TimeGT

Accomplish the impossible by breaking it into smaller pieces

Marius Andra — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:51:38 +0000

When you’re feeling overwhelmed about your workload and just can’t seem to get anything done, there’s a nice strategy to help you through the day. Everyone naturally knows it, but due to its simplicity it’s sometimes easy to forget. Thus let’s recap!

The strategy is to break the large seemingly impossible task down into smaller chunks that virtually take no time to complete.

The chunks should be small, easy and require minimal effort to complete. If a chunk can be logically subdivided even further or takes more than an hour to accomplish, it needs to be divided even more.

This system can work in a variety of different settings. Let’s have an example.

Suppose you have guests coming over and you need to clean your place. If you haven’t done it in a while, this task at first may seem like it will take ages. You’ll feel defeated before you even begin.

Let’s break it down into smaller and more manageable chunks.

Assuming you have a kitchen, 2 rooms and a bathroom your ToDo list might look something like this:

Clean big room
Clean bedroom
Clean the kitchen
Clean the toilet
Vacuum all the floors

It’s starting to look better, but the chunks are still too big. Cleaning the big room might seem such a big task that you don’t even want to start. Thus it needs to be broken down even more:

Collect all the empty beer bottles (~5 min)
Clean the table (~10 min)
Organize all the cables on the floor (~5 min)
Dust the cupboard (~10 min)
Take the trashcan to the front door to be taken out later (~2 min)

Even the biggest procrastinator can move him/herself enough to take 5 minutes to organize all the ethernet cables laying around on the floor. The task seems easy, there’s a clear end in sight and it will get done fast.

Already the room starts looking nicer and this will generate enough momentum to collect all the empty beer bottles, clean the table and to go on from there.

Suddenly the seemingly impossible task of cleaning the entire apartment is progressing in small 5-15 minute steps that all lead toward completion. Do the same for the other rooms and the place will be clean in no time!

Like mentioned before, this method works for virtually anything, even if you need to create a web design from scratch for a new client or code a completely new feature for your work.

Whatever the job, to get it done fast, break it down into chunks that are fast to accomplish, easy to do and when combined, produce the outcome you’re looking for.

There’s an added bonus to this system.

Namely, it’s easy to divide the tasks into these small chunks.

If you’ve been putting off working on a task for a while already, you will automatically want to do anything other than the task itself.

Luckily your procrastinating brain won’t see subdividing the task as doing the task itself. Thus it’s effortless to create the list and once it’s ready, it’s easy to get started. It’s a nice way to trick your brain into doing what needs to be done.

And of course, when you’re coming up with the subtasks, enter them into TimeGT to easily keep track of them.

Has this method worked for you? Write in the comments below!

TimeGT 1.2.1 released!

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:33:30 +0000

It’s time to celebrate the end of August with a new release of TimeGT! While not every requested feature made it in this time, we’re sure you’ll love the ones that did!

Time support

A much requested feature has been the ability to not only specify start and due dates for tasks, but to mark down the exact time for these events.

It is now possible to do this! Every entered date can either be an all-day event or feature an optional time!

And of course this feature also works seamlessly with Google Calendar integration for Hedgehog customers.

Search field improvements

The search field has gone through some tweaks that are hard to notice, but will make you wonder how you ever lived without them.

For example it’s now considerably wider, escape and enter provide much better focus handling and clear the search field more intuitively. An additional half-transparent “X” icon helps clear the field without the use of a keyboard. Any feedback is welcome!

In addition to that many bugs have been squashed and bolts under the hood have been turned… but these are too small to mention here.

To upgrade to the new version, either head to our download page or if you’re running version 1.2.0, just click the upgrade button once it appears.

Hint: if you don’t want to wait, the upgrade button will appear immediately after restarting TimeGT.

How Multitasking Kills Productivity

Marius Andra — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:45:53 +0000

Most people would argue that they are good multitaskers. They believe it’s easy for them to do many different things at once and remain efficient in all of them. The trouble is, this is never the case in reality. Multitasking is one of the biggest myths of our society.

We live in an age of constant distractions, never knowing what’s going to happen next. At any moment someone could call on our cellphone with a really urgent topic. New important e-mails arrive by the minute and if we happen to be logged on to an instant messenger, we’re obliged to answer every incoming message ASAP.

On our computers, we always have different programs running: an e-mail client, a few instant messengers, a browser with dozens of open tabs, some work related programs, etc.

If we’re dealing with an extreme case (or with a social media evangelist), then the list also includes software for checking Twitter and Facebook updates, a reader for various RSS newsfeeds, different group chats and so on.

But we are good at this, right?

Haven’t we been practicing these skills so long that it’s become second nature by now?

Wrong. If you’re looking for a real definition of multitasking, it means to screw several things up at once.

Much like a computer (with only one single core CPU), we can also do only one thing at the same time. If there’s more than one thing happening, we need to constantly switch our attention between things. Computers do it so fast we don’t even notice it, humans are considerably slower.

In addition to this, unlike computers (and much like the original iPhone), we can only store one program in our memory at any time. Thus switching to another activity takes time, switching back takes even more.

It is said that it takes up to 15 minutes to regain focus once it has been lost. This means your 2 minute e-mail or the 2 minute Skype conversation with a friend suddenly loses up to 15 minutes of your productive time.

Sure you’ll only lose 2 and not 15 minutes of work, but the 13 minutes you’ll put into the task will be half as efficient as the 15 you would have normally given. You will have to catch your train of thought again and pick up where you left off. This takes time and energy.

It should be obvious that 15 minutes of work at full efficiency is much better than 13 minutes of half efficient work.

As a related problem, in our society we tend to associate being busy with being important. Since we’re so busy answering every incoming e-mail, talking to people and reading the latest lolcats or hacker news, we must be really important people!

Well, no. You still won’t get any work done. Be careful if you measure your importance by the amount of distractions per day.

So, what to do?

Obviously all of us have some very important projects, both personally and professionally, that we want to get finished. Getting these off our plate would bring the highest degree of satisfaction and enjoyment.

Thus the answer is simple: just do it! Right now, say your goodbyes and close all instant messengers. Don’t tease yourself with a “do not disturb” status, log off. The people there can wait until you have finished your work. Close your e-mail program and check it perhaps 3 times per day, not more. You’re not so important that it can’t wait 8h. Schedule time for e-mail if necessary. Close Facebook and Twitter. They are a source of constant interruptions. You don’t need them.

And now, focus on your work. If it helps to cancel out other noise, put on headphones, listen to Groove Salad on SomaFM or your favorite concentration music… and get cracking!

This is of course easier said than done, but important things in your life are not supposed to be easy. Every now and then you will feel the urge to check e-mail again or see what your friends are up to in Facebook. Resist that urge and slap yourself on the wrist if necessary. This will pay off quick!

It will be hard in the beginning, but know that life is hard if you live it the easy way and easy if you live it he hard way. This means if you give in to distractions and do what feels easiest and most convenient, avoiding doing the hard things that matter, it will be an uphill battle later on. If, on the other hand, you train your mind to only focus on things that are hard and challenging (like staying focused), the rest will be easy and your life will flourish.

Does this make sense? If so, put it in practice, starting now!

Leave your comments below.

Quadruple your productivity by setting deadlines

Marius Andra — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:54:28 +0000

There’s a really easy trick you can use to become up to 4 times as productive in your work, freeing up time for things that really matter. It’s not magic, but something based on real life observations.

If you follow blogger Dave Navarro (@rockyourday) on twitter, you’ll realize he starts off most days by tweeting:

“What would you work on if you only had 2 hours available today? Ok, go do that first.”

It might sound simple, and while I usually receive his tweet at the end of the day due to different time zones, his message is profound.

Namely, there’s a strange law in the universe that makes everything take up as much time as it can get.

For example, if you have an 8 hour workday to write one blog post, how long will it take you to write it? You guessed it, it will take 8 hours.

You’ll know that there’s plenty of time available. Thus you’ll take it slow. You’ll check e-mail every now and then, chat with friends, write, have lunch, write a bit more, look for pictures for the post and just generally waste the time away.

You’ll get your job done, but will you feel good at the end of the day? Can you go home knowing you had a productive workday? Probably not.

If, on the other hand, you give yourself a deadline of only two hours to finish this task, it is more than likely that you will succeed. Your brain will be running on high energy, you will shut off all distractions and give two undivided and highly focused hours to the task. It will get done.

How do you imagine feeling after that? What would being this efficient allow you to do? What would you do with the extra 6 hours you just magically won?

The choice is rather limitless. You can work on other things that really matter to you. You can work on the next important thing and also kick its ass. If you feel like it, you can even take a longer lunch break or go to the beach. It’s up to you and the possibilities available for you.

The concept of setting a deadline can even be taken further. Suppose you have many different things you need to do in one day. Combined you can’t possibly finish all of them in time. What to do?

No worries, just write all of them down and set a deadline in minutes for each one of them. Be sure to schedule a few 5 minute breaks here and there. Grab an egg timer or an online stopwatch and get cracking!

Chances are, by the end of the day, you will have gotten more stuff done than you could have ever imagined.

What do you think? Have you ever tried this approach? Has it worked for you? Could it work? Post your comments below!

What is the Eisenhower Matrix?

Marius Andra — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 13:00:21 +0000

The Eisenhower Matrix is one of the simplest tools that can quickly make you a lot better at managing your time. As TimeGT has always had support for organizing your tasks according to this system, let’s take a closer look and see why it’s important to understand this method.

Although this method was made popular by Stephen Covey in his book “First Things First”, the concept is originally credited to US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, pictured right.

Whenever confronted with something that needed to be done, he would ask himself two questions. First, is the task important? Second, is it urgent?

Based on this, the task would end up in one of four categories:

Urgent and Important – for example the kitchen catching fire, a deadline to submit tax reports, a baby crying
Not Urgent and Important – doing exercises, long term planning, working on a project
Urgent and Not Important – various interruptions, facebook updates (not that Eisenhower used Facebook at his time), dealing with annoying people
Not Urgent and Not Important – activities that just waste time, procrastination, checking the latest lolcats, the wikipedia time-sucking hole, etc

The Four Quadrants

These categories are commonly visualised as the quadrants shown on the right.

The order in which you fulfill the tasks is important. As you only have a limited amount of time every day and can’t possibly do everything, it is important to prioritize the tasks you must do.

Obviously the first priority goes to the tasks that are Important and Urgent. That’s clear. However what is not so obvious is that tasks labelled Important and Not Urgent get the next priority.

Eisenhower himself is quoted as saying:

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”

He couldn’t have been more right.

Without the matrix in sight, people often forget this and tend to rush to deal with all the Urgent and Not Important tasks at hand, pushing the important, but not urgent ones somewhere into the far future.

This is when you know you should be working on a project, but instead end up checking Facebook, reading that really really urgent e-mail from a friend with a hilarious youtube video or chatting about plans for the weekend on Skype.

Thus, your second priority should be to spend time on important tasks that are not urgent and only then on urgent tasks that are not important.

The tasks in the 4th quadrant, Not Urgent and Not Important should be dropped. If there is no rush for doing them and they don’t matter anyway, why even bother?

How this helps?

When consciously filtering all incoming distractions based on their importance, you end up doing less of the not important ones and thus become more productive in your work.

The Important and Not Urgent quadrant is where you want to spend most of you time. It’s a peaceful place to work on things that are important and to have enough time to finish them.

Achieving this is not so hard. First, only do tasks that are important. Second, plan ahead. If you look ahead and take control of the way you spend your time, you can finish all your tasks before they become urgent.

This way you will become more focused and more productive in all the things you do!

Final words

TimeGT supports the Eisenhower method by giving you the possibility to mark all your tasks as either important and/or urgent, thus automatically sorting the list for you so you always know what to do next.

What’s your experience with the Eisenhower Matrix? Do you user it? Has it helped you in your life? Post comments below!

The wait is over – TimeGT 1.2.0 released!

Marius Andra — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:12:59 +0000

Summer is here! With it came hot days, warm nights, barbecue parties and, thanks to our air-conditioned office, a new release of TimeGT, cleverly labelled as 1.2.0! Wondering what’s new? Read on!

Automatic updates

From now on, you can easily upgrade to a newer version of TimeGT. Once an update is available, look for the “upgrade now” button. Click it and a new release will be on its way!

Firewall-friendly ports

Many have complained that due to our innovative use of port numbers, you couldn’t access the TimeGT server from various work environments. This has now been fixed with all secure traffic flowing over the standard SSL port of 443.

Fixed GCal issues

Issues reported over Google Calendar synchronization have now been fixed. Please try it out!

Start offline

Trying to save bandwidth or just to stay away from the internet? Now you can! Upon request, TimeGT can now start without connecting to the internet. However the first login after installation still needs to be done online as TimeGT needs to download the cryptography keys used to keep your data safe.

Add the task to a specific project

When typing in a new task, write the project for the task, a colon (“:”) and then the task title. Now press CTRL+Enter. This will make the task appear under the specified project, not in the current view. For example typing “shopping:buy milk” and pressing CTRL+Enter will add the task “buy milk” under the project “Shopping”. This is especially useful when using the small popup that appears after clicking the TimeGT system tray icon.

Interesting blog posts

From now on, this blog will become alive! Approximately every week we will update it with a new post about time, task or energy management, book reviews, tips and tricks to become more productive and so on. Stay tuned!

How to get TimeGT 1.2.0

It’s easy! Just click the download link from the top and enjoy!

NOTE: it is recommended you uninstall the previous version if you’re doing an upgrade.

Version 1.1.2 released and Sync back online

imeikas — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:58:04 +0000

We just released version 1.1.2. We fixed the issues with Google Calendar Connector and improved the Sync server scalability.

Problems with Google Calendar connectors

imeikas — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:38:34 +0000

We found some compatibility issues with the Google Calendar integration so please try to avoid using it until we come up with an improved version.

Also our sync server is under some quite heavy load so excuse us if it’s somewhat sluggish. We’ll work hard making sure it scales better soon.

Handling traffic and user sign-ups

AhtiK — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:42:25 +0000

Hey dear TimeGT community!

As some of you know, last few days have been a roller-coaster here. After TimeGT website and app itself got hit by users coming from so many different reviews (thank you Lifehacker and MakeUseOf!) things started to go out of hand a bit.

In general everything was fine — handling ~10 new user sign ups per minute (thousands of sign ups total) was alright — but — we didn’t anticipate this volume and weakest link for failure turned out to be Google Apps SMTP e-mail gateway.

Standard edition has 500 outgoing mails per day limit and we reached that limit way too soon

As a result, Paypal tried to contact our site to activate trials but as our system was unable to send out the greeting e-mail things got unprocessed.

Issues with the trial activation should be solved now, my sincere apologies to those who suffered — our payment processing is now back to normal and trial activation e-mails should have gone out today. More performance improvements are on it’s way but things should be still very smooth even now.

We have fixed the limit issue and getting more people on board should not be a problem anymore!

Thanks for the patience! If your trial is still not active — please contact us at dev at timegt dot com!

regs,
Ahti

Version 1.1.1 released

AhtiK — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:54:21 +0000

We just released version 1.1.1. This release fixes an issue where starting a cleanly installed TimeGT instance took a long time to get working.