Thanks for everyone that is a reader. Also, note the clever title with every word beginning with a “t”!

Productivity Ideas:

1. Having trouble keeping focused at work? Keep getting distracted by sites like Digg, Slashdot, and your RSS reader? A suggestion that we heard recently was to try this trick: Schedule time for reading blogs. Set a time and make it a high priority. You’ll realize how much time you spend reading sites, and become aware of it.
2. Track your time in 15 minute increments. By tracking all of your working time, you’ll find yourself more focused and learn where you are wasting time.
3. Create a set working-hours-schedule. An easy way to begin is to limit your working hours to a certain number per day. Or, a certain workday ending time.
4. Move your desk, or get a second desk just for your computer. Sometimes having a workspace that is large enough to accomodate both your computer and your paperwork is where it is at. The extra space affords more creativity, inspires you to sketch ideas, and not use your computer as much. In the past, I have also physically picked up everything on my desk and moved it to another part of the office. New scenery and a change in pace was all I needed to get motivated.

It is also a screensaver for OS X and Windows! Be sure to check it out, it’s quite cool and worth installing.

Here at the office Tom occasionally has to write Regular Expressions. He’s come to depend on a tool called RegexBuddy (for Windows) which he purchased for only $40. A really great value when you consider the time he’s saved.

Me? I don’t use regular expressions, I use Extra-Large Expressions.

For the majority of what I do, I’m doing it right here on the MacBook Pro. So a nice little tool bar or icon on the task bar would be handy. What do you recommend?
Signed,
A Reader

Chris responds with a few time tracking suggestions:
Hello Reader,

Thank you for asking, we’ve researched a number of time-tracking apps and made a handy list of time tracking software at www.timetrackingresources.com — check it out!

A popular time tracking application that works across Windows and Mac is Harvest (but get the widget so you can track time from the desktop).

And there is a Mac Desktop widget called TimePost2 you can purchase that works with a lot of different time tracking web apps.

One more recommendation: Billings. We’ve heard from many satisfied customers of Billings that it is a useful tool.

Use one of those programs until Minuteglass, our own software application, is released. Minuteglass is going to be released by Tornado later this year. It’s a time tracking application (for Web, OS X, and Windows).

I hope that helps!
Regards,
Chris

1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.
2. Thou shalt not hide content.
3. Thou shalt not clutter.
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections.
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels.
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography.
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences.
8. Thou shalt be social.
9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies.
10. Thou shalt make content king.

The article also has a neat slideshow called “best and worst of the web” which is worth the time and shouldn’t be missed!

TinyAlarm is a Mac only tool which is free and installs easily on your taskbar. You can quickly set a timer and your computer will notify you at that time. It’s super simple, and is perfect for simple stuff like remembering to pick up pizza.

Tony Wright, the founder, reveals that by using their own product they realized an efficiency increase when a specific team member took a day off (after long periods of working on their product). Very interesting.

I have to give props to the quality of the video. Scoble really has an excellent setup with multiple cameras rolling at once to provide excellent video.

Lately I have been thinking about goals for this blog. Its ultimate purpose is to promote our own time tracking tool called Minuteglass (sign up for beta and we’ll email you when we’re launching). We’ve decided that sharing interesting tips and tools to help you track your productivity are an essential way to bring value to this blog. So expect more posts like this one in the future.

I recently returned from 3 weeks in Italy and while visiting the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican I was struck by how quickly the ceiling had been painted. Only 4 years! It really made me think about how many people go about their lives hating their jobs, working for people they don’t like, and not really doing anything meaningful.

You know what’s most interesting? It was one of the first painting projects that Michelangelo had ever done. Yeah, seriously isn’t that amazing? Of course he was well known for his abilities with sculpture — a sculptor with little painting experience.

So the lesson to be learned is to always do what you love, and do your best.

Continue Reading:

• Sistine Chapel on Wikipedia
• Sistine set-up: the 500-year-old art mystery -– a sculptor with little painting experience.
• Michelangelo on Wikipedia

I’m more motivated and work harder.

Having a timer running all day long that tracks both my billable and non-billable time has forced me to constantly evaluate my productivity. In a strange way it acts as a constant reminder to be productive at work. The key is to have the timer running all the time. That way you always have to change the timer from one task to another.

At the end of every day, I know exactly how much I’ve earned for our company.

Believe me, there is nothing more inspiring than to look at the time log for the day and see that I earned $700 (or whatever the amount is).

It’s a lot easier to bill customers.

Prior to tracking my time with software, I would jot down notes about what I was working on. Little did I know I was actually forgetting about half of what I had worked on. Plus, it was difficult to remember the exact day I had worked on a project.

We’ve developed some internal tools for helping us sort through all of our time entries and place them on invoices.

We also switched so that most of our projects are billed hourly.

The biggest difference we immediately noticed was a lack of stress surrounding client change requests. Suddenly, customers requesting changes became an opportunity to earn more money rather than give free time to a client (if it was within scope).

Two years ago 95% of our projects were on a fixed-bid cost basis. We would estimate a specific dollar amount for each project, and then work hard to try to keep the gig within that estimate.

What we’ve noticed now is that we write half as many proposals, and instead our customers (new and old) work with us on an hourly basis. If you’re in the design business and are looking for a change I can’t recommend it enough.

Speed!

The biggest change though has been in our momentum. We literally accomplish twice as much as we used to get done. In the past, we would get bogged down with writing customer proposals, spending hours spec’ing out projects, and dealing with customer change requests. Change requests are now an opportunity rather than a cost.

If you’re not sure where to begin, I recommend giving time tracking a try. Make a goal to track all of your time for one week and at the end of the week evaluate your results.

By the way, as a result of tracking my time, I know that 47% of my time in 2007 was billable. Our goal with our upcoming product is to make it easy for everyone to track all of their time.

Thanks to Brian for the tip.

Bob Parsons who runs Go Daddy has written about tracking and measuring important business numbers. I read this and said “yeah, I need to do that.”

One thing I learned early in my business career is that anything of significance that is measured and watched, improves.

Back before I started Parsons Technology I became impressed with something I read about John D. Rockefeller. In fact, I still think about it and use it to this very day. I learned that Mr. Rockefeller was one of the few people in his industry (perhaps the only one) who knew exactly how much it cost to extract, refine and deliver a barrel of oil. In fact, he was entirely aware of all his costs. Knowing this information (and acting on it) gave him a huge competitive advantage. He knew how much he could price a barrel of oil for and still turn a profit. He was always keenly aware of each area of revenue, cost and market share, and he worked on improving in every area. As a result, he did cost saving things like manufacture his own oil barrels, have his own cartage company, and on and on.

The first sentence is the most important. Read it if you skipped over it.

This all brings me to my point. I think it’s very important to track the numbers that make your business a success. I’ve tried to do this over the years and have tracked a large number but never to the extent I want (for numerous reasons, not that I didn’t try).

As I said, I’ve been thinking about the next generation web firm and wondered what numbers you track in your business or where you work? The obvious things like revenue and billable hours are obvious, the less obvious are things like average employee utilization across a period of time, or average timespan to develop a site… How does this affect the bottom line? Does it give you a competitive advantage? I’ve got loads of ideas about things that can be tracked. Putting systems in place to actually track them (consistently) is the next step.

After asking the two key questions people ask (where do you live and how do you know so and so) someone asked what he did for a living. He said he worked for the city. Then he commented that it was the safest job in the world and said that he would probably have to murder someone in order to get fired.

Maybe it’s time that our cities adopt the GE management idea and regularily trim the bottom 10% from their workforce.

One of the first things I thought about was the idea that “safe” means different things to different people. To this guy, safe means a steady paycheck and benefits. And I suppose he won’t have to dust off his resume too often.

To me, a safe job means that I’m in control of how much money I can make. That doesn’t always mean I get to pick when I work, but ultimately I am in charge.

So this got me thinking. Is there a way to combine both of these worlds. I think that profit sharing plans are a start, however I like some of the things that Semco does in Brasil. They basically put people in charge of their salary along with the ability to hire and fire their managers. Since their co workers can also vote to remove someone, there’s a lot of incentive to be fair.

I know that not everybody is in a position to introduce plans and systems like this, but I think it’s wise to consider and aim towards that goal. The trick always comes down to whether the people on your team have an owners mentality.

What’s the point of this post? Well, I just read a fun article called 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job. I have been approaching my business with this model recently. Building up an all-service business is hard because you have to spend time in order to earn money. That’s why I’m slowly moving into ideas that earn residual income. It’s not easy but everything has much greater potential.

And that’s really what it’s all about.

Previously, the product was called Roundup, and before that Windstorm.

Now, we’ve come up with a name we’re happy with. It’s Minuteglass. It’s like “hourglass” but for minutes. Get it? We like it and we’re working on logos and also working on the product. We’ve got more people on the team, so the product is coming together faster.

We realize that not everyone will find our software to be perfect for their uses. So check out this new web site and we hope you find something that works for you!

A whiteboard with a clock built into it. Such a simple and grand idea! If you’ve ever been the unhappy participant of a 4 hour long meeting, this is for you! Unfortunately, I don’t know if the product is for sale. It was first released in 2004 and I couldn’t find it for sale online.

Thanks to Brian Shaler for the tip.

Follow Minute Glass: http://twitter.com/MinuteGlass

Follow Chris: http://twitter.com/christingom

Follow Tom: http://twitter.com/tomchapin

So who’s going? Chris Tingom and Thomas Chapin. If you’re going to be there this year, and would like to meet up, just give us a shout. Thanks.

As I was configuring viaKLIX for a customer, I stumbled across this great feedback form. They actually have an option for “confusing interface.” How appropriate.

This is a classic case of a company seeing a problem and applying a band-aid to the problem, and never fixing the root problem. In this case, a confusing interface.

Seth Godin, a marketing wizard who has written many books I admire, says this about band-aid marketing: Every quarter, your company ships new products or services. And every quarter, someone says, “under the circumstances,” or “given the deadline” or “with the team we had available”… it’s the best we could do. I say ship nothing.

Good advice.

It’s Ketchup Week! The one week a year when you can ketchup on all of your work! It’s also the week where we’re going to be spending quite a bit of time working on our web app! Should be fun and productive.

When scientists drill an ice core they pull a very large sample of data. Similar to the rings on a tree, ice cores have layers and it is possible to tell each annual layer apart. Water evaporates at different speeds depending on the outdoor temperature. It’s actually possible to see this in the samples. The other method is through Irradiation Dependent Markers (cosmic rays and solar irradiation impinging on the upper atmosphere).

It’s really all too complex to describe here, I suggest further reading:

• Complete Ice Core Dating Overview
• U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory
• Ice core on the Wikipedia

1. Time Tracking: I track all of my time at work religiously. I know exactly what I was doing and when on any day this year (billable and non billable work).

2. Calendar: I organize my days with Google Calendar. In our office, we have a “Tornado Deadlines” calendar so any time we promise a client something it’s added.

3. To-Do-Lists: We use Todoist for tracking our to do list. We have a separate category for every one of our customers and share it in our office. Everyone knows what items are due today and in the next two weeks.

4. Email: In Outlook, I flag emails that need to be responded to. Only after that is completed, added to our Todoist task list do I unflag it. Or when the email is responded to.

What other tools do you use for tracking your life? There are so many ways to track projects and time and money. We’re working on a few that we will be releasing as well.

The good news is that everyone in our office uses these same tools (team of 3 people). This makes collaborating that much easier!

Source: Flickr

Article: U.S. Currency and the Pictures Behind The Portraits

Via Brian Shaler

We’re really excited about our project and believe we have a truly innovative idea. We’re using the approach: “Get a product launched and improve it constantly.” Anyways, we made quite a bit of headway today and I just had to share.

Simply enter your monthly salary and this tool will show you how much money you are earning in real time. It’s fun and could be depressing all at once. Click here to give it a try.

I was rather pleased to stumble upon a book about pricing at Borders. It is called The Art of Pricing: How to Find the Hidden Profits to Grow Your Business. At first I thought “what can be learned from a book about pricing?” but I was rather surprised.

The book uses many real-life examples. There are stores about how Ford lowered prices on higher margin products to encourage less sales of lower margin products. As a result, they significantly increased sales of premium upgrades because the value was greater.

Similarly, a restaurant example showed how you could attract different types of customers using “early bird discounts” to attract penny pincers but limiting those to sales to times when foot traffic was lower.

This is a great book that gives ideas and examples to help you price your products or services. But more than that, it gives you creative ideas for pricing that you might not think about and that could prove extremely profitable.

The idea is that you put a big red X on your wall calendar for every day that you do your work (in Jerry’s case, it was every day he wrote comedy). The idea then is to not beak the chain.

Here’s how it worked.

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain.” He said again for emphasis.

Several sites have popped up since this tip emerged that help you track your chain of productivity. My favorite so far is www.dontbreakthechain.com (very aptly named). Anyways, it’s a great tip, and it definitely keeps you motivated.

“Not so long,” said the Mexican.

“Then why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more?” asked the American.

The Mexican explained that his small catch was quite enough to meet his needs and feed his family.

“So what do you do with the rest of your time?” asked the American.

“I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evening, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar and sing a few songs. I have a full life.”

The American interrupted. “I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat.”

“And after that?” asked the Mexican.

“With the extra money the bigger boat will bring, you can buy a second boat and then a third boat, and then more until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants. Pretty soon you could open your own plant. You could leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles, or even New York! From there you could direct your whole enterprise.”

“How long would that take?” asked the Mexican.

“Twenty — perhaps twenty-five years,” replied the American.

“And after that?”

“Afterwards? Well, my friend,” laughed the American, “that’s when it gets really interesting. When your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks and make millions!”

“Millions? Really? And after that?” said the Mexican.

“After that you’ll be able to retire, live in a beautiful place near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take siestas with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends.”

***

The moral of the story… Know where you’re going in life — you may already be there.

• Techcrunch
• Y Combinator Startup News (Hacker News)
• Solution Watch
• CenterNetworks
• Mashable
• WorkHappy.net
• Wikkid Apps
• Founders At Work Blog
• Mapping The Web
• GigaOM
• Read/WriteWeb
• Found+Read
• Webware.com
• Vitamin

P.S. Sometime in the future, this blog design will be updated to reflect the good style we have in our cards.

George Washington: Gilbert Stuart painted a number of portraits of George Washington. More than 100 in fact. One of the biggest no-nos in the design community is the horizontal flipping of photos of people. Because your face is not perfectly symmetrical, it is frowned upon as a design technique.

Despite this, our $1 bill contains a reversed picture of George Washington.

It’s really difficult to tell whether the above photo is the exact match. I have prepared two of the likeliest possible photos and matched them up so you can see how closely they match when reversed.

Abraham Lincoln: The easiest of the bunch to declare an obvious match.

Alexander Hamilton: The first Secretary of the Treasury (appointed by George Washington). The portrait is by Caroline L. Ormes Ransom.

Andrew Jackson: I bet you didn’t know that Grover Cleveland was on the $20 bill in 1914. Trivia: Jackson held an open house party where a 1,400 pound (635 kg) wheel of cheddar cheese was served as refreshment. The cheese was consumed in two hours. View full photo.

Ulysses S. Grant: This was the best photo I could find that is the exact same as the currency. It is obviously the same picture though, as you can see the hairline is the same.

Benjamin Franklin: Probably one of the coolest founding father. He wasn’t just a diplomat, but an electrical genius and very wise. This picture is inspired by an an engraving from a painting by Joseph Duplessis (1783). View full picture.

Bonus: The $2 bill is rarely used, but still printed (about 2% of all currency printed). The painting on the reverse side is John Trumbull’s “Declaration of Independence.”

Sources and larger pictures:

• Portraits & Designs at the U.S. Treasury web site
• Ulysses S. Grant
• Benjamin Franklin
• View a large painting of Washington
• Another large painting of Washington

Most people suck at managing projects

Most people have more than one project going at a time, and when one deadline is moved it moves the other ones (whether you want to admit this or not).

The odds of a large project finishing on time are close to zero. — From Rapid Development (Amazon)

Today I learned that close to 25% of all airline trips are late

Wow, that’s stunning. It just goes to show that most people are optimistic and can’t even predict when a project will be done. There are countless tools that exist today to try to facilitate creating accurate estimates, but most of them are useless because we are all so busy, and a million things impact our days, thus impacting our schedules.

If missing deadlines wasn’t enough, there is a horrible failure rate in software development projects. Some people say 5 - 15% of all projects fail.

Say no, do less

Tips on the gentle art of saying no. I’m not going to comment further since I’m really bad at this.

Throw deadlines out

Stop thinking you can accurately predict the future. Give your customers a realistic expectation that you can have their project done during a window of time. You’ll quickly find that most people don’t need an exact “delivery date” for their projects. Instead they just want to know progress is being made.

I’m not suggesting that it’s good to be late on your projects, just that you accept the fact that it’s nearly impossible to meet deadlines the way you’ve been going after them, and you should change your procedure.

The deadline dance is not always productive.

Customer service begins at the top

I went over to The Men’s Wearhouse today, and purchased a suit. A really nice suit. I spent over $500 and walked out of there feeling like a new man. The manager of the store helped me through the process and his entire staff was behind him to help me find the best matching clothes without asking.

The manager helped me pick out a nice navy blue suit which fits perfectly. While I was changing out of the suit, one of the other staff members picked out a series of matching shirts and ties. They had asked if I was interested, and I said I was. The whole team pulled together to make me look great, and it showed. Over 6 staff members assisted me during my brief visit (less than 30 minutes). It’s magical.

On the radio for years I’ve heard the famous catch phrase “You’re gonna love the way you look, I guarantee it” which is uttered by the company founder, George Zimmer. It’s true. Customer service really does begin at the top.

How this applies to personal productivity

Happy customers return, and really happy customers tell their friends. A business grows based on the service you provide and allows your company to grow, raise prices, and be the one people tell stories about.

I’m more inspired to tackle customer service again. I feel like we have okay customer service, but sometimes it can be rocky (not because we don’t care, but because we often get too busy to spend the time that great customer service requires).

Success is largely about keeping your promises

That’s how Seth Godin defines success and I think it also summarizes what it means to be good at customer service.

More reading on customer service:

• The Art of Customer Service — A very good article with 10 important things to know about good customer service.
• The Art of Customer Service, Part II — The second part of this article actually has some great tips which the first one missed.
• Return Customer — A blog about customer service, with case studies and ideas for improving customer service.

1. Things that advance your overall purpose in life
2. Things you have always wanted to do
3. Things already in the 20/80 relationship of time to results
4. Innovative ways of doing things that promise to slash the time required and/or multiply the quality of results
5. Things other people tell you can’t be done
6. Things other people have done successfully in a different arena
7. Things that use your own creativity
8. Things that you can get other people to do for you with relatively little effort on your part
9. Anything with high-quality collaborators who have already transcended the 80/20 rule of time, who use time eccentrically and effectively
10. Things for which it is now or never

I made 5127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative.

– Sir James Dyson

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

– Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1864-1912)

This blog is devoted to our upcoming product which is a time tracking, project management web application.

Read More:

• Profile on Viddler
• Web 2.0 Expo Schedule
• BrainFuel (My main blog about web design)
• Tornado Design (Phoenix based web design consultancy)
• LinkedIn Profile
• Sign up for beta release announcement
• Videos from the Web 2.0 Expo
• While you’re here, grab our RSS Feed, thanks!

David’s background is in game development and he has been working with Ruby on Rails for several years now. In his spare time he plays ice hockey. Welcome, David!

Required Skills:

• Ruby on Rails
• Web application frontend design
• AJAX web browser client technologies, ie. Javascript, CSS, DOM+XHTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, Web Services.
• (Prototype and Scriptaculous and others)
• Languages (in order of importance): Ruby, PHP, ActionScript, C/C++
• PostgreSQL, MySQL
• Linux and Open Source development platforms

Desired Skills:

• Distributed/Clustered (web) application development
• Any experience or familiarity with other languages such as Javascript, Actionscript, CakePHP, SmartyPHP, C++, VB, or .NET
• Mad PC/XBOX/Wii gaming skills are a plus

This is a full time position in Phoenix. Inquire within.

The figure that I mentioned above — $4,687.50 — represents the accumulation of only an hour and fifteen minutes a week in billable hours. A paltry fifteen minutes a day, at $75 an hour, adds up to a nice vacation at the end of the year. Counting only 5 day weeks for 50 weeks a year.

Amazing, huh? Imagine what you could do if you tracked an extra hour a day.

Most companies just give away time like this. It’s too-small to track, they say. But the reality is that if you use an efficient tool for tracking time, it’s easy! And it pays off, as you can see.

Minuteglass is that tool (just wait until we launch!)

I hope that this demonstration helps you appreciate the value of tracking your time. It’s stunning, really, how most people don’t track time. If you charge your customers an hourly rate, it pays to track your time with a solid time tracking tool. It’s important to “independent agents” and also large companies of any size.

Benefits of tracking time:

1. Earn more money by tracking your time better.
2. Keeps you focused on your task at hand. When the clock is running, you know you need to be productive.
3. Motivation: At the end of the day, if you can look at your time log and see how much you accomplished, and how much money you earned, it boosts your enthusiasm for what you do.
4. It helps you estimate future projects (you can see how long a similar project took).
5. Even if you don’t bill your customers an hourly rate, it’s great to know how much you work, and really know.

Sharing the number of subscribers is one of the key things that FeedBurner provides. You can actually track how many people have subscribed to your blog. That’s very important.

I also discovered this great plugin by Steve Smith that essentially points any of your existing subscribers to your new feed url at FeedBurner. The great thing about this is that you don’t lose your existing subscribers, and you can get instant statistics about your subscribers. I am using the free version of FeedBurner. They have some extra statistics you can pay for, but I don’t need them.

I also enjoyed this screen (above) which is a good example of a “blank slate” in a web application. We’ll have to think about adding a bubble like this to our application.

I present you with four links that will help you organize your projects and your life on paper.

1. Moleskine PDA — Using your Moleskine notebook as a project and task organizer. Simple but clever.
2. The Emergent Task Planner — An amazing paper based tool for staying on track in your day.
3. Paper Prototyping — Paper prototypes invite people with little-to-no technical background into the design process.
4. Remember names at meetings by making a map — Sometimes the obvious ones are the best.

My favorite tip of all time is this: Grab a sheet of paper and write down what you are going to accomplish today. Then make a new sheet every single day (or every night, before you head home).

We’re going to be attending along with several people from Viddler. The show is on April 15th through the 18th in San Francisco. It will be the perfect opportunity to hand out business cards and meet potential “early adopters” of our product, while at the same time spreading the word about Viddler.