For as long as I’ve been building, I’ve lived in an unending cycle of optimizing things—my personal routines, my team structures, our product systems. No matter what stage I was in, one question kept returning, almost haunting me: How do we actually deal with time?

I come from a generation—and a profession—where we grew up convinced we could learn and build anything. Programmers and builders rarely feel limited by knowledge or skill. With curiosity and access to the internet, the world feels open. What stops us is almost always time.

You can create any product if the timeline is wide enough. You can pick up any skill if the calendar stretches far enough. But in the real world, results depend heavily on when something is delivered. That simple detail changes careers, companies, and outcomes.

A product built in one year has a completely different trajectory than the same product built in three. The same is true for features delayed by months. Opportunities shift, markets change, momentum fades. Teams that spend most of their time reacting rarely get the chance to shape the future. I’ve seen so many good startups die even with strong ideas and talented founders. The runway ends. You need enough speed to lift off before it does. Some teams simply don’t reach that point in time, even though they’re capable. The product gets built, but the timing slips, and the window closes.

Throughout the years I ran a software agency, managed engineering teams, and led product development, I became deeply interested in how time behaves inside work. I wasn’t trying to track it as much as I was trying to understand it. I wanted to design environments where time moved with purpose instead of scattering in all directions.

I experimented with processes, architecture decisions, communication rituals, roadmaps, and team rhythms. Much of what I learned came through intuition—signals I could feel, adjustments that made everything run smoother, patterns that showed up after many projects and decisions. These insights guided how I worked, but they were hard to describe or even name. They lived below the surface.

Then I started building WebWork, a product centered entirely on time. For the first time, I wasn’t just thinking about these ideas inside my own teams—I was building a system used by tens of thousands of people to understand their time, improve it, and shape how work moves through their companies.

WebWork became a place where intuition met real data. I could finally see the patterns I had sensed for years: how time slipped, where it accumulated, how work changed shape depending on the environment around it. The product revealed how easily teams drift, how quickly priorities can dissolve, and how much clarity matters.

This experience made something obvious: understanding time requires more than counting hours. It asks for awareness of how work flows, how decisions ripple through teams, and how structure influences momentum.

After many years of building, observing, and studying these patterns, one idea became central to everything I was seeing: time behaves like a system. It reacts to structure, environment, expectations, and habits. Left alone, it tends to scatter. Shaped intentionally, it creates movement and progress.

That understanding became the starting point for Builder’s Time.

The book is an attempt to organize a decade of thoughts, instincts, and observations into something clear and useful. It looks at how teams drift into reactive cycles, how products lose years through misalignment, why progress often stalls even when people work hard, and how builders can create environments where time turns into momentum.

I wrote the book to put words on the questions I’ve wrestled with for years:
Why does work take the time it takes?
Why do some hours matter far more than others?
Why do weeks disappear without progress in some environments and compound rapidly in others?
And how do we build systems that give work the best possible chance to move forward?

Many of us who grew up in this generation of builders believe we can do anything. The harder truth we eventually meet is that we cannot do everything in time. Learning to work within that reality—shaping it instead of fighting it—became the center of my journey.

Builder’s Time is the book I needed when I started. My hope is that it helps others see their work and their time with clearer eyes.