Track The Time Blog

Smashing Magazine has published an article titled Passing The Holy Milestone: How To Meet Deadlines. It’s rather lengthy, but worth a read.

I didn’t know this before, but apparently Dwight Eisenhower played over 1,000 rounds of golf in his 7 years in office. Staggering! Can you imagine a President doing that nowadays? I can’t.

Anyways, I liked how Golf Digest visualized his golf playing on a calendar.

To see a full size image, check out this PDF.

Saw this gem from Paul Graham today and had to share:

A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you’re being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I’d feel like something was terribly wrong. Just thinking about it makes me wince. I’d start to feel uncomfortable after sitting on a sofa watching TV for 2 hours, let alone a whole day.

And yet I’ve definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day—days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I’d feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I’d feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It’s not fun. So it must be work.

Watching these ads made me remember all of the changes that have happened over the last 20 years. Amazing!

Here are ten great tips for taking charge of your time.

Link: Two Kids, In Two Years: Best Time Management Strategy Ever

Just read this tip on how to get things done when you have children:

I would spend lots of time thinking, and making notes randomly whenever I could. Then when I could sit down and do some work, I would have a plan. Another aspect that always helped, is that I was never able to get the list done. Which meant always knew what I was going to start on next.

Tonight while reading Hacker News I ran across a post describing the Pocket-To-Do. A cool template file you can download and print that gives you this:

Quick! Think about what you were eating for lunch a week ago on Monday. I bet you can’t remember. That’s my point. Time tracking after-the-fact is dumb and totally inaccurate.

At best, you’ll be able to guess about the chunks of time, but never the detail. You’ll forget all of the little things you did, and you’ll be forced to fudge the numbers.

Use your brain, use a stopwatch.

Photo on Flickr by conorwithonen (CC BY 2.0)

I found this presentation while reading this excellent post on the Contrast blog.

If you liked that, you might be interested in Designing for Social Traction.

When I ask people about their time tracking habits, most of them just say they are terrible at tracking their time. According to an informal survey I conducted, about 35% of you don’t even bother to track your time. And a whopping 40% track your time after-the-fact. Only 25% of you track your time as you work using a stopwatch or a timer.

I’m going to explain to you why I am compulsive about tracking time, and why I think it makes me more productive. All of us at Tornado Design track our time every day.

I track my time using a (software based) stopwatch as I work. It works great for me since I’m usually at my computer during the day.

I deal with lots of different projects and clients during the day and if I tried to remember what I was doing there is no way I could accurately remember. I’d be guessing, at best. And at worst I would forget half of the things and it wouldn’t be billed.

Since I track both my billable and unbillable time, I am able to accurately gauge my total utilization (the percentage of my time that is billable). This helps when determining hourly rates.

The most important aspect of tracking my time is knowing the timer is running. It’s a constant reminder that I am supposed to be productive and stay on-task. When the timer is running, I know I need to be working efficiently.

It’s akin to having a manager sitting behind you constantly critiquing your productivity. I take that pressure and apply it to my work.

On the flip side, when I’m doing unbillable tasks I can easily see that I’m not earning income and it reminds me to get back to the billable work.

I track time because it makes me more productive because I am constantly reminded by a ticking stopwatch.

Photo by bogenfreund on Flickr.

I stumbled across Peter Belanger’s web site and while reading his blog noticed he provided a writeup about how he goes about billing his clients.

It’s a curious look at the workflow of a photographer. He lists the tools he uses which are:

• Blinkbid (contacts, estimates, invoices)
• iCal (calendar)
• Evernote (to track expenses)
• Scanner Pro (iPhone app to add receipt images)
• QuickBooks (accounting)

Designer Jessica Hische comes out with the Day-Ruining Invoice notepad. What a great idea, and a fantastic way to vent. Available for $25 and on top of that it is letterpress.

Steve Zelle, an identity designer, chimes in about why he thinks billing by the hour is a bad idea.

You really can’t force creativity to happen. There are ways to encourage it and a process is there to help direct it, but in the end it has to just happen. So while a project may only take an hour at a desk, I can assure you more time was spent thinking about it.

The post has a number of interesting comments as well — so don’t miss them.

Link: Selling Projects in Blocks

Summary: Sell your time by the day (as blocks of time) and use the increased flexibility to have a life. Using this method, clients can know project length (in days, or months) and approximate cost. Since you’re only selling 4 days a month, you’ll hopefully have one day a week to work on the other stuff on your plate.

While I really like this idea, it does not work for us at Tornado because we have so many clients and so many projects and we handle ongoing work for most of them. It could work for you, though. Especially if you have only a few clients / projects per month.

The Perpetual Calendar is really cool, it requires a bit of modification every day, but what an interesting design.

If that strikes your fancy, check out this list of 49 other calendar designs.

Hat Tip: Kent Downer.

I stumbled across this awesome desktop background… thought you all might enjoy.

The rest of the Kitsune Noir web site has some great design inspiration.

When a client doesn’t seem to care how much time he is wasting, it usually means he’s not planning to pay the bill.

My friend Greg just sent me this cool hourglass timer set, for only $9.95 you get three timers which all run at different intervals.

A few years ago I had this crazy idea that the week between Christmas and New Years would be perfect for catching up on some side projects.

This all began when I realized that a significant number of people either take the week off, or assume you do. So it frees up a considerable amount of time, and thus others expectations.

And that’s how Ketchup Week began. I’d love to find a sponsor for it — perhaps Heinz or another ketchup maker — but for now the emphasis is on personal productivity.

Catching up on your work doesn’t necessarily mean you are working — it might mean you are catching up on relaxing.

So make this Ketchup Week your best!

Saw this today over on another blog under the category “best of calendar design.”