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!

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!

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.

Today we’re announcing a significant update for our Free official Harvest Android app, version 1.3. This update brings improved reliability with your Android phone syncing to your online Harvest account.

We launched our Android app in March of this year. This summer we overhauled the entire syncing engine in our iPhone app with brand new API calls, and now we’ve brought these new API calls to our Android app. They are a much more efficient and reliable way to sync time and expenses on your phone, even on-the-go!

Along with the reliability updates, this version also includes some new features and other improvements, including:

• Sync button added to Pending tab
• Project Codes are now displayed
• ‘Report Issues’ directly from the options menu
• Various bug fixes
• New icon

Enjoy, and let us know how the Harvest Android app is working for you. If you’re running into any phone-specific issues, let us know by writing into support.

Visit Android time tracker to learn more and download this companion app for free.

Harvest timesheets have always started on Monday. However, many companies begin their timesheets on Saturday or Sunday, and they approve time weekly based on that start day. It’s been a goal of ours for a while to have Harvest accomodate this worklflow, but we knew that this was a much bigger update than it seemed. Shifting the start day affects all the time a company has entered in Harvest, making it critical that this feature be implemented with the utmost care. With this in mind, we’ve taken every precaution to make sure that a complicated behind-the-scenes switch seems like a simple and seamless one from the Harvest UI.

If your company starts its week on Saturday or Sunday, simply head to Manage > Account Settings and update the Start Week On preference. Harvest Timesheets and Reports will be updated to start the week on the selected day, and timesheets will be approved based on that week.

We hope customizing the start of the workweek makes your Harvest experience even better, and as always, send us your feedback!

See the integration in action, thanks to this screencast provided by Base:

Don’t forget, integrations with Harvest are just an API call away. Do let us know if you are planning an integration, or even if you are just dreaming of one!

Today we’re announcing a significant update for our Free official Harvest iPhone app, version 1.3. You can find it in the App Store on your iPhone.

Improved Syncing Reliability

Version 1.3 brings improved reliability with the iPhone syncing to your online Harvest account. Being one of the first to bring offline syncing to time tracking, we’ve now made it even better. The previous code ran into a number of issues during sync, so we decided to overhaul the entire syncing engine. This overhaul includes the removal of 1000+ lines on code in favor of a brand new set of API calls for much more efficient and reliable syncing (these calls will soon be exposed to all API developers and integrations).

Tracking time and expenses on-the-go should be smoother than ever. As an added bonus, the new API calls now allow us to include conflict messages when a sync doesn’t work exactly as planned, so you know exactly what happened:

Other Features

Along with the reliability updates, this version also includes some new features and other improvements, including:

• You can now create clients, projects, and tasks right from the app
• A ‘Jump to Today’ button if you go to another day in Timesheets
• A ‘Jump to this Week’ button if you go to another week in Expenses
• Project Codes are now displayed
• Increased font sizes on all inputs
• Various bug fixes
• New icon

Enjoy, and let us know how the Harvest iPhone app is helping your business. As always, let us know how we can make it even better.

The Harvest iPhone app allows iPhone users (with iOS 4) to track time and expenses on-the-go, with or without a network connection. You can start and stop task timers, add duration and notes, and upload expense receipts right from your iPhone. Learn more about iPhone Time Tracking.

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!