Saturday, 14 November 2009

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....

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