Published January 26th, 2012 by Karen Schoellkopf
The one resource we all have the same amount of is time – how you spend it defines so much about your life. We’ve assembled a few tips to help you make the most of the time you have in your workday.
Managing your time needs to become a ritual, an ongoing process you follow to keep you focused on your priorities throughout the day.
- Do all of your invoicing and paperwork in set groups, so that you can pull things out all at once, and put them away more efficiently.
- Have 2-3 attainable goals for the day. No one is productive w/ endless to do lists.
- Learn to say no to projects where the time investment outweighs the return.
- Find the perfect GTD system out there: there are no magic answers, it’s simply the one you trust and use so your mind is free.
Know the strongest times of your work day. If you can match your best times for work with the most intense tasks, and your least productive times with more routine tasks, you’ll get more out of your day.
- Read emails before leaving for work, mentally process while commuting, then answer on arrival at the office.
- End your day by making a list of things you want to accomplish the following day.
Budget your time.
Many thanks to the Twitter community for sharing your own tips for this article. We’ll announce the winners of our Time Savings Tuesdays contest next Tuesday (along with the new contest theme), and feel free to share your own tips in the comments!
Published January 24th, 2012 by Karen Schoellkopf
We’re excited to announce our winners from last week’s Time Saving Tuesday contest, and to fill you in on this week’s contest and prize.
LAST WEEK’S CONTEST: We asked you to send your best time saving keystrokes. We had so many great entries that we decided to pick two winners in two separate categories: everyday tips, and power user app suggestions! We assembled a blog post of Time Saving Keystrokes, incorporating several of the best responses. The winners of the 3-1/2 in computer hard drive clock by pixelthis are:
@AdamHoej, who tweeted this: #respectyourtime ctrl+s.. Saves (pun intended) me from messing up my files! I’ve set it to Incremental save, so instant traceback! Nice touch with the incremental save!
and also @chopmo, who tweeted us with this power user protip: I use Gleebox for webbrowsing using only my keyboard. Huge timesaver. #respectyourtime
THIS WEEK’S CONTEST: Inspired by our Twitter follower @nicolelafave and her #respectyourtime suggestions last week, we decided to dedicate this week’s contest to your best time saving tips for your workday – how do you shave time from your day?
Follow @harvest, begin your tweet with #respectyourtime, and share your best time saving workday tips. We’ll be following the #respectyourtime hashtag to keep up with your entries.
This week’s winner will recieve this beautiful hand stamped clay NOW clock by M Bart Studios!
Please share this widely, the more answers we get, the more we can share with you. We can’t wait to hear your tips and tricks!
Published January 23rd, 2012 by Naama Bloom
Last Friday evening a bunch of us stayed at the office to play Settlers of Catan. It was the first time I ever played, and when I texted my husband to ask him to pick up the kids, he texted back with this: you’ll be there for a while.
Sure enough, the game did not move quickly. I was new, and others were rusty. After about an hour and a half, everyone was getting fidgety, so I took out my phone and convinced everyone to play as a timed game. Everyone got 1 minute for their turn, no more. The game was more fun and no one’s strategy suffered due to lack of time.
Since joining Harvest I’ve gotten a bit fanatical about measuring time and keeping myself to time limits. I’ve found that I have become more efficient. For me, timers create a sense of urgency that I need to help me focus.
In this age of constant distraction, what tools do you use to help you focus?
Published January 20th, 2012 by Naama Bloom
Hello!
It seems that flu season has arrived. Harvesters and their children are dropping like flies. So far among our team of 19 the virus has been spotted in NY, MN, PA and Canada. But even though the nasty bugs have been on attack we’ve still managed to get some work done and share some utterly ridiculous videos and animated gifs on Co-op.
The biggest product news this week is that we pushed out a new update to the Harvest App in the Android marketplace. We also deployed another 14 changes behind the scenes to make our beloved Harvest run even more smoothly. We ran a Time Savings Tuesday Contest and got some awesome Keystroke Protips from our Twitter community. And Samara came out of the closet as an introvert by writing this blog post on collaborative work spaces. Take that flu!
Next week Warwick, Jon and Christopher will be hitting the road. If you happen to be in Cape Town next week join our awesome Systems Guy, Warwick, for a drink. Once you’re done drinking him under the table, jet over to Seattle for a happy hour with 2/3 of our support team on Friday night.
And now a brief look into the wacky world of Co-op:
- Lettini found this explanation to the age old question ‘What are the Developers really doing all day?”
- Not really sure why Doug decided to share this picture with us, but now I’m sharing it with you.
- Barry apparently gets tired often and needs a place to sit. He found this solution - chair pants!
- And, at lunch today we decided to end the week with a Friday evening game of Settlers of Catan.
Hope you all have a great weekend!
Published January 19th, 2012 by Karen Schoellkopf
Did you know that it’s 10 times quicker to type a command rather than lift a hand from the keyboard to the mouse? Here’s a few ways to save time with some easy keystrokes!
Some Harvest and Co-op protips, from the Harvest Team:
Everyday keystrokes:
- Ctrl+F (Win) or Cmd+F (OSX). Finds specific text in the Web page that’s open.
- Backspace (Win) or Delete (Mac). Makes your browser go back one page.
- Windows key + first few letters of a program + enter. Start any program from your keyboard. (via @jkenters)
- Ctrl+z. “People take this feature for granted. Imagine a world with no ctrl+z.” The power of the undo! (via @stevendeeds)
- Ctrl+s. “Saves (pun intended) me from messing up my files! I’ve set it to Incremental save, so instant traceback!” (via @AdamHoe)
- Cmd+q. “Sometimes you have to quit and walk away.” (via @weepapa)
If you want to geek out:
Many thanks to the Twitter community for sharing your own tips for this article, we had a great time swapping tips! We’ll announce the winners of our Time Savings Tuesdays contest next Tuesday (along with the new contest theme), and feel free to share your own tips in the comments!
Published January 19th, 2012 by Samara Strauss
Over the weekend, a friend of mine gave me a tour of Bloomberg’s NYC office. Their 29-floor building is full of huge, open workspaces. Even the company big-wigs don’t get a private office; when they’re in town, they occupy one of the many transparent, glass-walled conference rooms scattered throughout the building. This is a similar set up to what we have at Harvest HQ, though on a much larger scale, and I think the atmosphere promotes equality and togetherness.
While there’s a lot to be said for this type of environment, the inevitable noise and distraction that comes with it can actually hinder what its supposed to foster: creativity through collaboration. Susan Cain comes to the defense of introverts and quiet workspaces in The Rise of the New Groupthink, an article from last Friday’s NY Times. Here’s the gist of it: equality and transparency are good, but collaborative spaces can decrease creativity, especially in introverts.
Continue Reading …
Published January 17th, 2012 by Karen Schoellkopf
We’re excited to announce our winner from last week’s Time Saving Tuesday contest, and to fill you in on this week’s contest and prize.
LAST WEEK’S CONTEST: We asked you to send your best time saving tips you use on your commute. We got many creative submissions (thank you all for Tweeting your suggestions!) and we assembled a blog post of Quick Time Saving Tips For Your Commute, incorporating several of the best responses. The winner of the Harvest orange slapwatch from Winky Designs is @jorydayne, who tweeted this: #Respectyourtime: I walk to work. It takes 4x as long, but building my sched with that constraint in mind forces efficiency everywhere else. We really liked how Jory combined two activities (exercise and commute) instead of trying to skim time off of either on.
THIS WEEK’S CONTEST: We want your best time saving keystrokes, one of the most universal time savers. We want to know your most relied upon keystrokes.
Follow @harvest and tweet your best time saving keystrokes (and what they do!) using #respectyourtime. This week’s winner will win this sweet clock made from a real 3-1/2 in computer hard drive by pixelthis!
Please share this widely, the more answers we get, the more we can share with you. We can’t wait to hear your tips and tricks!
Published January 13th, 2012 by Jonathan Lane
Yikes, Friday the 13th! No point dwelling on it though, let’s all enjoy another dose of TGIF and sit back for another Harvest Playback. Here’s a look at what’s made the news in Co-op and what we’ve accomplished for the week:
Ms. Sarah Haas joined the team this week as our Account Manager. Welcome Sarah! We pushed out our 2011 retrospective looking at all that happened in 2011. We published a pair of blog posts with time saving tips for your commute and for meetings. We did some software upgrades to help with performance and security. We posted about an excellent new Harvest integration, Harvest4Clients that was posted to GitHub. And finally, we sent out invitations for our Harvest Happy Hour (Seattle) event at the end of the month. If you’re in the area, join us!
But what would Friday be without a little fun? Submitted for your enjoyment:
Hope you all have a great weekend! See you next week.
Published January 12th, 2012 by Jonathan Lane
I’m really excited to be writing this blog post! In support, one of the common feature requests we get is for a Harvest client log in: a place where you can direct your clients to go to view their invoices and any uninvoiced time on their projects.
One our our customers, Jeroen Kenters of Jeroen Kenters Web Development has taken the time to build just that using PHP (no database required!) and the Harvest API, and he’s made it open source – so you’re free to install it and tweak it however you like. Harvest4Clients is dead simple to configure and use. Instead of having me go on and on about it though, why not check out a demo?
Continue Reading …
Published January 12th, 2012 by Naama Bloom
There has been plenty written recently on distributed teams. A couple of weeks ago @dhh wrote a post on the 37signals blog that generated an enormous amount of discussion. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about since I joined Harvest because I happen to think we run our distributed team really well.
A huge part of Harvest’s successful distributed team is our use of Co-op, a free online collaboration tool built by the Harvest team. Co-op is a private status update stream that is seamlessly integrated with Harvest (naturally!). The original intent was to create a water cooler that was less invasive than group chat. However it has become absolutely vital to the operations of this business as well as to the culture.
The reason Co-op works is that it enables one-to-many communication in addition to one-to-one communication. As a marketer, I shouldn’t be surprised that communication should vary if speaking to many people versus one person. It just never occurred to me that successful distributed teams need tools that enable multiple types of communications. It’s quite obvious now.
I’ll admit, when I first got here I was a bit overwhelmed by Co-op – it just seemed like one more continuous stream of chatter that I needed to pay attention to. I have now come to love it. In addition to keeping me up to date on what everyone is working on it has helped me build relationships with my co-workers both in and out of New York. Personalities come through in Co-op in a way that they don’t on email. It has helped create and maintain the sense of culture in the office.
If you have a distributed team, or even if you don’t, I recommend you check it out here.
