The HARVEST Blog

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.
• Kids are cute when they’re learning to walk.  Unfortunately, sometimes they fall. :-(
• Warwick shared this great mashup he found by DJ Lobsterdust.
• TJ educated us on 10 things everyone should know about time.
• 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.

I’m really excited to be writing this blog post! In support, one of the common feature requests we get is for a Harvest client log in: a place where you can direct your clients to go to view their invoices and any uninvoiced time on their projects.

One our our customers, Jeroen Kenters of Jeroen Kenters Web Development has taken the time to build just that using PHP (no database required!) and the Harvest API, and he’s made it open source – so you’re free to install it and tweak it however you like.  Harvest4Clients is dead simple to configure and use. Instead of having me go on and on about it though, why not check out a demo?

Continue Reading …

There has been plenty written recently on distributed teams. A couple of weeks ago @dhh wrote a post on the 37signals blog that generated an enormous amount of discussion. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about since I joined Harvest because I happen to think we run our distributed team really well.

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.

Unless you are working from a home office, most of us leave to go to work. You may be surprised by how much time you actually spend in transit to your job – Time Management Ninja created this quick table (which assumes 8 hour workday, 5 day work week, 50 weeks a year), showing  the difference between a short and long commute:

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!

In 2011, we made over 800 updates to Harvest. We had countless conversations with our customers, added new features, refined old features and fixed issues. The constant evolution is a part of who we are as a cloud-based software company. A new update can be deployed to our customers in over 100 countries in an instant and we love that.

It’s About the Team

Behind the scenes, we’ve focused on growing our team. By December of 2011, we added 8 brilliant Harvesters to round out the team at 19. We’ve learned new ways to work together, whether it’s creating Delta Force teams for support, thinking through feature requests, or getting face time with our customers.

With every new team member we add to Harvest, we’re adding one more mind that’s completely focused on making the Harvest experience better for our customers. Updates are done faster, problems are solved more efficiently and our customer service gets even better (send our support team an email during business hours and you’ll hear back from us within 15 minutes).

It’s been a tremendously educational year for us as a team. If you’d like to learn with us, we’re hiring. :)

Turning 5 Years Old

2011 also marked the 5th year we’re in business as Harvest. Harvest was first created to meet the time tracking needs that Shawn and I had during our days as a design studio.

Since the beginning, we’ve taken the approach of building things one step at a time. At first, it was out of necessity of being bootstrapped, but later, it was because we wanted to keep things simple. Year after year, more and more people adopted Harvest to power their businesses. In the process, we’re honored to have picked up the best kind of funding possible for a company: paying customers. Without the distractions of fundraising, we are free to focus on just making Harvest better.

We couldn’t have done it without the support of our amazing community and customers, so when we turned 5 in April, we launched our Giving Back program. As our users tracked time, we allocated donations towards important causes addressed by Doctors Without Borders, Room to Read and charity: water.

The first 5 years was just the beginning.

A Better Harvest

Our business philosophy is simple: create a great product and tell people about it. There are no gimmicks and no shortcuts. We simply love creating something useful and we’re happiest when our customers tell us how we’ve saved them time and hassle.

Our team proudly stands behind what Harvest offers and we’ve prepared a little something to look back on the major updates last year: Harvest 2011 Year In Review.

Thank you for a great 2011. We can’t wait to share the goodness with you in 2012.

We’re excited to announce our winners from last week’s Time Saving Tuesday contest, and to fill you in on this week’s contest and prizes.

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!

Time is money, and meetings are a notorious time sink. Forbes points out that, “a one-hour meeting of six software engineers costs $1,000 at least. People who don’t have the authority to buy paperclips are allowed to call meetings every day that cost far more than that.”

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!

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).
• It’s Doug’s birthday today!  Happy birthday Doug!

Happy New Year everyone!

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!