1DayLater - The Blog

Designers, now you can create customized 1DayLater invoices

Regular 1DayLater users will have noticed several improvements to 1DayLater’s PDF invoicing tool over the last few weeks; but what news for our designer community?

Well, we listened to popular demand and made it easy for designers to create their own invoice templates. We even wrote a short user guide to help. Non-designers should be seeing more customization options next year.

A case study: Digitalized Web Design

Web design company ‘Digitalized’ wanted to create an invoice which their clients would recognise immediately. They amended the standard 1DayLater template to include their own colour scheme and business logo.

The result is a sleek and professional looking template which can be populated straight from the PDF invoice tool in the ‘business tools’ section of 1DayLater.

Needing some inspiration for your design?

If you need some ideas to help you get started, we recommend you check out 1DayLater’s Flickr page. Here you can find all of the current non-customized templates for 1DayLater, including some from our friend Balazs Ertl Bakos.

Have you designed an invoice template which others would use?

Get in touch and send us your design. If we think other 1DayLater users would use it, then we will give you a free premium licence to thank you for your hard work - Send this to designs@1daylater.com

6 budgeting and money tracking tips to keep your bank balance healthy

If you are newly married, saving up for a big expense or trying to claw your way out of debt, then managing a tight budget could be the answer to your problems. With money-related stress affecting us all at some point in our lives, it’s great to know that there 6 practical tips that can help us through the hard times.

1) Maximize Your Savings

Figure out how much money you can realistically save each month from your budget. Set up a standing order to deposit this into a savings account each month. This will serve as a handy buffer if you fall into any difficulties later on.

2) Use cash for essentials

Taking a pen and paper, work out exactly how much money you need for your everyday living costs (eating, travelling expenses etc). At the start of each week, withdraw this amount and divide it equally into paper envelopes. Name each one: “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday” to serve as a reminder.

Just remember not to use your card as this is the quickest way to lose track!

3) Ditch your “bad habits”

If you’re a smoker or a drinker, alchohol and cigarettes are an obvious expense to cut from your spending. This could be a great opportunity to make some positive changes to your health as well as reaching your financial goals. Other bad habits like gambling can go too!

4) Pay down your credit card debt

The high interest rates on credit cards make them one of the worst forms of debt. But there are some logical steps that you can take to pay them back effectively and quickly:

• Focus on the credit card with the highest rate of interest.
• Pay back as much as you can each month without getting yourself into further difficulty.
• Pay the minimum balance on any remaining cards - this will stop you from getting any bank charges.

5) Track your Money

The biggest hurdle to overcome in making a budget work is self-discipline. Once you’ve been budgeting for a few weeks it can be easy to fall back into old habits. Keeping track of your daily spending is a great motivator and can give you an early warning sign if any expenses. Track your money with 1DayLater

6) Analyse your spending habits

You’ve tracked your spending habits, now its time to make some practical use of this knowledge. Figure out if any of your expenses can be reduced or removed completely. Are you spending a lot of money on restaurant food each month? Could you be saving money on gas? (check out our earlier blog article on finding the cheapest gas prices in your area)

Lastly, don’t lose faith!

Keeping a budget is pretty hard work. It takes discipline and self-motivation, so focussing on your goals will be key to your success. I’d suggest attaching a photo of that big expense or dream holiday to your fridge or somewhere else where you’re likely to see it. Now good luck and don’t give up!

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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!

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

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.

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