Wondering what your co-workers are working on? We’ve just released some updates to the Who’s Working list that make it possible for you to see. Previously, we displayed the employee’s shift total. Now from the main TSheets web interface you can see what job/project someone is clocked in under, how long they’ve been clocked in for that job/project, and you can also see the total number of hours clocked for the entire day.

If someone is clocked in under a long job/project name, you’ll only see a portion of it in the Who’s Working list. However, you can see the full job/project name by hovering your mouse over the job/project and the full name will appear as a popup.

For employees who are currently off the clock, you’ll still be able to see the total number of hours they’ve clocked for the day.

Now you’ll know when the Sales team is talking up your latest gadgets and gizmos and the Development team is squashing those elusive software bugs :)

The Who’s Working List is displayed to admins by default, but you can allow any/all employees to view it by granting the ‘See “Who’s Working”‘ permission via the employee editor. You can further customize it to hide hours worked from employees via your My Account window -> Advanced tab. This will allow them to see who is working and on what job/project, but there will be no information displayed concerning how long they’ve been working for that day or shift.

Enjoy!

Today we have the pleasure of announcing another highly anticipated feature - Multi-level Job/Project codes!  TSheets users with the new business or freelancer accounts finally have the option of breaking away from a flat list of job codes, and can now track time against clients, projects, and tasks.

How does it work? Essentially multi-level job-codes work just the way they did before, except now there’s a parent / child relationship that can be created.  Use this structure to your advantage by breaking jobs/projects into levels.  Client -> Project -> Task is probably the most common way to break tasks out, but we’ve left it open ended so it will work for your unique needs.  Get started by clicking “Manage Employees” (yes, we know this is counter-intuitive) and then “Manage Jobs/Projects” at the bottom of the window.

We’ve added two new ways to make assigning job codes to employees easier.  Truly global job codes. For a long time we’ve had the ability to assign newly created job codes to “all current employees”.  We’ve now replaced that with an “Assign to everyone” check-box that makes that job-code globally assigned to everyone.  When job-codes are assigned to everyone they show up with a light-blue background color.  It’s important to realize that a job-code assigned to everyone with this option cannot be unassigned from anyone- it’s global.  Which leads us to the second improvement.

A new job-code assignment tool has been added.  To access it, create a job-code, then edit it again by clicking on the job-code’s name, and then click the new “Assign” button.  A new interface appears with a list of employees, allowing you to assign (or unassign) the job-code in bulk.  The screen-shot on the right shows it in action.

Moving forward. At some point we’re planning on adding a layer specifically for those of you tracking time for customer billing purposes.  We’re not sure what that will look like just yet, but it’s on our minds and might be ready in the 2-3 month range.  If you have suggestions be sure to post them, we take customer feedback very seriously.

More time tracker screen-shots:

Adding a new job-code:

Editing a job-code:

Moving a job-code:

Assigning job-codes to an employee:

It’s late July.  The 4th has come and gone, and we’re starting to see autumnal items make their way onto the store shelves.  The kids have got another month or so to go before they’re back at the books.  Looking forward to, or have you already taken that week by the lake this summer?

Barack Obama has got his vacation on his mind as well.  That and then some.  I’d love to tell you that I got a few moments with Mr. Obama earlier this week, but unfortunately he was busy meeting with David Cameron, the Tory Party leader in the UK.  What I DID have time for this week was to catch an excellent article in the New York Times about Mr. Obama’s and Cameron’s ‘hey is this thing on?’ quasi-open mic conversation they had last week:

Mr. Cameron: You should be on the beach. You need a break. Well, you need to be able to keep your head together.

Mr. Obama: You’ve got to refresh yourself.

Mr. Cameron: Do you have a break at all?

Mr. Obama: I have not. I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who — not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process — said that should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be …

Mr. Cameron: These guys just chalk your diary up.

Mr. Obama: Right. … In 15 minute increments and …

Mr. Cameron: We call it the dentist waiting room. You have to scrap that because you’ve got to have time.

Mr. Obama: And, well, and you start making mistakes or you lose the big picture. Or you lose a sense of, I think you lose a feel …

Mr. Cameron: Your feeling. And that is exactly what politics is all about. The judgment you bring to make decisions.

Mr. Obama: That’s exactly right. And the truth is that we’ve got a bunch of smart people, I think, who know 10 times more than we do about the specifics of the topics. And so if what you’re trying to do is micromanage and solve everything then you end up being a dilettante, but you have to have enough knowledge to make good judgments about the choices that are presented to you.

Whether you’re planning on support Barack or John this November, you’ve got to give Obama some credit here.  He’s taking advice from some very smart people.  These people have advised him to take time to think.

Obama may be running for president, you may be running a small business, but at the end of the day, both of you are striving for the same goal: To steer the ship on the right path, avoid the icebergs, keep the crew happy, and try to leave her in a better condition for the next captain.

Using TSheets as a time tracking tool for your employees is one way to cut down on costs, but it’s also a great way for you, as the business owner to organize and review your own time management.

Do it like Barack.

If senior White House advisers, close to both Clinton and Obama advise scheduling time to think, shouldn’t you be doing the same?

Matt Rissell joins Twitter, Ebay, Typepad, MLB, Trism, Modality and Enigma and Cro-Mag Rally to show off their cool new apps and talk about the release of the new Apple App store.

The Quest

As the CEO of Tsheets.com, a productivity tool, I set out to interview CEOs and find the Top 10 Productivity Tools they use to manage their time. After an initial round of interviewing about 20 CEOs, I started getting a bit nervous, as I wasn’t finding any common tools that that they were using. I considered that the effort might be a flop - that is, until I interviewed Jason Fried of 37Signals. During the conversation I started to see a common thread. The “Light Bulb” moment hit me, and I blurted out, “That’s fascinating. I’m beginning to see some brilliant common threads.” Jason’s immediate response was, “Yeah? Well, what are they?” After mentioning a few of them to him, he said, “Very interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing the end result.”

After I hung up the phone, I realized that the productivity commonalities weren’t tools at all – but rather principles! I knew that I was onto something, but I also knew the title had to change.

One of my final interviews was with Andy Sorcini, an obviously successful social media expert as he is the # 1 Digger in the World! At the end of the conversation, I realized that he had some brilliant concepts that led to extraordinary productivity. Clearly these principles didn’t apply just to the most successful CEOs. Thus the Title:

“Productivity Secrets of the Most Successful People”

Dictionary.com defines Principle as: A fundamental, primary, or general law or truth from which others are derived. E.g. the principle of modern physics.

As defined, I have truly embraced the idea that principles are as factual as the law of gravity. Only the highly misinformed or the delusional are going to argue with you that jumping off a building results in a fall; yet the same applies to business principles.

***This document has been abbreviated to accommodate quick reading; please visit mattrissell.com for the full conversation***

From C-level executives of billion dollar organizations to companies of smaller, yet successful entrepreneurs, here are the resulting Top 10 Productivity Secrets of the Most Successful People:

1. Passion!

This is your “Want”. The very premise of all productivity is a love for what you do. I asked every interviewee, “If you could take everything that we have talked about and boil it down to just one thing – What would be the key to productivity”? The most common response? Passion.

For many – intellectuals, to be specific - this can be a tough concept because it deals with heart and not the head. Passion doesn’t need to be for the product itself, but what the product or service does. E.g. A productivity tool in and of itself may not be a thing of passion – but the end result of increased productivity could be.

Productivity Principle Summarized: If you’re not passionate about what you are doing – then stop now!

2. Surround yourself with people of Excellence

Notice that I didn’t simply say, “hire great people” but rather surround yourself with people of excellence. The obvious is to hire great people to be productive, but personal productivity goes MUCH further. Who is your mentor? Who are your friends? The same principle that applies to my three year old daughter applies to us as business leaders: Show me your friends and I can tell you what you’ll be doing in 5 years. Powerful isn’t it?

As I mentioned above, hiring great people isn’t the end-all but is significant in surrounding yourself with people of excellence. When you hire excellence, they bring both the problem and the solution. It doesn’t matter how you describe them: Great, Phenomenal, Extraordinary, Best of the Best – when it comes to your people DO NOT settle for “Good”.

Productivity Principle Summarized: Surrounding yourself with excellence personally and professionally defines your current productivity as well as your future.

3. Create an Environment where Great People Can Succeed

It’s one thing to surround yourself with excellence; it’s another to keep excellence around you! While I’ve heard the saying many times “hire people smarter than yourself.” The most successful take it step further and say “why spend so much time and money recruiting smart people and then allow insecurity to take over and spend all of your time making sure that everyone knows how smart you are?”

Examples of how to create environments of excellence for productivity:

• Pay them well – visit www.mattrissell.com for out of the box ideas
• Show Gratitude – This caught me by surprise and came up often enough to stand on it’s own as a productivity principle. See principle number nine.
• Understand the Vision – See mattrissell.com for a great example of employee vision in the Roman Empire.
• Do not be delusional – others are not motivated by building your dream
• Allow for creativity
• Candor is required

Productivity Principle Summarized: Hire the best and treat them as the best, and the productivity will follow.

4. Simplicity!

What a paradox this one became! This was the most frequently occurring topic in my interviews with the most content, and yet shouldn’t it have been simple? I discovered that the most successful leaders keep things as simple as possible, so much so, that even leaders of the most technologically advanced companies keep things relatively low-tech to stay productive!

A familiar example given was to pick one project and complete it; not getting caught up in the tyranny of the urgent by multi-tasking. Taken a step further, that example was compared to the difference between a shotgun and a rifle. A 12-gauge shotgun cartridge has two times the amount of powder that a .270 rifle cartridge has. Yet because the energy is spread out between so many different objects, it’s practically useless beyond 50 yards. While a .270 cartridge, with less energy focused on one object, can be effective out to 1,000 yards. We are back to the relationship between productivity and physics again, eh?

Productivity Principle Summary: Do one thing at a time with less energy, and you’ll make a great impact.

5. Know your Motivation

This is your “Why”. Many confuse this with their “Want” or passion, but these are two very different items. The “Why” is your motivation to build your passion. The “Why” is critical to productivity because it’s what keeps you going when times get tough.

Where are you headed in your life? Who do you want to be in 10 years? These are big but important questions pertaining to productivity.

You may be thinking your motivation is money, however my interviews confirmed the timeless quote of Warren Buffet, “Money has to be the by-product of your definition of success – not your definition of success.”

Some examples from the CEOs and business leaders interviewed:

• To become the standard
• To be the best or to win
• To purchase the NY Jets (J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets!)

Conversely, an example of a poor, but common, motivator for entrepreneurs, has been: “To be focused on the exit plan… To plan on being bought out for $X amount in two years”

Productivity Principle Summarized: Know the answers to your “Why” Questions before you run into difficulties; Money isn’t enough of a motivator.

6. “Secret Sauce”

If you want to have a provocative conversation with successful people, talk to them about two things: Getting stuff done and their ‘Secret Sauce’. On it’s own, this is at least a two-drink conversation.

It was unbelievable to me that all the successful people I spoke to nailed this. They all knew what makes them a limited edition or gives them the competitive advantage.

Some examples:

• Their opinion that others want to hear
• Love for people
• The Gift of ‘understanding what people want to know’ even when it changes
• Genetics
• The people that they surround themselves with

7. Make your decisions be great

Notice that I did not say, “Make great decisions”. Overwhelmingly, the successful people out there say things like, “Just make a decision, and if it’s not a good one, learn from it and go on”. We all make bad or “wrong” decisions at times but on the other hand, the cost of not making a decision is much more expensive than making one. Beware of the trap of becoming paralyzed in your productivity from fear of making wrong decisions.

Here’s a perfect example: An IBM Executive made a “bad decision” that cost the company $3 million. The next day, he started packing up his office. Thomas Watson, the CEO, walked by his office and asked what he was doing. The exec responded that he was ready to be let go because of his “wrong” decision. Watson’s response? “B.S. You better not leave me now – I just invested $3milion training you.”

It’s not about right or wrong decisions in building productivity, it’s about what’s working or not working and constantly adjusting… Are you Familiar with the definition of insanity?

Productivity Principle Summarized: More productivity is lost from indecision than from making the wrong decisions.

8. Balance

This is for long-term productivity and shoots up to the top of the list for most of the successful people I interviewed. A quote that absolutely stopped me in my tracks was from John Pollard, CEO of Jott.com. “Anyone can work 16 hour days. The secret to being productive is being able to get done what needs to be done in an eight to ten hour day, still get a workout in, have a successful marriage, relationship with your kids, and sustain life outside of work; otherwise, you’ll lose the “Why”. You need balance in your life if you are going to stay at peak productivity.

Another comment I heard all too often in my interviews was, “I’m not too sure how much longer I can keep this up”.

Productivity Principle Summarized: Balance is essential to stay at peak productivity for the long haul.

9. Execute

Productivity requires action.

Few people actually execute; rarely do they say what they are going to do and then roll up their sleeves and get to work. While dreaming, talking, and thinking can all be included in the productivity world, the successful don’t forget the “do”.

The most successful also execute on the important things – not just the urgent. An easy phrase to help distinguish the difference is a quadrant (learn more on the Vlog on mattrissell.com). Kevin Dixie, CEO of Fuel My Blog, had a great point regarding executing on the important: when he goes through his list of tasks, he finds the item he wants to do the least and does it first, as it’s usually the most important.

Productivity Principle Summarized: Execute. Execute. Execute.

10. BUILD YOUR OWN SYSTEM!

Surely we’ve all heard of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system. Not one CEO or successful leader referred to his name or system. . While Mr. Allen has good solid principles in his book, the applications that he suggests are built for a very small % of the population.

To accentuate the point that a successful system needs to be “your own”; here are some quotes from the Most Successful when comparing their methods to the standard.

• “I do things different”
• “I don’t do things right”
• “I do things backwards”

While they may not do things according the to book, the most successful each have a system of productivity that works.

Productivity Principle Summarized: A productivity system is integral to success; however, must be made your own.

Many of you have requested an export to .pdf feature. You spoke, we listened. An export to .pdf feature is now included in your TSheets reporting options. The main benefit is portability and ease of use. By exporting to a .pdf, you can now easily attach this timesheet to an email, file it in your personal files, compile weekly timesheets in one easy to read document, etc. By compiling a number of timesheets in one PDF, it’s now easy to create a (non) paper audit trail.

As a self employed professional, it will now be much easier to run a report, export to .pdf and send off to a client in an easy to read familiar format, explaining hours worked on project XYZ, an over/under estimate of project ABC, etc.

We’re also updating the already existing .csv export option. The current .csv report does not export as pure raw data, but rather includes a number of calculations already done for you. Many of you expressed interest in a ‘raw’ format that could easily be imported into a number of data integration systems such as payroll and/or HR databases.

Again, you spoke, we listened. Since you now have the option to export raw data, you and your IT department are free to do whatever you so choose with this data. Whether it be a pre-existing database you’re using, or building a custom database, TSheets can now provide you with raw time data.

From day one, we’ve always made it easy for our customers to track their time via extremely simple clock-in and clock-out functionality.  This is great for customers who want to track their time down to the second.  However, we’ve had great call from our customers for an easy way to enter their time manually.  This request often comes from those with salaried employees or consultants who have a block of time they need to track against a client.  We’ve heard your call and are responding with our latest feature, the ‘Weekly Time card’.

The Weekly Time card is an easy to use time ledger that allows you to easily and quickly populate your timesheet with multiple job/project codes and enter time in a spreadsheet-like format against those codes.  Daily and Weekly totals are calculated dynamically as you enter your data and are highlighted in a different color when they exceed configurable thresholds.  All data entered is stored on our redundant, backed-up infrastructure, of course - so you don’t have to worry about losing a thing.

It’s very easy to navigate around the timecard view - you can use your arrow keys to navigate to any cell on the sheet.  When you get to the bottom of your list, new rows are added dynamically as needed.  Whatever row and cell you are currently editing will be highlighted in a different color, so it’s easy to confirm which date/code you’re editing.

You have a Notes field which will show the notes you’ve entered for whichever cell you have highlighted in the grid.  You can edit the notes for any cell in the grid.

You can enable time tracking via the Weekly Time card for all employees, or individually for select employees only.

The Weekly Time card is one more way that TSheets customers can enter/view their time.  The list is really growing, here are some other ways that you can track time with TSheets:
> TSheets Touch
> Mobile Web App
> TGadget
> Mac Widget
> Jott Integration
> Web Interface

We’re proud to announce our brand new, iPhone optimized web app,  TSheets Touch.

TSheets Touch presents a new, graphical way of looking at and interacting with traditional time tracking methods.  

Starting, stopping and switching tasks is literally a touch (or click) away, saving time and making time tracking a little less arduous.

Read more about TSheets Touch at TechCrunch or at our TSheets Touch feature page.

Getting Started with TSheets Touch

Current TSheets users can visit their TSheets URL using their iPhone to use TSheets Touch.  

New users can visit http://app.tsheets.com/ip, where they can create an account and start tracking their time in minutes.

For mobile users without an iPhone, we’ve got you covered too with our mobile web app and Jott integration.

Josh Stephens from Coax Jax is one of the first customers that we’ve heard from who is using Jott Integration to keep track of employees’ time. Listen to this interview as he speaks about how TSheets and Jott have saved his company time and money by taking him from paper timesheets to voice activated time tracking.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 6 or above) is required to play this audio clip. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“TSheets’ Jott Integration has saved me alone (not counting my employees) over 10 hours of administrative work every month!”

Josh Stephens (Coax Jax)

Here’s a bit from the Coax Jax website:

At Coax Jax, we are specialists at designing and implementing custom home theater systems, as well as custom lighting, motorized window treatments, and so much more. We will give you not only incredible home theater performance but also ease of use, so that you won’t feel lost. For the music and movie enthusiast, we will turn your home into a sight and sound paradise.

Doc: Marty, I’m sorry. But the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning.

Marty: What did you say?

Doc: A bolt of lighting. Unfortunately, you never know when or where it’s ever going to strike.

Marty: We do now.

Any of this ring a bell? If you’re of the age to remember pacman and kangaroos, you’ve probably already identified the above dialogue. It comes from Robert Zemeckis’ 1985 classic: Back to the Future.

You’ll remember that our hero Marty McFly escapes from a group of Plutonium packing Libyan terrorists by jumping in a supafly DeLorean and accelerating to 88mph. At this point the Flux Capacitor kicks in and Marty….finds himself suddenly in 1955, 30 years prior to the current date.

While the exact operation of the Flux Capacitor was never fully explained in any of the trilogy, Dr. Emmet Brown does cite that the stainless steel body of the DeLorian had a direct and influential effect on the “Flux Dispersal”.

Zemeckis’ wildly successful ‘Back to the Future’ trilogy is only one example of science fiction’s quest to give the public exactly what it wants: The ability to travel through time. Who can forget Dr. Who’s classic TARDIS device? Or Scott Bakula’s seemingly endless quest to reach ‘home’ through setting history’s wrongs right and (quantum) leaping to the next time? Or for those of you that want to go deep: Star Trek’s Wells class starship: the USS Relativity.

So what is it about time travel that excites us so much? Maybe it’s going back to see what time was like before we were alive. Perhaps a glimpse of the future could let us see our children’s children’s children. Maybe it’s similar to McFly and Sam Beckett’s quest to correct mistakes of the past? Whatever your reasoning might be, it’s a pretty good bet that you’ve daydreamt about time travel at one point.

But is it a reality? According to scientists; theoretically. Technically speaking, if you’re reading this right now, you are time traveling. You are mass, mass moving at a constant rate of 1 day at a time. 1 hour, 1 minute, 1 second, 1 nano-second. Each of us are already time travelers. It’s only the matter of accelerating or decelerating this steady rate that gets tricky.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines time as “a limited stretch or space of continued existence”, or “as the interval between two successive events”. The main problems with time travel are the paradoxes. For example, what if a time traveler were to travel back in time, interfere with their great grandmother meeting their great grandfather, and ultimately interfering with the Time-Space continuum. Technically speaking, that time traveler would thus never have been born resulting in instant fatality.

There are two ways to resolve this paradox.

• One is to accept that past time is totally defined, meaning that nothing a time traveler could do would disrupt the already pre-defined time space continuum. This time traveler would experience a number of mistakes, mishaps, etc. that would technically not allow him/her to interfere with predetermined history.
• The second theory involves a bit more complexity. Looking at the quantum rules that govern the subatomic level of the universe, if a time traveler were to interrupt a critical instance of history, they would then create a parallel quantum universe in which the great grandmother had never met the great grandfather. Both universes can theoretically exist in parallel. Stephen Hawking believes that he can explain the origin of the universe as (most) of us see it today through parallel quantum universes.

Ok, now that we’ve solved the pesky problem of paradoxes, how do we leap? How do I go back in time and meet Elvis? The secret to time travel is speed. There’s a certain Swiss scientist with a wacky hairdo that might come to mind. Something having to do with E and some M’s and C’s squared? Right. E=MC2. Traveling through time requires that you’re able to move mass at the speed of light. Awesome…let me go get my Ferrari. Whoa Enzo…slow down. The main problem with traveling at the speed of light is that as you approach C (the speed of light), time continues to slow down. Once you reach C, time in effect stops. How can you go faster than time if it has stopped? Ok, ok…technically you’d have to make the leap to quantum tunneling, but that’s a whole other can of worms…..

To conclude, is time travel possible? Technically…yes. Has anyone ever done it? That remains to be seen. What is our fascination with time travel? Is it possibly the ultimate goal of man? To conquer that which has yet to be conquered? Possibly. For me…. I just want to know who DID kill JFK, where IS Jimmy Hoffa, and WAS the royal doctor responsible for the brutal killing of 5 London prostitutes?