One of the big advantages to a high level of trust amongst co-workers is the ability to work productively while also working remotely. I live in Alberta, while Jon lives in British Columbia. Barry is in Minnesota; Doug is in Montana; Warwick is in Pennsylvania. Dee is in Hungary. Our head office is in New York City. And Patrick is trying a different-location-a-month for a while, starting with Texas, and now in Illinois. (All pictures taken today.)

To stay in touch, we all use Co-op to post what we’re all working on, to have some hilarious banter, and to share some informative tidbits during the week. Here are some of this week’s highlights:

• Patrick is trying to get us to gamble on some strange American tradition called the “Superbowl”. I thought it was a trendy NYC noodle shop.
• This week we made a playlist dedicated to speed.
• TJ taught us more about the dangers of fracking.
• Karen had us all consider the trustworthiness of beards.
• Barry got nostalgic about what we did last summer. (But it was before my time with Harvest, so it probably wasn’t much fun anyway.)
• And Christopher came up with a first draft of our new marketing campaign.

Have a good weekend, y’all!

Get ideas to make it

• relishrelish will email you a week’s worth of recipes every Thursday, complete with shopping lists. The meals take 30 minutes or less to prepare, and the ingredients usually cost $80 or less for the week’s worth of dinners.
• Gojee curates recipes from food bloggers around the web in a visually enticing way.
• Use Allrecipe’s Ingredient Search to find recipes based on what you’ve got on hand.

Buy it

• Multi-task! Use Omnifocus to give an alert to your phone when you’re near the grocery store — reminds you when you have a list and saves trips out!
• Shop at odd times. The less time you spend waiting in line with everyone else who’s shopping is more time for anything else.

Make it

• Choose recipes that take limited time to prepare. Mark Bittman wrote a great NY Times writeup for summer meals that take 10 minutes or less (save for when it gets warmer!).
• Make more than you need. Example: if you make soup, make enough that half can go in the freezer for next week — you can do the same with tomato sauce, and chili. You can even portion soups into 2-cup containers for freezing: the perfect healthy grab-and-go lunch. You can even swap with a friend!
• Use ice trays to freeze tomato sauce, pesto, and soup stock - most regular-sized ice cubes are just about 2 tablespoons, it’s easy to dole the ingredients out later!
• Cooking in blocks of time, as advised by The Pemmican Principle of food preparation. Set aside a 4 hour block of time on Saturday or Sunday, and prepare meals for the week. If you’re pressed for time, simply wash and cut fruits and veggies, essentially turning refrigerator into a healthy salad bar and deli.

Many thanks to theTwitter community for sharing your own tips for this article. We’re please to announce that @DanaCoBar won our very last Time Saving Tuesdays contest for January – congratulations Dana, we hope you enjoy your beautiful new kitchen timer!

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!

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?

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!

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!

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:

• Great review of Harvest on The Stiletto Series. You’d think we paid for this, but we didn’t.
• Kids are cute when they’re learning to walk.  Unfortunately, sometimes they fall. :-(
• Warwick shared this great mashup he found by DJ Lobsterdust.
• TJ educated us on 10 things everyone should know about time.
• We wondered what some advertisers think as Barry posted this ad (we’re not clear if it’s “proposed” or actual) for North Dakota. Wind has gained acceptance (finally) in this clever one.

Hope you all have a great weekend! See you next week.

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!