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. 

• If you find that emails are taking up a lot of time, set yourself a time limit.
• Hit unsubscribe once instead of delete 100 times.
• If a task is taking too long, leave it and come back to it refreshed (leaving for lunch can boost your productivity!)

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!

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.

The only way to run (and participate in) efficient and useful meetings is to invest in certain areas, and reduce in others. Last week, we launched our first Time Saving Tuesday, and we’ve combined our own time saving tips with some excellent Twitter suggestions for making meetings most productive.

Remove from your meetings.

• Get rid of chairs, coffee, donuts, and cell phones. Everyone seems focused on not wasting time when they have to stand, and the number of distractions is limited.
• Use collaboration tools (like Co-op, IM, or email threads). Quickly solve the questions that don’t need a meeting.
• Keep meetings on target by using accurate time estimates. It makes people antsy when meetings run over their time limit, so check previous time reports to effectively gauge typical meeting length.
• Downsize your invitee list. Curate your attendance list wisely.
• Encourage open (for everyone) and closed (selected participants) portions of meetings, where people who do not have to be at entire meeting can be dismissed. You can share meeting notes with everyone afterwards to review.
• Create “meeting-free” days, to allow employees to capitalize on focused, uninterrupted concentration.
• Don’t accept every meeting invite. Says Seth Godin, “Don’t bother having a meeting if you’re not there to change or make a decision right now.”

Invest in your meetings.

• Define specific goals for the meeting ahead of time, so that you can stay on topic.
• Have a clear agenda, w/ time budgets for each item, and then enforce those time limits.
• Offer a way for people to submit questions and ideas in advance of the meeting.
• Circulate any reading materials before the meeting, and insist that all attendees read them beforehand.
• Make use of a talk object (a hat, stick, staff, feather, or something else!), so that people can talk freely without having to talk over others.
• At the end of the meeting, ask for feedback about its efficiency. Keep improving the process!
• Hire a meeting fairy. This magical person can manage and enforce all of the above suggestions, and keep everyone prepared and informed both before and after meetings.

Many thanks to the Twitter community for your great contributions to this article. We’ll announce the winners of our Time Savings Tuesdays contest tomorrow, and feel free to share your own tips in the comments!

Let’s say your design firm is looking at a healthy sales pipeline and the signs are that you may get more work than you can handle. Everyone should have such problems, right? Should you just hire more people and grab all the work you can? Maybe not. There is a good chance that some of that work isn’t good for your business because it doesn’t align with your goals and your company vision.

Everyone who starts a business does it with some goals in mind and a vision of what kind of company they want to be. Most prospective clients have no idea what these are, so it’s up to you to make sure that you only pursue and take on work that best serves your needs. At my firm, we found that a useful tool was to establish assessment criteria that helped us to filter out work that we didn’t want to take on. These criteria gave us an agreed upon framework for our discussions and allowed us to make decisions efficiently and with confidence. We defined this framework by identifying three key things that an ideal project would provide us:

1. We will learn something valuable

Learning something valuable could mean a range of things. For us, it meant picking up new skills, working in a new medium, getting into a new industry, gaining further insight into an area we already had some familiarity with or getting a chance to do something we’d never done before. Projects in this category allow you to gain greater depth at what you already know, expand into new services and growth opportunities, rise to new challenges and stimulate your brain.

2. We will have a great addition to our portfolio

Every designer wants an interesting portfolio that represents their skills and highlights their creativity, and they want clients that people have heard of or can easily look up. Doing a great portfolio project allows you to shine — it builds pride and keeps on giving long after completion by being great for case studies, marketing materials, lecture topics, blog posts, articles and books. You can even show them to your parents when you go home to visit.

3. We will receive a healthy payment

There is no avoiding the money issue. You can’t build a business without money, but most designers don’t want it to be the only thing they’re chasing. Do too much of that and the business will have no soul. It doesn’t feel good to say “I’m just doing this for the money”. But it’s also important to be able to take payment so you can see tangible results for your skill and hard work, not to mention treating your folks to dinner once in a while.

I mentioned that these three are the components of an ideal project — but everyone knows that the world isn’t perfect. Not every project is full of interesting new challenges backed by big budgets. In our experience it is all too easy to find work that fulfills one of the criteria, and it’s rare to hit all three. But satisfying two of them is feasible and helps to prevent taking on fun projects that don’t build the business, relying on bread-and- butter work that becomes a bore, or doing money jobs that leave you feeling empty.

So the next time you receive an RFP, an inbound lead, are making cold calls or even are thinking about your marketing strategy, try taking a step back first to see if these assessment criteria can help you to focus on the work that is worth taking on. If these criteria don’t cut it for you, take a look at your goals and your company vision and establish three criteria of your own.

You will end up turning some work down, even as that practical part of you cringes at passing up an opportunity. Refer the client to your best competitor or someone you think is better suited to the work, and you’ll have done the better thing for your business, yourself and the client.

Are you one of the many successful Harvest customers? We’d love to hear stories and lessons about your business. If you have something to share, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Since January of this year, we’ve curated and shared #workbetter articles via @harvest on twitter. The goal was to provide you with the very best advice for growing your business. We’re expanding on our lofty goal by sharing our own knowledge and tools geared towards helping you work better. You can find what we crafted over at the new Resources Section, or read on for a quick tour of the section.

Harvest Guides -We’ve started to distill down conversations we’ve had with team leaders, who use Harvest every workday. From these conversations we’ve assembled a series of Harvest Guides that cover how small business owners and project managers can get started with team time tracking, and how to get the most out of it. For example, our Time Tracking for Project Managers Guide will walk you through how to use reports in Harvest to better allocate time on future projects.

Free Templates - We love our in-app timesheets and invoices. They are impeccably designed and powerful. However, for your friends and like-minded strangers who are completely new to tracking time, or are looking for a basic invoice, we’ve created simple, editable versions of both. As an example, our Daily Timesheet template is ready to download and print, and is structured to help you keep track of your day in 15 minute increments. Track time this way for a few weeks, and you’ll have a much better picture of where your time is going. Our Invoice template also comes ready to be filled out, and looks professional. Most of the templates are already available in PDF or Google Docs. If you’re trying to hook your friends on the benefits of time tracking or automated invoicing, the free templates can be their gateway drug.

Webinar Series – Our Getting Started with Harvest Webinar Series covers the basics of Harvest’s core features including time tracking, invoicing, and reporting. The series has been popular, so we’re giving it a permanent home. You can learn more about the series, sign up, and share pre-recorded Webinar clips with your friends or colleagues to get them started with Harvest. Down the road, we’ll be expanding the Webinar Series to include integration tutorials and more.

As we continue adding to the new Resources section, we’d love to hear feedback from you. What else would you like to see? What are you reading or using right now to improve the way you work? If you’re using Harvest to work more effectively, we’d love to know your thoughts, let us know!

Invoice Faster

The goal of this report is simple and straightforward. It allows you to quickly scan and find all the outstanding, unbilled amounts for each client and project. You can view the amount by month, quarter or year; and each client has an “Invoice” button – click it to create an invoice for the selected timeframe. If your account has rounding turned on, this report will automatically round the hours according to how you configure it.

Here are some other features we’ve added to enhance the Uninvoiced Report:

• Check the Active Projects Only box to hide any archived projects
• Uninvoiced Hour and Expense amounts generate detailed reports
• You can Export this report to Excel or CSV

We hope the Uninvoiced Report helps your business stay on top of its numbers and get paid faster for all of your hard work. Thank you for your continued support and helpful feedback, and we look forward to hearing from you!

Find What You Need

We’ve added new input filters that make it so you can quickly choose what to include in your report. Simply start typing what you’re searching for and results will appear instantaneously. You can also select multiple items for the same category. Want to see a report for your two most tracked Tasks? This is now possible with the new filters.

Better Organization

The Detailed Time Report previously grouped all results by Date. Now you can group results by any category that you use to filter your report. Each group displays the hour total with a clear breakdown of time entries below. Grouping results keeps Detailed Time Reports clear and organized for you and your clients.

Other Improvements

We’ve made some other notable improvements, including:

This feature took us 182.13 hours.

• Refreshed visual design with better spacing.
• Improved interaction for marking hours as invoiced or uninvoiced.
• We’ve also brought over all of these changes to the Expense Report.

All of the changes we’ve made make the new Detailed Time Report easier to generate, scan, and use in and out of Harvest. Additionally, we’ve got more new features coming to Harvest Reports next week. While you’re looking forward to these, enjoy the new Detailed Time and Expense Reports, and let us know what you think!

A redesign of the Time Report has been a long time coming. Reports need to effectively present the overwhelming amount of data your company enters every day, in a format that’s easy to analyze and understand. At its core, the Time Report is a decision-making tool. We want Harvest to help you make better decisions and the new version of Reports was designed with this in mind.

Here are a few of the enhancements in the new Time Report:

Easy to Scan

The new interface is designed to make it easy to understand the overall health of your business. We’ve added a summary panel at the top of the page that quickly shows you the big picture: total hours, billable percentage, billable amount, and uninvoiced amount. Details of this summary are displayed in a table organized by Clients, Projects, Tasks, and Staff. This layout will help you find what you need fast.

Staff Report New!

How staff spend their time is one of the most important pieces of information for any company, so we’ve added a Staff Report as a way to access this data easily. Decision makers can view staff members’ total billable and unbillable hours, or click on a specific staff member and find information on all of the Projects and Tasks they worked on. You can also upload their photo, making it even faster to relate hours to a person on the report.

Click image to view full.

5x Faster

Underneath the new Time Report interface, the entire reporting codebase was rewritten from the ground up. Our development team took advantage of the recent Rails3 upgrade, and the rewritten code is 63% smaller than the original. With the updated interface and navigation structure, there’s less data to render for each page load, and together with the more efficient code, the new Time Report is five times faster than the original reports on initial load.

Other Goodies

We’ve also incorporated a number of special additions and frequently requested features to make Reports more useful:

• You can now filter Reports by a “semimonthly”  timeframe, so if you bill from the 1st to mid-month and from mid-month to the last day, this filter is for you.
• We’ve added more graphs, including a color-coded bar graph to help you quickly compare the time spent on your top tasks.
• Tabs are loaded via AJAX for more responsive navigation (as well as faster initial rendering).
• We took full advantage of our recent Harvest HD upgrade, minimizing images and utilizing all new CSS3 techniques. This means pages load extremely fast.

What’s Next

This feature took us 451.10 billable hours.We’re extremely excited about the new Time Report, and we hope you find it useful for your own business. We’re happy to announce that this is only the first in a series of updates coming to Reports in the future. Stay tuned for major improvements to the Detailed Time Report, Exporting, the Project Status Report and more.

Enjoy the new Harvest Time Report, and let us know what you think!

Two Buckets

We categorize requests into two buckets:

1. Things we plan to work on.
2. Things we don’t – requests we don’t hear of often, or suggestions that don’t fit our vision.

Feature requests that fall in the first bucket are tricky. We genuinely want to work on a lot of these features, but if something is not in our immediate plan, the best we can tell you is that “it’s on our list.”  Whether it’s through email or the forum, we can only say that so many times before we start to sound insincere.

Whatever the case, we ask each prospective customer to make their purchase decision based on what is available in Harvest today. We are constantly improving Harvest, but we simply cannot promise a timeline for new features. We do not make false promises.

What Are We Working On?

Frankly, I feel like an ass whenever I have to say “it’s on our list” to a customer. So what should we do? One thing we’d like to try is to make our first bucket public. Here’s a list of the 4 big things coming to Harvest in the upcoming months:

• Reports 2.0 – we’ve done an extensive survey with our customers, and we’re overhauling our reports section based on the feedback. We’re breaking this down to many releases, and the first one will be public by March 8th.
• The ability to change the start of the week on a timesheet.
• Better control of user permissions.
• Invoice customization.

These are, by far, the most highly demanded features from our customers, and we want to get them done.

Kaizen & The Team

Another thing we’d like to make known is that the “list” we refer to is real:

We built our own custom project management application called Kaizen, in which we record every single suggestion that comes in. We save your email address to the request – and once it’s ready, we email you. To the astute observer, you can see that some of the most popular requests are not shown in the screenshot. These requests have already been turned into actual projects.

Oh, and by “we,” I mean every member of the Harvest team. Christopher takes care of the bulk of the incoming tickets, but we all answer support emails and questions on the forum. Your requests are answered and handled by the same people who design and build the application.

Fast & Agile

Today, Harvest has a total of 13 people (we hope to grow that to 18 before Summer). Danny and I cannot be more proud of our small, but nimble, agile and extremely capable team. We execute much faster than traditional desktop applications – have you tried asking QuickBooks or Photoshop for a new feature or to fix a bug? We also release features and updates much more often than our peers – we average about at least one big feature per month, with many smaller updates and improvements deployed throughout the week. What we can do better is to make these updates known to our customers. But really, would you rather we spend our time improving the product, or devote our energy to writing blogs and books?

On that note, I’ll end this blog post and get back to work.

Click on the Manage tab, and under Projects, Clients, People and Tasks, you’ll notice the new Import/Export button. Choose whatever action you need and just follow the simple set of instructions. More specifically, you can now:

• Import projects into and Export projects out of Harvest via a CSV file (a standard spreadsheet format which you can prepare with Excel, Numbers or Google Docs). Note that you can also import projects via Basecamp and Highrise.  This will allow you review multiple projects’ information in one spot, and even print it out as an Excel spreadsheet.
• Import and Export clients and client contacts via a CSV file.
• Import and Export people via a CSV file. Harvest will automatically create an account and email each person of their log in credentials upon import (the email is optional).
• Export all active tasks to a CSV file, so that you can see them all within an Excel file, and print out for review.

The new import/export features will make life a lot easier in setting up and managing project and clients easier within Harvest. Kudos to Doug for making this happen!

Thank you all for your feedback and support. Please let us know if you have any questions or thoughts about these updates!