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.

Save Time

• Shift your commute to a less travelled time. This means you may come in earlier, but you leave earlier too (avoiding the evening rush!).
• Skip the commute. See if it’s possible to occasionally work from home.
• If you drive: use the HOV lane.
• If you’re based in DC/Virgina and you drive, here’s how ride sharing, a.k.a. slugging works. Being a “slug” saves you money, and being a driver allows you into HOV lanes.
• On the train or bus, use mobile apps that work offline & sync later, like Evernote.
• Take the NYC subway? Walk to the spot on the subway train closest to your exit – there’s even an app for that!

Invest in Yourself

• Make a to-do list of all the personal tasks you need to do that day, to help organize your thoughts.
• Listen to audiobooks, learn a foreign language, or watch downloaded screencasts on your iPod or mobile device.
• Save interesting articles on Instapaper, and read from your smartphone while on the train.
• Knit (only on subways or buses, do not attempt while driving!).
• Skip work altogether, and unplug – clear your mind to be more efficient during the day.
• Combine your exercise routine with your commute:  it may make the commute longer, but it may be shorter (and more efficient) than doing both separately.

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!

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!

Simply put, a big part of my job is to acquire more Harvest Customers. One approach we’ve been discussing lately is marketing our product to different industry verticals. Yesterday, I stumbled across a time tracking software specifically “designed” for lawyers. Naturally, I watched the demo so that I could see how we stack up. Harvest was the clear winner…by a wide margin. If your law firm uses this particular software, you have multiple (more than 5!) steps to go through each time you want to make a time entry. In other words, it costs time to track your time.

I have asked many lawyers about how they manage their billable hours. Several — not all — record time on scraps of paper or put it into an excel sheet. These time entries get passed along to admins who enter the time into the firms’ systems. Most don’t enter time as they work, rather they go through their calendars when timesheets are due and use memory. Firms are spending thousands of dollars on software that the lawyers don’t use because they don’t like it. These firms are wasting time and money, and missing out on countless billable hours.

Believe me, I understand the inertia that keeps inefficient systems in place. At my last job we used many clunky systems; we were on Lotus Notes until 2011. We all complained, but no one took the time to do anything about it.

As I watched the legal time tracking demo, I got to thinking: why don’t people demand better?

I think it’s because they don’t know that better exists. My epiphany of the day is that my job isn’t to sell Harvest — it’s to educate people that better exists.

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:

For more Louis CK:

• His fantastic, open statement about the story and economy behind his online special.
• Bill Simmons interviews Louis CK in his latest B.S. Report.
• Louis opens up to Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
• Louis answering questions on Reddit. Our favorite is his answer about learning and his decision to default to “opt out” for his mailing list.

• How to save an unproductive day in 25 minutes: How often have you had a work day when, as mid-afternoon races toward late-afternoon, you realize that you haven’t really gotten anything done? Here’s how you get back on track.
• The best time investments you can make: 7 ways to smartly invest your time, including building in 5 minutes a day to keep to your time investment goals.
• Six of the biggest office distractions: How do you deal with “the talker” in the office, so you can stay on track and get back to work?
• Which e-mails should you respond to first? The mystery is solved, in this short email triage post.
• Taking a more realistic approach to your to-do list with the 3 + 2 rule:  End the frustration (and procrastination!) of never-ending to-do lists, and make headway on the things you actually have time to do.

Follow us on Twitter to get #workbetter tips daily, and feel free to share your own suggestions by using the #workbetter hashtag! We’ll continue to keep you on top of the conversations and topics that are most relevant to you in the world of small business.

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.

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.

60 Minutes recently went behind the scenes with Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of the show, to find out just how they do it. It all starts with a brainstorm session on Thursday morning and results in a completed episode, ready to air, the following Wednesday.

The 5-minute segment below shows the process of how Matt and Trey’s tightly-knit team go from idea to finished product in just 6 days.

Read more at 60 Minutes