1DayLater - The Blog

Mileage claims - are you claiming the right tax relief for your mileage?

Claiming the right amount of tax relief for your business mileage could be saving you hundreds of pounds each year.

Although there are several things you must be aware of, maximising your claim will really just require a combination of good discipline and proper organisation. Here’s how you do it:

Firstly, you will need to find out your country’s Approved mileage rate

In the UK, there are 2 sets of rates depending on the total number of miles you have travelled in any given tax year:

For 0 - 10,000 miles, these rates are:

• 40p / mile - cars and vans
• 24p / mile - motorcycles
• 20p / mile - bicycles

After 10,000 miles, this goes down to: 

• 25p / mile - cars and cans
• 24p / mile - motorcycles
• 20p / mile - bicycles

I have to admit that I laughed the first time I saw this table, kudos to whoever travels more than 10,000 business miles on a bicycle in a year :) I want to meet that guy!

Calculated over an entire year, this could add up to a tidy sum, particularly if you or your staff are often out on the road visiting clients.

The next step now that you know your Approved Mileage Rates is to get in the habit of recording your business trips. - naturally we would recommend 1DayLater for this ;-)

The things you will need to record are:

• Distance travelled (remember to check your cars speedometer before and after you make a trip)
• Reason for the trip and who you visited - you will only be able to reclaim mileage for business-related trips so this is really important.
• Date of journey  

And if you’re lucky enough to have an accountant then that’s it….they should deal with everything else….simply hand over your mileage log or 1DayLater mileage claim and relax. Lovely!

Time Management Tips - no. 6 - are you working towards your goals?

You can work as hard as you want, and as efficiently, but if it’s not bringing you any closer to your goals then it’s time to take stock.

“If you’re going nowhere, you’re guaranteed to get there”

Effective time tracking can help you to understand if your working habits are congruent with your goals. Here is a simple method you can use to make sure you’re working ‘clever’ rather than just working hard.

Step 1-Record your daily activities

Using 1DayLater, record your daily activities over a week - or better still; over a month.

Step 2-Rank your activities in decending order

Rank your activities in descending order, with the most time-hungry tasks at the top of the list.

Step 3-Compare with your ideal case

Write our a separate list of projects and tasks in the order they should be in. Compare this to the real case; showing what you actually spent time on. Is the weight of each task mirrored by your actual ‘real life’ activities. If the ‘actual’ and the ‘ideal’ don’t mesh, then why not? Are you spending too much time on low priority tasks?

Try to look of your ‘bigger picture’ and see which tasks will benefit you in the long term. If these are being neglected it’s likely you’re getting sidetracked by low importance, urgent tasks (see our earlier article on this).

Improve

Now, armed with your newfound knowledge you can start improving the way that you work on a daily basis…

Thinking about ‘Time’ rather than ‘Money’ influences your happiness!

Hello chaps, I came across a recent study carried out by ‘The Association for Psychological Science’ and wanted to share it with our lovely 1DayLater users.

Researchers at TAPS have discovered something interesting; if we actively think in terms of our time, rather than in terms of money - we are motivated to change our habits and spend more time socialising with friends and family - behaviours that are associated with greater happiness!

^ take this cup of coffee for example, he’s already doing it!

This idea might seem really simple, but I think it’s pretty profound. By shifting our perceptions from money-focus to time-focus we can actually make ourselves happier!

I know my friends at HappiestHQ will enjoy this notion. If you get the chance, sign up to their Beta list and keep an eye out for their happyness app this year - http://happie.st/

So yes; there’s never been a better reason to start tracking your time and improving that all-important work-life balance. And before you go, take one last look at the Happy Coffee Cup; you know you want to :)

Our redesign is now up and running!

So our new redesign has finally gone live. Hurrah! We crossed our fingers and hoped that the innevitable firefighting would be kept to a minimum, and it has been. Touch wood!

One of the main things our users will notice straight away is that modules are now segmented, so they are no longer all on one page. A lot of the reasons behind this will become clear once we add ‘teams’ next year, but we feel it separates 1DayLater’s functions nicely.

Another useful addition to the new site is multiple timers. We had several requests for this feature on our feedback form, with users suggesting that it would be a good idea to be able to start and stop different projects as they flicked between tasks.

There are some other nifty improvements too; including a search feature that sits separately from user’s historical data, a handy auto-fill for export, mileage claim and invoicing features and an improved demo system.

So far Feedback on the changes has been overwhelmingly positive. Here are a few of my personal favourites (via Twitter):

“Best thing about the new @1DayLater is the multiple timers, very useful!”
- KristianLunde

“Loving the new @1DayLater redesign - looking funky retro in IE and smooth as a pebble in Firefox”
- AidanGarnish

Of course we’re up for criticism too!. Please let us know your opinions via our online feedback form or be commenting on this blog

Time Management Tips - no.5 - making sure you’re always on time for meetings

With our tip of the day you’ll never be late to another meeting again ;)

Ask yourself - how many times have you stumbled into an important meeting late, sweaty and unprepared? Your potential client watching beads of sweat drip from your forehead…not a good first impression!

I’m sure this happens to everyone at some point. With so many distractions around us it’s no wonder. But there’s a simple little mental trick to avoid it happening. Cue the “super hot date” scenario.

The thinking goes…

If, instead of the meeting penciled in your diary, you actually had a SUPER HOT DATE planned (let your imagination paint the specifics here) you would probably do anything to make sure you gave yourself good time beforehand. No mountain goat, force-field, ocean or giant banana peel would stop you getting there.

I was going to put a picture of Jessica Rabbit here…but the banana won!

So that’s it, simple. With hot date on the mind, you’ll turn up well dressed, on time and well prepared…viola!

Of course if you want to become a true time management guru and take things to the next level…

Step 1 - Record your interuptions

Over a normal week you can use 1DayLater to record how much time you spend dealing with interuptions. An interuption can be thought of as something which makes you deviate from your daily plan.

Step 2 - Figure out your daily average

Divide your weekly total by the number of days you worked

Step 3 - Factor this into your everyday diary

Now you know how much you’re likely to be interupted each day. You can factor this into your diary, planning sufficient time before your meetings in case something comes up. Magic!

Time Management Tips - no.4 - ditch your bad email habits

This week I want to focus on emails and why it’s a good idea to ditch that compulsive ‘empty at all times’ email habit! If you’re one of the 68% of people in the UK who check emails during their time off this habit is not only killing your productivity, it’s interrupting your social life too!

Since starting 1DayLater over a year ago I’ve learned a lot about productivity. In the same way that you would expect a ticket inspector to buy a bus ticket, you would also expect the directors of a time tracking software to know a little bit about good time management.

And by far one of the most difficult habits I’ve tried to develop is centred around emails, and avoiding a productivity-draining ‘empty at all times’ email habit.

It’s not surprising that we are all compelled to act instinctively on a new email. By nature we’ve evolved to be curious as a survival mechanism to keep an eye out for predators. Although nowadays literally getting eaten isn’t much of a concern, having our precious time gnawed away by emails is still a pain!

These compulsive habits are also no doubt why those outstanding Facebook updates maintain such a power over you. (I recently committed ‘Facebook Suicide’ to get away from this particular distraction)

Luckily there are some things we can do to stop emails interrupting our business.

Getting into some good email habits:

1. Only check your emails at certain times of the day for a designated amount of time. Morning, midday and afternoon should do the trick
2. Turn off email notifications in between 
3. Be selective about what you read - you will instinctively know which emails are the time wasting ones so try and get into the habit of simply not reading and then archiving them.

If people question why you haven’t read their emails tell them that this is your new habit. They should respect it

More hardcore phase

To take this to the next level

1. Only sweep emails

2. Only reply to urgent emails

3. Leave everything else (tricky at first)

The ability to work uninterrupted on tasks should have a profound effect on your productivity. Not only that, you will develop a reputation for only answering important emails (I know this is true because my brother is a true master of this habit and people have learned to send the less urgent emails to me!) 

And when people stop bothering you with trivial matters you can spend more time on the things which really make a difference. Magic!

Shall I compare thee to a 1DayLater timesheeting system….?

If I asked you to think of timesheets you would probably think of last thing on a Friday afternoon, loads of grief, wasted time and drab spreadsheets. A necessary evil.

Well no more! When local company and Centre for Digital Excellence, Codeworks recently asked us to help save them admin time and costs we went to it with a venguence. And now we’re making timesheets beeeautiful!

A work in progress…Part of the Codeworks <-> 1DayLater dashboard.

Data is fed in from Microsoft Outlook and then presented in an easy-to-read timeline, with different colours representing different projects / clients supported.

Our central dashdoard (shown above) then allows managers to observe, at a glance, what their collegues have been up to. Users can then see forecasted activities, generate timesheets or run a number of different reports.

And because data has already been inputted once into Outlook there is little need for organisational change, a major selling point for larger companies.

We will be getting some feedback from Codeworks staff using the system in the next few weeks. We are hoping that the result will be reduced admin time, admin costs and improved reporting in general.

Ps. although it is an awesome compliment it’s probably not a good idea to compare your missus / mister to a 1DayLater timesheeting system ;)

1DayLater phone apps are almost here!

Over this last month we have been waylaid slightly from our feature roadmap by a large corporate tender we recently won.

The result (which you might have noticed) has been less frequent tweaks and improvements to the site. But rest assured that we are still here working hard and that there are some very exciting new things to come out of our current development.

Despite our current corporate goings-on, the latest build of our 1DayLater phone app is finally almost release-worthy. We now just need to do some user-feedback testing and then get it out into the big wide world of the app stores.

————A screenshot of the 1DayLater i-phone app————-

The 1DayLater phone app will make it easy to log snippets of information while on the move, whether that’s time spent with a client, miles travelled, or daily expenses accrued. 

It will be available first on i-phone, and then on Blackberry, Google android and Nokia N-Series. We expect that this will make our service exponentially more useful for many users!

If you would like to be one of the first users to test the app, please drop me an email. We would very much value your feedback - feedback@1daylater.com

Paul

PCmag’s ‘best free software of 2010’

I was just a gleam in my parents eyes when PCmag started up in 1982. For anyone who hasn’t heard of these guys, they are a well respected online computer magazine who were published monthly both in print and online till January 2009.

Now the magazine just has an online version, but still features reviews and previews of the latest hardware and software for the IT pro. Every year they run an article with the best free software of that year - and you can see what’s coming right?

Ah you guessed it, our own 1DayLater made the cut! And let me tell you it’s a proud day when we are featured alongside the likes of Picassa, Evernote and Dropbox (who we wrote about last year)

So a big thanks to everyone who helped us into this list - and for providing us with a great moment.

1DayLater phone & desktop applications

Some months ago we surveyed our beloved 1DayLater users to find out what the most-wanted features were. A mobile phone application came out on top, with a desktop application not far behind.

We’ve decided to kill these two particular birds with one stone. And enlisted the help of some local pro’s to help us do it.

Twisted Studio are a digital design house operating from the heart of Teesside’s Digital City. They are versed in all the latest creative and interactive technologies, and whats more, they’re big on data visualisation.

Now here at 1DayLater we LOVE coming up with cool and innovative ways of displaying data. So as you might imagine they’ve already won us over! But apart from that we’d really urge you to use their services because they’re a great bunch.

Here’s what we can expect for 1DayLater over the next month or so:

1) Phone applications for the following platforms:

• Android
• i-phone
• Blackberry
• N-Series

2) ‘Adobe air’ cross platform desktop application
(serving as a handy reminder to log your time, money and mileage)

Assuming everything goes as planned we should see these start to emerge in February, with the desktop application coming first. I can’t wait to give our customers something really special as I get the feeling they’re going to dazzle us.

Paul

Techcrunch Europe and other great exposure

January has been a phenominal month in terms of press for 1DayLater. Almost overnight we’ve started to attract a swash of Beta sign ups from across the waters. And like proud parents we’d like to share with you some of the great reviews 1DayLater has had.

1DayLater - A feisty time-tracking solution from the North East of England

Techcrunch Europe is ranked as the most influential tech blog in the UK - by information site Wikio

“1DayLater - Keep track of your business”

Useful Tools sift through the abundance of technologies available to you, and help you find the most useful web tools and apps.

“1DayLater - Ensuring the right amount is invoiced”

Killer Startups review 15+ startups a day. The public votes on which one they think will be ‘a killer’

“1DayLater - Keeping track of your time, money and business miles”

A daily dose of web 2.0

The Export feature lands!

7 days between 1DayLater blog posts?! It’s unheard of!!

Being busy is a terrible excuse for not writing on the blog, I think it might be time to invent a word that’s busier than “busy”… We’ve got some great news about 1DayLater, but first lets recap other goings-on:

• Me and Paul have moved in together
  a shared home office = double productivity
• We’re starting an exciting charity event
  we’ll starting blabbing about that soon
• Phone development is under way
  funding is sorted and the dev team standing by
• I seem to have acquired a rabbit
  he (or she) might become the 1DayLater mascot…

The real news is that the much awaited 1DayLater Export feature has finally arrived - I’ve grafted hard to make this as simple as possible and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results you can get

It’s worth trying out to see how tasty the results can be.

We’ve a lot more in the pipeline, and I’m already excited to get the new features finished and start writing about them! Till next time, David