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:
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)
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!
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!
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:
Great review of Harvest on The Stiletto Series. You’d think we paid for this, but we didn’t.
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!
It’s a new year! We hope that everybody had a great holiday season and that you’re as excited about 2012 as we are! We’ve got some great things planned for the coming year!
After returning from a short break, we’ve been focussed on catching up with any questions and bugs that were reported to us. Naama had an epiphany while on holidays, and put out the rallying cry to Demand Better! The billing overhaul went very smoothly and we’ve been tweaking a few odds and ends on that front. We discovered a minor bug with our iOS app when the New Year hit (with Expenses), and a new version has been sent to Apple for approval. We also launched a new Twitter Contest for the month of January – Time Saving Tuesdays where you can tweet your best productivity tips for a chance to win some great prizes.
It hasn’t been all business around the office though, we have had some great chats on Co-op:
Patrick has relocated to Texas for the next few weeks, despite the lack (so far) of winter weather in New York.
Shawn made a quick trip back to New York over the holidays to welcome a new member to his family (and ours). Welcome Nico! Even though Shawn is off spending some time with little Nico, he’s still watching over us at Harvest HQ. (thanks Lettini and PillowMob)
Sri has suggested that maybe all of this talk of productivity is overrated. In the near future, we’ll do all of our goofing off while hidden by a time cloak.
Warwick has been busy digging up some wonderful delicacies for us to sample at the next Harvest Summit. I’m going to try out Casu Marzu if Warwick tries some Hákarl (I’ll report back if I survive the experience).
At Harvest, we take time seriously, and we’re constantly looking for new ways to be more efficient. Join us in sharing your best time saving tips, and you may even win a prize for it!
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!
Other things on our brains, as evidenced by our link swapping in Co-op:
It was TJ’s birthday Wednesday, and the whole Harvest crew pitched in to make him a special website to help him launch his “side business.” We knew he had discovered it when he posted the link in Co-op.
Many of us at Harvest are fans of Louis CK. We were super impressed with everything about his recent internet special – from the comedy itself (the $5 is well worth it!), to how simple the purchase process is, to this statement below the purchase button:
To those who might wish to “torrent” this video: look, I don’t really get the whole “torrent” thing. I don’t know enough about it to judge either way. But I’d just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without “corporate” restrictions.
I found myself actually reading every single word on the purchase form (and re-reading it). I did that, not because I was confused, but because I actually enjoy what Louis CK has to say. He’s genuine, saying things that make sense without any buzzwords or corporate language. It wasn’t crafted by an ad agency figuring out the tone and stuffing words in Louis’ mouth. There wasn’t a consultant urging him to be be a certain way in order to boost conversions. I’m sure he wasn’t even thinking about SEO or A/B testing when he was writing for his online store. It was just Louis CK, acting as a (somewhat!) reasonable human being, speaking directly to us.
It is incredibly inspiring and gratifying to see someone follow common sense, do the right thing, and make good money at it. Just in case you need another reason to pay Louis CK $5 for his “Live at the Beacon Theater” special, here’s a hilarious 4-minute outtake:
I’m in awe whenever I come across a physical object that’s been made by hand. I’ll often pick up the piece and study it, like a work of art. It’s easy to forget to appreciate handicraft, especially if your days are spent building for the digital world.
That’s why it was a pleasant surprise to hear about Brooklyn based Joel Bukeiwicz, a professional knife maker (not far from Harvest HQ) who does all his work by hand. Joel is one of only a handful of knife makers in the country to practice this art form. You can watch the video from Made by Hand below, or read on to learn more about Joel and his story.
Joel came to knife making from the unrelated craft of writing. After having a hard time selling his manuscript, he decided to take a 3 month hiatus from writing. He fed his desire to create by building physical objects — bookshelves, tables. Anything. For Joel, creating tangible things was a breath of fresh air. He eventually came to knife making and quickly became passionate about it.
After toiling in the shop for two years, Joel came away competent of his craft. He now sells handmade cutlery to fine chefs in Brooklyn and beyond out of Cut Brooklyn. Each knife gets 15 hours of attention, versus your high-end German knife which takes 10 robots, 15 minutes to spit off the line.
Cut Brooklyn’s mission is to make every knife the very best knife they’ve ever made. As Joel learns and iterates, the quality of the knives improve. This human element makes every piece unique and brilliant. It’s this level of care and attention to detail that we admire as software builders, and it’s why I continue to pick up the pieces made by hand.
True story: Danny, T.J. and I saw Woz walking past us on Lafayette St. We thought it was him, but we weren’t sure. If we had done what we should’ve done, you’d see a picture of us, with Woz, for this Playback edition (he was in New York for the Gizmodo Gallery Opening Party).
Published January 19th, 2012 by Karen Schoellkopf 
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?
