1DayLater - The Blog

Time Management Tips - no.2

Understanding Urgent Vs Important

By being pro-active rather than reactive, and ensuring you work on ‘the right’ things rather than on all things you will become far more effective in work and in life.

Maelstrom is a timeless classic and favourite game of mine, a lot like the popular asteroids. It provides a great visual aid to describe how your daily activities fit within Urgent & Important frameworks.

Here are a few screenshots from the game…

The Important Tasks

1) Not Urgent + Important - These are the fast little asteroids which aren’t on an immediate collision course. They won’t kill you straight away but these little guys will get you eventually. Best to pick them off now before they become a threat later on.

(business) think of preventative tasks, personal development, networking, planning, developing new product lines - all the things which will ensure growth & long term survival but are easy to put off. You need to spend more time on these tasks.

2) Urgent + Important - This is anything which is on a collision course to wipe you out. If you don’t deal with it right now there will be serious problems.

(business) This could be a crisis, a meeting with your bank manager / investor, the filing of an impending VAT return. Always deal with these things in a timely fashion.

The Unimportant Tasks

3) Not Urgent + Not Important - Slow asteroids which just ramble along, no threat at all. But by far the most fun to shoot gung-ho at! And once you do, there will be a whole barrage of smaller faster asteroids to deal with when you have to play catch-up

(business) Sneaky time spent on facebook, procrastinating, basically most things you know you shouldn’t be doing. Don’t waste time on these!

4) Urgent + Not Important - Shooting stars appear momentarily and give you points when shot. But they are never a threat and you often get hit by something else while you’re distracted by them.

(business) A ringing telephone, any staff interuptions which take you away from your train of thought and working. You need to exercise restraint in dealing with these things all the time. Learn to say no!

What a great analogy for your working day! By visualising activities like this it’s easy to see you should be spending more time in quadrant 1 (the non-urgent, important tasks) and less time in quadrants 3 and 4 (the unimportant quadrants)

Developing these habits will help you to massively increase your productivity. Why not use 1DayLater to track your time spent in each area as you try to improve your working focus day-by-day.

Props to Steven R. Covey & his great book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People for teaching me about this awesome technique.

Our Ambitious Vision for 2010

1DayLater have enjoyed a great 2009, and look forward to celebrating this Christmas and New Year. But before we go, here are a some exciting things to look forward to in 2010…

• A Full feature set — with outputs including invoicing, mileage claims, export, more in-depth analysis, and 3rd party add-ons.

• Mobile phone & desktop app development — you’ll be able to log your activities on the move, and our handy desktop app will remind you to log them while you’re working at your pc.

• The launch of our market intelligence campaign — by London-based firm, Kingpin Intelligence. That means MORE FEEDBACK which essentially means better end service for you

• Development of an Outlook application for 1DayLater — A useful Outlook ‘skimmer’ being created by our friends at local Centre for Digital Innovation - Codeworks as part of their new Dev scheme.

- check out David doing ‘The Proposition’ pose, perfect for corporate photos!

Aaand if none of that other stuff tickled you, we’ll also have…

• Integration of 1DayLater with Sage Sales Logix (CRM) & Sage Accounts — Using the expert guidance of our friend Derek Curtis & his company Bond Solutions, the leading NE supplier of Sage software products

• A ‘secret charity based project’ — supported by our friends at Sunderland Software City, Newcastle’s Culture Lab, Codeworks & Bond Solutions - more info to come soon!

• A discounted ‘Time Recovery Tool’ for 1DayLater members — A tool to help you save time which has been created by time-management coaches, Cadenza associates.

Wow!

Writing it down like that just made me realise that next year is going to be epic. I don’t know about you lot but I can’t wait :)

Time Management Tips - no.1 

Aggressive Prioritizing / extreme time management

Here’s one of the most effective ways to boost your work productivity. I do this every day and seriously - it works!

Bend time to your will…

Step 1-Create a to-do list every morning

First thing in the morning (after you’ve had your morning cuppa of course) spend 15 minutes constructing a to-do list of activities you feel should get done that day. This won’t be wasted time.

You now have a list of activities

eg.

• 20 activities

• 5 really need doing

Step 2-Use aggressive prioritizing.

If you had to pick just one of these to do today - which one would it be? That is your number 1. Repeat this exercise to find number 2, and so on.

Step 3-Get working!

Stick to the order of your list and make sure you complete each task as much as possible before moving onto the next.

Now if you only get some things done in your day, they will have been the most important ones. Simple but truly effective!

- coming soon: time management for programmers

An Update - “Analysis”

One of the core features of 1DayLater is being able to view your activities in a way that is easy to interpret and understand. This might be visualising time spent with clients, business miles or everyday expenses.

Alternatively it could be observing your day-to-day productivity by tracking time spent on tasks such as admin, finance, sales etc. This is the kind of thing I generally track, which you can see in my own analysis below.

I’m happy to give you a sneak peek into the first of our outputs, “Analysis”

There are clear benefits of being able to see your data in this graphical form. You know when you’re working too little on a job or if you’re working too hard! Or you can build up a good picture of your work/life balance.

At a glance you should be able to see where my weekend was, or the two days I was ill with a bug - and the subsequent drop in productivity that occured (spot the overall drop in height on the right hand side)

Our developers are now listening to the feedback of early testers and creating something which is truly beautiful to behold. I don’t think anyone works quite as hard as the 1DayLater developers to please our future customers - massive kudos and respect!

Speak soon

Paul

An update on development…”the timer”

You may have noticed we’ve been a bit quiet on the official site updates of late! A thousand apologies! Well I’m happy to report that things are coming along nicely, with the developers beavering away in a zen-beaverlike frenzy.

Not ones to disappoint our fans, we decided it was about time we showed some of our new features off. Today I’m going to show you our new-fangled timer. Next week we’ll work our way down the page to show you other features we’ve added.

So (cue fanfare) the timer!

Having a timer is super useful, especially if you work at a computer like I mostly do. With a little “click” you can set it away while you’re doing a task and then forget about it. We’ve tried to make ours as unobtrusive and functional as possible.

After 1 minute…

After 3 minutes…

Once you’ve finished the task, clicking the stop button will neatly populate the time field for you :) Nice!

Those people who were familiar with the original prototype version will notice that our interface layout and wordage have changed somewhat. Why, you ask? Well this is mostly due to the addition of mileage and money into the system whereas originally 1DayLater could only understand notations for time.

I’ll be talking more about this in more detail in my next update!

Peace guys

Paul

Developing a business mindset - Mental activity modelling

In order to start acting like a businessman you need to start thinking like one. A neat idea we picked up from one of our excellent mentors, Richard Hanage is to create and follow a mental activity model. The reason I love this is that it’s proactive rather than reactive!

The idea is that you create a complete list (or mindmap) of things which are necessary to the general running & development of your business. Depending on the nature of your business, your tasks might be something like:

• Make an appointment
• Make a sales visit
• Write a proposal
• Take an order
• Deliver some work
• Raise an invoice
• Update finances

Then SET SOME TARGETS & commit them to memory

For example: You could aim to complete one thing off your list every day, and all of them in a normal week. Or devise some practical targets for your own business.

Following this mental model will help you improve cashflow, organisation and working efficiency in the long run. If you’re focused on doing it properly it can also prevent you from neglecting those less fun but important aspects of your business.

I would love to hear about the kinds of mental activity models you all operate. Including any personal experiences with them!

Later!

Paul

Morten Kombat! Security lockdown

The time has come to nail down the OAuth part of the 1DayLater API, which is coming along rather nicely. Morten Fangel, the veritable OAuth boffin is landing in bonny Newcastle on Monday and together we will take on this specialist task.

could you resist the temptation?

Being a hospitable bunch, he’s staying with me and Paul in the family home for a few nights, and we’ll no doubt subject the man to some highly cultural evenings… That is if Beer, Curries and a ragtag of good mates counts as cultural!

We’ll write about the social funtimes, and the technical progress next week. If anyone is interested in meeting Morten before buggers off back to Denmark, we’ll (probably) be free on Tuesday and Wednesday evening next week - get in touch!

A peek into 1DayLater

Me, Paul, our Dad, and local coder Peter Beckwith have all been using the 1DayLater prototype since January and we’ve decided to give you a little peek into our working lives. We habitually enter how we spend our time into 1DayLater like so:

“1h30, The Great North Run Project, Working on visualisations”

It takes about 5 seconds to do, and we typically make 5-10 entries a day. It might not look like much, but we’ve already created useful analyses of our data in the forms of activity charts and accurate invoices (for once in my life!). Using only this simple data I can show how me, Paul and our Dad have different working lifestyles:

• I’ve worked many hours on a big orange project (1DayLater), but also have a few other steady side-projects
• Paul’s been working on a pink project (1DayLater again) and takes on occasional work when he needs to
• Our Dad works on many projects in tandem, some phasing in and out, and some are steady (the brown and green ones)

This early version only measures time spent, but the upcoming release (end of August) will deal with business miles and expenditure too! I really can’t wait to show what we have in the pipeline!

The Brothers King

“The Brothers King” are me and (not surprisingly) my awesome brother Paul. We’re creating a new start-up company called 1DayLater that will help small businesses and freelancers be more awesome and profitable!

This blog will chart our journey in creating the new company, and at the same time explore the research we do for the company, its people and the technology we explore. Wish us luck!