"Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed." This profound insight from Peter Drucker, often regarded as the 'father of modern management,' encapsulates the core philosophy behind CuroWork, a groundbreaking platform envisioned by co-founders Daniel Paik and Andy Chen.

Daniel Paik's 18 years of experience in back-office operations unveiled a critical issue: the lack of a system to accurately measure and manage time and tasks at work. Through conversations with over 200 back-office professionals, he found a common struggle—teams felt overwhelmed, burnt out, and managers were in the dark about their team's capacity. Daniel shares, “The first thing we hear from our users is that they wish they had a way to manage and see how busy they are and with what.” He adds, “And managers feel helpless without those insights.”

“This is exactly why we see retention and burnout issues in back-office roles. Every day is new, with to-do lists that exponentially grow.” Andy explains, “We need to fight new issues that pop up, complete business-critical tasks that need to be done, and sit through a mountain of meetings, all the while making progress on new projects. There isn’t enough time in the day.”

The Solution is Clarity

Andy and Daniel’s mission is ambitious yet straightforward; their platform will transform back-offices from mere cost centers into growth engines that help corporations grow and empower the people who work in them to feel less stressed, more engaged, and more achievement. How? They discovered that getting clarity was the solution. That is where CuroWork comes in. It was designed to provide a single source of truth for all tasks, allowing managers to prioritize and distribute work effectively.

While back-offices are often perceived as necessary costs, they are also undervalued and underinvested. While existing systems manage some projects well, they fail to capture the substantial workload and provide clarity, including the firefighting tasks that constitute up to 60% of back-office work. CuroWork aims to standardize the chaos of these tasks by providing a solution that allows managers to see team workloads, helps them facilitate the delegation of tasks and enables them to make data-driven decisions. After all, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

“Right now, it’s hard to tell the impact an urgent new request for a report from higher-ups can have on the team downstream. The team could already be overloaded, and stacking the last block on top of the shaky Jenga tower could cause a collapse - or key team members to quit,” Daniel describes, “we’re building a system to visualize what that tower looks like at any point in time so managers can help delegate and distribute loads effectively, allowing them to make quick, data-driven decisions on work. By measuring and understanding our team’s workload in this way - we can train new machine-learning models that effectively even out workloads, predict project deadline obstacles as they arise, and provide retention risk scores if employees have been overworked for too long.”

More than ever, with the global emphasis on remote work, CuroWork becomes even more relevant. The platform fosters trust by providing 360-degree visibility into the team’s deliverables, priorities, and capacity, which enables effective management.

The Stories

As Daniel and Andy talk to more and more back-office professionals, the ‘horror’ stories keep amassing. At a larger scale company, through onboarding, they discovered one accountant, hidden in plain sight, was dedicating five hours monthly for five years to a report rendered obsolete three years prior by the receiving department lead. Another story revealed a senior director spending only 18% of his time on his designated department. And one woman found herself spending a third of her time on tasks that weren’t even part of her job description.

These kinds of insights provided by CuroWork allow managers to catch these massive efficiency problems. Identifying such inefficiencies has allowed teams to reclaim deep work time, fostering increased productivity without additional time investment. This has translated into reduced time spent on routine tasks, a heightened sense of achievement through increased focus on critical projects, and overall improvements in stress levels, engagement, and, most importantly, workplace culture.

“It’s been incredibly rewarding seeing the effects our Beta has already had on the stress levels and culture within teams,” Daniel expressed, “therapeutic has been one of the words we keep hearing. We’re building something that balances that fine edge between visibility, time efficiency, and productivity. Providing something helpful for managers that team members get a ton of value from as well.”

To join their beta waitlist, visit: https://www.curowork.com/