1DayLater - The Blog

Carpooling - Considering “Mileage Per Person” rather than Miles Per Gallon

Last week we summarized 5 tips to help you track mileage and improve your cars Miles Per Gallon (MPG), but what about other options? If you’re environmentally conscious then maybe Carpooling could be a great alternative to driving everywhere on your own.

Considering the environment

Here’s some interesting food for thought. According to WorldBank (World Development Indicators), there were at least 462 passenger cars for every 1000 people in the UK in 2008 (and a similar amount for the USA). In Monoco it was as high as 732 cars per 1000 people - that’s almost 1 car per person!

No doubt this figure has risen considerably in the past 3 years, but that’s certainly enough to make me stop and think about my own car use.

Start Carpooling

Carpooling (aka car-sharing, lift-sharing, ride-sharing and covoiturage), is the sharing of car journeys so that more than one person travels in a car.

The idea is that, if you’re driving somewhere and have some spare seats in your car, then why not let others travel with you. On the flipside, you might want to find a lift with someone driving your way.

Any tools to help me get started?

One great website which we’ve found is CarShare. It’s free to sign up and shows you (in map view) any Carshare journeys happening in your area.  

There’s also a pretty detailed help section which should alleviate some of those worries you might have after watching slasher-films like The Hitcher ;-)

Of course if CarShare seems a bit daunting, you could always look at setting up your own CarShare with workmates. Not only will you be saving yourself some money, but you’ll be doing your bit for the environment too. Just don’t forget to get everyone to chip in for petrol!

Some cool websites that will help you find the cheapest petrol in your area

I’ve been trawling the world wide web recently to find some useful resources for 1DayLater users. I figured, hey as well as giving you a snazzy tool to log mileage, how nice would it be if we could show you how to save mileage too!

So here are the absolute best sites I’ve found to help you compare petrol prices in your area.

Gasbuddy - as the name suggests this is one from our American friends - but a local search seemed to work just fine for me (see below). You can drill into the map and and get a run-down of petrol prices in your area - how cool is that!

Petrolprices - another great site that tells you the cheapest petrol stations in your area for diesel, unleaded and LPG - you just enter your postcode and how far you’re willing to travel.

The great thing about this site is that you can also get text alerts which notify you of any price changes. There’s even an app - although I haven’t had a chance to look at this yet

So those are two pretty awesome tools which I hope you find really useful! Please drop me any other suggestions if you know any and I’ll add them to my list

5 things you can do before driving to improve your mileage efficiency

Here are some practical tips which can help you save mileage before you even set foot in your car.

• Plan your route well - Take a look at Viamente, a great web-based software which can help you plan routes with multiple destinations - http://www.viamente.com

• Lighten your load - Carrying an extra 100 pounds of weight can increase your fuel consumption by 1-2%. This is especially important if you stop and go often. Light cars also perform better for mileage, something to consider when you are buying a new one! 

• Properly inflate your tyres - Keep your tyres fully inflated as much as possible as this can reduce fuel consumption by up to 3%. Most tyres lose about 1 PSI per month, so checking your tyres monthly at the garage isn’t a bad idea.

• Use synthetic oil - Using synthetic oil in your car can help you save around 5% gas on average

• Figure out your cars optimum speed - Different types of cars perform better at different speeds - this is usually around 50mph. Your cars optimum speed is the minimum speed your car is running at in its highest gear

Next week - 10 things you can do during driving to improve your mileage!

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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…

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!

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.