Harvest customer Jason Calacanis has started companies like Weblogs, Inc. (acquired by AOL), Mahalo.com and ThisWeekIn.com. Jason recently wrote about why his businesses track time and how that has helped them make better decisions.

Time tracking is a very touchy subject in the employment space, and you have to be very, very careful implementing it if you’re not in advertising, legal or consulting (where it’s standard). Time tracking asks team members to report on which projects and tasks they are working on down to the quarter hour.

It seems annoying, but it actually isn’t a big deal. It adds about five minutes to each person’s day—max —since most folks work on fewer than 10 tasks a day. The information you can get from it can be unexpected. For example, we realized that one of our video shows was costing eight times another, with two more sitting squarely in between. When drilled down, we figured out what the more efficient shows were doing, and applied those best practices to all the other shows.

Additionally, we went to our distribution partner and said, “Look, this is costing us more and here are the numbers—we need a better deal.” We got it!

If you’re having trouble motivating your team to adopt time tracking, Jason offers some sound advice:

Now, you will get standard objections like “I’m too busy to do this” and “You don’t trust me?” The first objection tends to come from high performers, who will respond properly to “I understand you’re slammed, but if you do this, it’s a short-term cost for a long-term benefit, because we’re going to show exactly how much more effective you are than everyone else—and you can use that in your next review!”

The “You don’t trust me?” protest tends to come from “eeyores” or low performers. When they respond this way, you should look them in the eye and say, “We wouldn’t have hired you if we didn’t trust you. This is for the good of the team.” Then say nothing. If they whine some more, you can use the metaphor of athletes who track every metric under the wisdom of “If you can measure it, you can manage it.” If they still complain? Well, it might just be time to hit the eject button on that employee.

Read more about the tools Jason uses for his business in this OPEN Forum article.

We have been making a lot of improvements to the new Harvest Timesheet. Today, I wanted to show power users the fastest way to use it.

Knowing just a few simple keyboard shortcuts, you can start a timer or enter time without ever having to use a mouse. See it in action:

• ‘n‘ to open up the new entry form,
• Use tab to move between the form elements,
• ‘esc‘ to cancel out of the form,
• If you are tracking time via duration, we accept a variety of formats (1.2 = 1 hour and 12 minutes) and simple time math.
• If you are using timestamps, we understand “11.25″ or “1125″ (faster than typing 11:25) or “9a”, short for 9:00am.

We’re starting out with a limited and simple set of shortcuts, and we’d love to hear what shortcuts you’d like to see for the timesheet!

The good folks at Fog Creek have received over 1900 votes to build time tracking into Trello, their project management application. With that much enthusiasm, it only made sense for us to bring time tracking into Trello, Harvest-style. Today, we’re very excited to announce that you can now use the Harvest Chrome Extension to track time right from your Trello account.

Track Time in Trello

Harvest is already the fastest and easiest way to track time, and our integration with Trello goes one step further in making it accessible anywhere and everywhere. Curious? Watch the Harvest Chrome Extension in action.

Here are some great reasons to use the extension:

• Track time without leaving Trello – You can track time right from your Trello cards, so you can focus on the task at hand.
• See the time spent on each card – Each Trello card shows how much time  has been spent on it, so you know exactly where your time is going.
• Get all the benefits of Harvest – In Harvest, you can easily turn the time tracked from Trello into reports and invoices. We’ve got all your needs covered.

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Today, we’re excited to give developers an easy way to add a seamless time tracking experience right into their applications. Introducing the Harvest Platform.

Traditionally, integrations between applications have required tedious API calls and database changes. With the new Harvest Platform, adding time tracking to a project management, issue tracking or task management application is as easy as embedding a few lines of JavaScript and HTML. Developers can now focus on the core functionality of their apps while easily harnessing Harvest for time tracking, reporting and invoicing.

Background

Over the last 6 years of building Harvest, we’ve received countless requests to integrate with various applications. The reason is simple: users want to simplify their daily workflows. Our customers use Harvest in conjunction with project management or issue tracking applications and they crave a tight integration between the apps.

For the application developers, many are reluctant to add time tracking on top of their product’s core focus. They know that time tracking is just scratching the surface of the true customer need. Once time is captured, customers need to run reports and send invoices based on that time.

With these reasons in mind, we’ve created the Harvest Platform. It’s an extremely easy way for developers to enable time tracking in their application while offloading time tracking, reporting and invoicing to Harvest.

A first-class user experience

To see the type of experience the platform can enable, take a look at the first application to take advantage of the platform: Do by Salesforce. Do is a social productivity tool that helps people work together on shared tasks and projects.

Using the Harvest Platform, the Do team has enabled time tracking by including a timer button with each Do task. When you click the button, the Harvest Platform modal window opens, and it already knows about the Do project and task details and the user simply enters any additional notes and tracks time. The user never needs to leave the Do application for time tracking.

Do.com shown here using the Harvest Platform integration to bring time tracking to their tasks. If you wish to request early access to this integration on Do, simply create a Do account (if you don’t have one already) and email the Do team. 

Implementation in 15 minutes

As developers know, integrations between applications can often be a cumbersome development effort. With the Harvest Platform, we worked hard to make sure it’s incredibly easy to use for any developer. Implementation involves only adding JavaScript and HTML to your code. There are no APIs or data models to worry about.

If you’re a developer, head to the Harvest Platform page to learn more. If you have a favorite application which you wish had time tracking, let them know about this new effortless way to add time tracking right into their application.

We are very excited to announce version 2.0 of Harvest for iPhone today! This version is almost a complete re-write of the application with an eye towards speed, reliablity, and a better user experience.

The user interface is based on the beautiful design of our Mobile Timesheets page, which includes some powerful usability enhancements like slide-in navigation and the ability to stop a timer directly from the Timesheets view.

The new application internals have borrowed heavily from the lessons learned from our successful Harvest for Mac app. We believe you’ll notice this as a faster, more reliable experience in version 2.0. In addition, this new architecture lays the groundwork for future updates, meaning we’ll be able to incorporate new features and fixes that much faster.

We’ve got a long list of updates in this release, but here are a few highlights:

• We’ve added support for logging in via Google Apps, for those of you who have linked your Harvest account to your Google Apps account.
• The new Team Status view is a great screen for admins who want to know what their team is working on.
• You can now create projects, clients, and tasks while offline.

(The full list of improvements in this version is included at the bottom of this post.)

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A few weeks ago I downloaded MyFitnessPal to my iPhone. During the 2 weeks that I actually used it (don’t judge!) I noticed something about my behavior. Specifically, being hyper aware of my choices, actually changed the way I consumed food and the way I chose to spend my down time. I started bringing lunch and started exiting the subway a few stops earlier in order to lengthen my walk to work.

If you’ve ever used Mint or any other budgeting apps, you may have experienced the same phenomenon. Understanding where your money goes makes you much more aware before you spend it. You end up being more focused. It might even inspire you to create a budget for yourself and stick to it.

While using MyFitnessPal, I realized that the relationship I was developing with this fitness app was similar to the one I have with Harvest. Since joining Harvest more than a year ago, I have found that entering time as I go has a huge personal benefit. Sure, it’s faster and it ensures that the time data is accurate, but the real benefit for me is that it helps me manage my time more efficiently. The act of starting a timer makes me more focused. It is the equivalent of making a declaration about what I’m about to do.

Even though Harvest has more than 10 ways for you to enter time as you go, many of you still enter at the end of the day, week or even, month. If you’re one of those people, I’d recommend you give track-as-you-go a try. It may seem awkward at first, but it becomes second nature rather quickly. Give it a day. And if you take me up on this challenge, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

After months of hard work, we are thrilled to finally unveil the new Harvest Timesheet.

This new timesheet is a giant step forward from the previous version. The interface is redesigned from the ground up. We sweated over every pixel and interaction, down to the timer animation on the “Stop” button. The codebase has been rewritten from scratch, and the new timesheet now has a stronger and more reliable engine that will serve us well for years to come. We think you’re going to be pleased with the resulting product – a faster, simpler, smoother, and more powerful new Harvest Timesheet:

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Basecamp is a popular web-based project management application by 37signals which we’ve been using since 2006. Earlier this year, 37signals launched an all new version that is fast, simple and powerful. For some users of the new Basecamp, there was only one thing missing: the ability to track time.

While Harvest has long supported the previous version of Basecamp (aka Basecamp Classic) with an integration that synced projects and people, we heard from many customers that they needed just a little more — they needed to track time on specific to-dos. With that in mind, we decided to rethink our approach to the integration.

Today, we’re very excited to announce a seamless way to track time in Basecamp. Unlike most integrations which can feel disjointed, we really mean it when we say seamless. With the help of the official Harvest Chrome Extension, you can now track time for your to-dos right inside Basecamp. To see what we mean, take a look at the video below.

With Harvest for Basecamp, you can do your project management and collaboration in Basecamp, and your time tracking, reporting and invoicing in Harvest.

To get started with Harvest for Basecamp, simply do the following:

• Use the Google Chrome web browser (it’s a great browser and it’s free)
• Install the Harvest Chrome Extension
• Log into Basecamp, find a to-do and start tracking time.

That’s it! We hope you enjoy this new integration and thanks for using Harvest.

Track time the modern way. Try Harvest for free today. 

There’s a brand new Harvest Timesheet coming your way next week. It’s faster, simpler, roomier, and better designed. Here’s a quick video demo of the new day view:

The new timesheet is completely re-written and re-imagined, driven by one goal: to make it faster and easier to track time.

From our customer research, we found that most people love the simplicity of our current timesheet. But there are a few fundamental problems: the project and task selectors can get long and make it hard to find things once you have too many projects, the timesheet becomes “stale” if you leave it open in your browser without manually refreshing, and if you use the day view (like most of us here), it’s a hassle to review your progress for the week. The new timesheet design solves these problems, and we believe you will be pleased with the new experience.

From a technical standpoint, the new timesheet is a necessary fresh start for our team. The code behind the current timesheet has served us well for the past six years, but it has become difficult to maintain and nearly impossible to enhance. We applied everything we learned from our new mobile timesheet to create fast, approachable code. The experience for customers is markedly improved, and the robustness of the code will allow future improvements to be delivered much more quickly.

We cannot wait to show you the fruits of our labor next week. We believe you are going to love how snappy everything feels, and we hope the faster timesheet means that you can spend less time tracking time, and more time on the important things.

9/26 Update: A couple of notes to clear up some confusion:

• There will be a new timesheet week view. The new week view has been redesigned and rewritten from scratch, and will be just as fast and easy as the new day view.
• Timestamps will be supported. The new timesheet is not taking away any feature you’ve grown used to. For those who prefer to track time based on start and end times, not only will you be able to continue doing so, we have made a couple of small but useful improvements to the interaction.

The new Harvest Mobile Timesheet is now ready for everyone! Here’s a short and sweet video to show you the highlights:

New Features: Team Status & Recent Tasks

There are many tweaks and improvements to the interface. The two most significant features are:

• Team Status. This feature is built for project managers who are constantly asking, “what’s the team working on?” This page automatically refreshes itself with the latest information, a little touch that busy project managers would surely appreciate. Note: for this first version, you’ll need to be an admin to see Team Status.
• Recent Tasks. Instead of choosing from a list of projects and tasks, you can now quickly select from a list of five most recent tasks. Once you start using it, you’ll be amazed at how much faster it is to start a timer in Harvest.

And a tip: you can use the new mobile timesheet from your computer or iPad by going to https://SECURESITE.harvestapp.com/timesheet

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