LAST WEEK’S CONTEST: We asked you to send your best workday time saving tips. We assembled a blog post of Time Saving Tips for your Workday, based on the answers we sourced from our Twitter followers. Nicole won this gorgeous handstamped NOW clock by M Bart Studios, and here’s her winning entry:

#respectyourtime Do all my invoicing & paperwork in set groups, so that I can pull things out and put them away more efficiently. Consider us impressed.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST: It’s the end of January, and our thoughts are turning to the SuperBowl this weekend, and the parties that it involves. We decided to turn our time saving focus to food – how do you save time? Either in the grocery store, getting food to your home, or with food prep – we want it all!

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 receive a kitchen timer (for pies, and beyond!) by the London-based brother design duo Designwright:

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!

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!

Some Harvest and Co-op protips, from the Harvest Team:

• Math is allowed in durations fields! Example: 3:00 – 2:23, or :23 + :12. (@bjhess)
• Ctrl+. in Co-op switches between the Co-op and Track time tabs. (@pfiller)
• Harvest Command Line (HCL): Uses Terminal to control Harvest timers. (@the_vole)

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:

• Win+[n] where [n] is 0-9. Items in your taskbar are 0-9, L to R. Brings that item to focus or launches it. (via @mavickers)
• Instant Text, Windows app that, “Saves me 1000s of keystrokes on documents and transcriptions.” (via @WorkFromHomeMe)
• “I would die without TextExpander.” (via @the_vole)
• PhraseExpress. The Windows version of TextExpander. (via @jkenters)
• Breevy, PC app that integrates with your Dropbox TextExpander snippets. (via @ServerSense)
• Quicksilver, Mac plugin to launch apps, search, and type w/ keystrokes. (via @browncoat and @mbaizman)
• Gleebox, a keyboard-centric approach to navigating the web. (via @chopmo)

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!

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!

LAST WEEK’S CONTEST: We asked you to send your best time saving tips for making meetings more efficient. We got many great submissions (thank you all for Tweeting your suggestions!) and we assembled a blog post of Quick Time Saving Tips For Meetings, incorporating several of the best responses. The winner of the set of 8 colorful and lovely “You’re Very, Very Late” tatt.ly tattoos is @svpino, who tweeted this: If you want to keep your meetings short, get rid of chairs / coffee / donuts. #respectyourtime

We have to mention that we got a suggestion from @fulljames that tickled us: I want to get a TIM (Time Is Money) clock to show how much our meetings are costing. #respectyourtime

We thought that was a great suggestion (in addition, of course, to checking your Harvest time reports!), and we thought we’d make his day by sending him the TIM clock – congratulations to both Santiago and Stephen!

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST: We want your best time saving tips and tricks for your commute. Most of us have to leave the house to get to work, and we want to know: how do you save time while you’re en route?

Follow @harvest and tweet your best time saving tips for your commute using #respectyourtime. This week’s winner will win this Harvest orange slapwatch from Winky Designs! No longer available on their website, we’ve got one of their last slapwatches here at HQ, just waiting to be scooped up by this week’s winner!

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!

Each Tuesday in January, we’ll be asking a time saving question on Twitter. We’ll be accepting submissions until midnight EST, and we’ll share the best tips and tricks in the next week’s blog post. To sweeten the pot, one lucky winner will score a prize from us.

THIS WEEK’S THEME: We want your best time saving tips and tricks for meetings. Meetings are a notorious time sink. Tell us how you keep your meetings efficient and productive.

Follow @harvest and tweet your best time saving tips for meetings using #respectyourtime. This week’s winner will score a set of 8 colorful and lovely “You’re Very, Very Late” tatt.ly tattoos!

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!

Here are a few pictures of the festivities, and thanks for sharing such a great evening with us!

During Summit, our team continues to work as usual, but with a few things mixed in. Here’s a sample of what we did at our last Summit in November:

Harvester Patrick Filler presenting a talk entitled “So You Think You Can Open Source”

Tech Talks
Curiosity is one of our core values. We believe not only in the constant pursuit of knowledge, but that it’s important to share what we’re learning with each other. While the talks are technical in nature, everyone in the company is invited to attend (we are a technology company afterall). Knowledge is shared not only for the sake of education but also to gather feedback. In our latest Tech Talks series, we discussed our new and improved approach to billing, an introduction to Chef and learnings from our open source project, Chosen.

Customer Visits
While every Harvester interacts with our customers via email or phone, there’s simply no substitute for visting our customers in person and getting to know what they do. We’re extremely customer focused as a company and we love learning from our customers. This year we visited three of them and you can read more about what we learned here.

♫ Don’t Stop Believin’ ♫
As you can gather from our careers page, we have a very musical group here at Harvest. It’s no coincidence that karaoke is one of our favorite pastimes. With each Summit, our team is bigger and our sessions are more epic.

As this year’s Summit wound down, we’re re-energized for the road ahead. More importantly, we’ve come away with a heightened understanding and appreciation for each other’s craft.

Want to join us on our next Summit? We are always looking for great minds to come along for the ride. :)

Yesterday, we were very lucky to have Teresa von Fuchs, coffee & espresso consultant for Dallis Bros. Coffee in Queens, NY, in the office to spend some time with us talking and tasting coffee. A big part of Teresa’s job involves going into the cafes and coffee shops carrying Dallis’s coffee to educate them on preparation, freshness and general coffee know-how. She doesn’t normally do presentations to internet companies, but we asked so nicely that she couldn’t say no.

Teresa started by talking to us about how much work goes into each pound of coffee before it even arrives at their facility for roasting. Farming coffee is a very labor intensive process and each bean goes through human hands more than once. She encouraged us to take our time when preparing coffee and to respect the efforts of the farmers who’ve done so much with the beans.

Next, Teresa brewed three of Dallis’s offerings via two different preparation methods – french press and pour over. Sampling the various methods side-by-side helped us understand the differences in flavor that result from different brewing methods. After an hour with Teresa, she had us considering switching our trusty office coffee maker to a giant french press.

While showing us the different methods, Teresa stressed the importance of every variable involved in coffee brewing. Though choosing quality beans is an obvious first step, everything from coffee grind size, to water and cup temperature, to steep time, and even the vigorousness with which you pour the water affect the final outcome. She really encouraged us to treat the preparation step not as a nuisance, but as a chance to celebrate the coffee and appreciate all that is involved.

Needless to say, we had quite a bit of fun learning about and tasting coffee. Many thanks to Teresa and Dallis Bros. for giving up some time to us.

About Dallis Bros. Coffee

Dallis Bros. Coffee has been roasting coffee in Ozone Park, Queens for nearly 100 years. They offer a number of expertly roasted single origin and micro-lot coffees through their website. If you’re in the NYC area, they also offer tours of their roasting facility on the first Saturday of every month. Here are their coffees we tried during our tasting:

• Los Idolos, Columbia
• Finca Siberia, El Salvador
• Kopakama Co-op, Rwanda

Does taking a break from work to talk coffee sound fun to you? Join us, we’re hiring.

After hosting our second Walkabout NYC, an open house for technology companies, just over a week ago, I wanted to share with you why we here at Harvest organize this city-wide event. Harvest has always supported the entrepreneurial spirit (like with our New Founders Program). The goal of Walkabout NYC is simple: to create a connection between the tech companies and the community that surrounds, inspires, and supports them.

Danny Wen and Shawn Liu, the co-founders here at Harvest, have always enjoyed taking tours of creative and entrepreneurial workspaces. No matter what size, they found the spaces always fostered inspirational energy. From forming the company in a tiny shared office to Harvest’s current home in a Soho loft, Danny and Shawn recognize how instrumental those behind-the-scenes experiences were along the way.

This year’s edition of Walkabout NYC included over 80 technology companies, and we heard back from some of the people who put on their walking shoes, and explored the companies on Walkabout NYC:

Qlabs, AOL ventures, Meetup, Gawker, Squarespace were all great to visit, as were many more. Saw some informative and engaging presentations, had some in-depth discussions with great folks, and took home some cool t-shirts, stickers and swag.

A great added bonus was we got to meet founders and team members which was super, super cool. Hearing their stories and ideas was fun and the fact it was on a Friday afternoon made for it to be very relaxed.

I thought the atmosphere’s in offices such as Meetup.com, ZocDoc, Thrillist, Indaba Music, and AOL Ventures were exciting. Everyone was extremely knowledgeable and willing to help. It seemed symbolic of the startup community as a whole. This was my first experience with Walkabout NYC and hopefully not the last!

If you weren’t able to join us on Walkabout NYC, you can still see photos from the event, and check out some of the workspaces of companies that participated, on our Walkabout NYC video channel.

We can’t wait for the next one, and hope to see you there!