as many bets as you can and hope they pay off. Finclock is an online project management system. The idea is to use a database to organize your projects, making everything easier. You put your projects in the database, and the database tells you what to do next. After you start the project, you do things step by step. At some point, you have to decide whether this project is worth finishing. If it is, you add new tasks to your to-do list. If it is time for another decision, you throw it away and start over. Here's how it works. First, you gather information about your projects. How much time and money do you need? How long do you expect the project to take? Who is working on the project? What does he or she need? What is likely to happen? Then you make assumptions. For instance, how much time will you spend each day doing other things? How many hours a day will you spend on the project? How much work will someone else do? How much will it cost? How likely are you to win? After you make those assumptions, you make bets. You either bet that you have enough time and money to finish the project, or if you don't have enough, you bet that you will save enough money to fund the missing part. You do the analysis, which tells you the chances you have of winning.

A finclock project is like a clockwork model of your business. It describes all the steps you need to follow to get a particular job done. Like the clockwork model, a finclock project identifies the right jobs to be done, and shows how people in the company should work together. Typically, the different parts of the project are still carried out by different people. But the finclock model has a key difference from a regular clockwork model: the finclock model shows the very next thing that needs to be done. It specifies how the project will unfold. It works like this:  lwho will do it ("dobox"), and the task ("taskbox"). The finclock model then shows other parts of the project as a chain, with the next job to be done as a link. The finclock model measures how fast a project is progressing by counting the number of boxes in the chain. A finclock project is not the same as a Gantt chart. A Gantt chart lists tasks with dates and durations, but does not show how they fit together. A finclock model shows both. A Gantt chart only shows which jobs need to be done when. A finclock project shows which jobs need to be done to build the project, and when. A Gantt chart shows the work that needs to be done; a finclock model shows the jobs to be done. A finclock model gives you a picture, not just of what needs to be done, but of the order in which the job