Time management for the busy (Part 2)

It has been several months since I posted about the start of my adventures with time management.

One of the interesting things about trying to rise above the level of a mere mortal in the time management department, is how your perspective on time changes. Updating a blog, whilst being a cathartic experience, it is also fundamentally non productive process (unless your job is updating your blog of course).

So writing this post had to take the back burner, until I had some free time (or in the realm of time management - I decided to make time for it).

In my first post, I talked about how to find where your time was going. I came across 2 of the best tools you can get your hands on for doing exactly that. It seems fair to give you a quick summary of the strengths and weaknesses of each product.

Well they are both brilliant, but come at the problem from different angles.

Lets start with YaTimer.

It is very simple to use, however it is well worth the effort of having a play with it first to get to know some of it's features.

I recommend setting up templates for tasks you use regularly, I created a template for each project I was working on with different colour schemes. Creating a new task for an existing project is then a one click operation.

The reports are really good and can be customised with your own or your customers logo. It can produce time sheets that can be used for billing as well if required. I have not as yet needed a report that is not already included. That said NBD Tech are very responsive to their customers and if a report that is not there sounds useful - you can bet it will be included in a later update.

So what could it do better?

If you are like me, you will be moving around several tasks during a day. So you will pause and start tasks several times before they are complete. Yatimer logs this well and gives you the ability to add a comment against each block of time that it has logged. However you do need to go into the task and add the comment. Because it does not prompt you to enter a comment every time you pause a task, it is human to forget to do it.

The downside of doing this is simple, you cannot remember the specifics of the task after the event. This is a small thing, in that it is not that the software is not capable of holding this information, more that the user is not capable of remembering to enter it.

The most important thing to say is that make sure you clock on to a task. You can manually add a timing event if you forget but try and get in the habit of clocking on and remember to add commenting to the task time slots. The benefits come when someone says what took you over 20 hours to do on task x? A quick look at the detailed daily report and there are the answers - no need to rebuild history and waste more time!!

Overall I would class it as a must have. The better you use it, the more satisfied you will be with the reports. On a personal note, just make sure you set it to start when you log on, if you do not see an icon, you may forget to use it!! (Yes guilty as charged - a bad day).

Now for RescueTime.

Well the software is fit and forget - the greatest single strength of the product is the "always on zero input required" kind of approach.

It provides you with some very clever (and occasionally depressing) stats on what you have been working on. By automatically categorising application and websites, it catches every single distracted tangential web search and surf session and blog update as well as your more productive moments.

The Solo product is worth the money as it gives you the ability to filter out non office hours when looking at your stats and also the ability to find the name of the individual document you were working on and the time spent on it if required. It can help you rebuild a history of what you did at your PC - when you have forgotten to log the information anywhere else. (Yes, guilty as charged). It is also great for setting application category usage targets and as such is a good motivational tool.

So could it be better?
It kind of does what is says on the tin. It even has the ability to enter offline events like meetings. My only gripe is not being able to print off the main dashboard. As of last night (13th November 2009) the Rescue Time team have introduced a new additional feature set called Rescue Time Pace designed for project time tracking but I cannot comment on it (Yet)

Overall it also gets a must have badge. I find that it makes a good complementary product used alongside YaTimer.

By using these tools, there is absolutely no excuse for not being able to know exactly where your time goes. Here I have used these tools initially as a diagnostic aid but they have become part of my daily productivity tools. The whole purpose of getting time usage information, is to try and find your current bad habits. Trust me we all have them.

It is this information that I put to use in part 3....

Time management for the busy (Part 1)

When it comes to time management, I am the first to admit that I have room for improvement.

It does seem a bit "Catch 22" doesn't it? You need more time, so that you can learn how to make more of your time. Well that was exactly the situation I found myself in, one soul searching Saturday night towards the end of June.

I thought that it would be a useful starting point to know how I was spending my time. So I decided that the following week, I would break out Excel or Word and just make a list of the things I did each day.

I have found the idea of recording what you do, to be an essential tool in the fight for more time. However analysing the data using my first 2 suggestions lost me heaps of time.

So, I turned to Google - there must be an IT based solution out there for people in my situation?

I am happy to say that I found quite a few. However, I lost a shed load of time playing with them, trying to find the right one for me.

I am now going to save you a lot of time (well at least 16 hours) testing various pieces of software by telling you the only 2 you actually need. Both are very simple use - which is essential.

The first is a fantastic piece of software called YaTimer written by NBD Tech that logs time against tasks and projects you are working on. You can leave it running when you are away from your PC / laptop too, so it is great for tracking meeting times, conference calls as well as tasks where you are PC based. It has great time sheet reports and you can export the data to Excel if you want to manipulate the data further. You can even use it to log billable and non billable time. Best of all, it is a dream to use. You can check it out here:

http://www.nbdtech.com/yaTimer/



Next there is another fantastic piece of software called RescueTime Solo from RescueTime. This is a fit and forget piece of software that automatically logs all of your PC based activities down to the documents you open and the websites you visit (if you want it to). It can then give you very detailed productivity statistics and enables you to set goals for yourself. Again it is a dream to use and once you start using it, you will never look back. The basic version is free, but the Pro version gives you the extra granularity and is worth the 8 bucks a month it will cost you. You can find it here.

http://www.rescuetime.com/

Use these two properly and within a week, you will have a good idea of where your time is going. Use them for a month and it may change your life forever!

The process of monitoring your time should become a habit as soon as possible.

In my next blog I will be sharing more things I have been trying and how they are working for me.

Vodafone Mobile Internet PAYG XP 64 bit solution

Well, If like me you were an adopter of XP 64 bit, you will by now, have had your fair share of disappointments where things just have not been designed to run on it. (HP Photosmart C4585 software springs immediately to mind). Even now, more often than not, only the 32 bit variety of operating systems seem to get software developed for them!!

My latest annoyance was the purchase of a Vodafone Mobile Connect Pay As You Go USB stick. It was a K3565 made by Huawei (also known as a E160x I think - but don't quote me on that).

On 32 bit XP or Vista - just plug it in and go - literally. The stick pretends to be a CD ROM and autoruns, loading the software, which in turn, magically changes the stick into a dial-up modem, loads the drivers and software that manages the connection to the mobile network. - A fantastic bit of kit (it really is).

Try that on XP 64 and the software bails out telling you that you need to be an administrator or load a service pack. This is a classic installer "run home to mummy" kind of response when it does not recognise the platform you are trying to run it on.

And that is that. You are left with a feeling of disappointment

Vodafone forums (after a google hunt) provide the "no support now and none coming" message that further saddens the heart of all XP 64 bit owners.

I was so annoyed I decided to find (with Google and the tenacity of a pit bull terrier) a better answer - i.e. how to make it work.

One very long evening later - I found a working solution.

Problem 1)
Find some 64 bit drivers. Technically there are none - even on the manufacturer site, that said 64 bit Vista drivers for a similar modem seemed a likely candidate. A dig around some blogs and forums delivered this link :

http://rapidshare.com/files/98165936/huawei_e220_XP64.zip

Problem 2)
The USB stick thinks it is a CD ROM!! Manual hardware scans reveals no sign of a modem. A focused search delivered the following link:

http://www.mobilebroadbandrocks.com/huawei-modem-utilities

The Switch Port utility is the one turns on or off the CD ROM function of the USB stick. So turn it off with the utility and then unplug and plug back in the stick. Hey presto - the modem is detected and you are prompted to install the drivers. You then manually select the drivers I mentioned and install them - accepting the usual unsigned driver warnings.

Now if you are a techie, you just create a dial-up connection in XP with a phone number *99# a user name of faster and a password of web.

That is it you are connected to the web!!

But you cannot find out your signal strength, credit left, the cell id you connected to etc.

Problem 3)
The Vodafone software just will not load, so what can give you virtually identical (some may say better) functionality? The answer after a relatively short period of searching was this link:

http://www.mwconn.com/mwconn.zip

MWCONN by Markus Weber will give you the functionality you need in a very small application. It gives you network, signal strength, credit enquiry and credit top-up functionality. If you can afford it - give him a donation - a top bloke and a top piece of software!

So thank you to all the people who provided the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. You are all unsung heroes.

What more could a mere mortal ask for? (apart from Vodafone to support XP64?)