Time tracking blog

Attention shoppers – there are only 10 days left until Christmas.  In isle 7, save a bundle on this season’s hottest holiday gift: time.

Say what now?

A show of hands (or comments if you like) – who’s got their holiday shopping done?  I’ve often found that there are two very distinct groups: One that has their holiday shopping done by August (Yes, I’m talking to you mom) and those that wait until just about the last possible moment, and spend Christmas morning getting up just a bit earlier to umm…make the coffee (more along the lines of – oh crap!  Did I forget to wrap Susan’s present)?  I fall into category two.  So this year, I’m trying something a bit different: Using TSheets to optimize my holiday experience.

Around the 20th of November I logged into my TSheets account and started making job codes of people that I had to buy gifts for.  In my case, this amounted to around 15 people.  I then set up a bunch of job codes: Shopping with three subcodes: specialty item shopping, online shopping, and brick and mortar shopping.  Next, onto travel time and finishing up with wrapping time.

The rest is self-explanatory.  I’ve been using the TSheets iPhone mobile time tracking app to track the times that I spend walking to, waiting for, riding, and walking to the shops I need to go (note to self: a mall would help simplify this process).  Then with a simple flip of the job codes, I’ve been tracking the actual time spent looking through the stores to find that perfect cashmere for her, and that book I told him about months ago.  Likewise, back at casa del Dan, I’ve been using the TSheets desktop widget to track time that I’m spending on amazon.com to find, compare, and order various gifts for aforementioned 15 folks.  And now for the real challenge: wrapping.  When it comes to packaging gifts into a nice to look at format held together with scotch tape, I seem to have been born with three thumbs.  As of today, I’ve only wrapped seven out of the thirty or so gifts that I’ve either already got in the house, or on their way (thanks UPS!).

The Breakdown:

While I’m not yet completely done, thus far I’ve managed to rack up:

• Travel – 4 hours 58 minutes
• Shopping – 17 hours 18 minutes
• Wrapping – 1 hour 18 minutes

17 Hours shopping?  Yes, I know…I’m surprised too.  Either I need to seriously rethink my gift selection and purchasing process or hire a personal shopper.  The travel doesn’t really shock me, as noted, I did not go to a ‘get it all under one roof’ shopping complex, but have traveled to a number of individual stores.  Wrapping?  Well, no shock there to be honest.

What does it all mean?

To be honest, this is the first year/holiday season that I’ve experimented with time tracking in relation to personal shopping, and the results have been truly eye opening.  As noted above, 17.2 hours of shopping is really ridiculous.  Next year I’ll be rethinking the process and perhaps spend either a bit more time thinking gifts out before I even head out the door, or spending a lot more time with amazon.

Think you’re a Holiday Power Shopper?  Prove it.  TSheets time tracker is not just for business, but personal productivity.  Holiday shopping is something that we all do, whether we want to or not, so why not make it as efficient and productive as possible?

Related articles

• Online shopping boom expected next week
• ‘Mega Monday’ set to the busiest Christmas online shopping day

Oooooo baby!  Can you feel that?  Do you smell that?  Do you FEEL that?  It’s football time baby!  Whether you’re a fully-fledged Monday morning quarterback, or just the casual observer, there’s no doubt about it, Football season is well underway, and a hallmark of Americana.

While there’s a vast majority of folks who are perfectly content watching a game or two on Sunday with the occasional Monday night game, there’s also another breed that get up early on Saturday morning to do all the weekend chores (maybe this might be your ‘get up early’ motivation that Jared was talking about), and line up Saturday afternoon to scout potential NFL great via the college ball lineup, spend most of Sunday analyzing quarterback pass and rushing percentages, and start watching the clock around 4pm on Mondays in anticipation for the last juice of football for the week via Monday Night Football.  And then there are the fantasy football players.

While I personally am not an active participant in fantasy football, I do assist a few of my buddies in stat collection, player ranking, overall performance statistics, etc.  99.44% of this is on my own time, but I have been known to head on over to ESPN around midmorning on Thursdays to double check the lineup for the coming weekend.  And there you have it.  I said it.  I spent company time, looking into football.

If you consider the $9.2 billion loss that Challenger, Gray and Christmas are predicting, Fantasy Football seems to be a downright crime.  It’s all too easy to find similar reports around the net that fantasy football costs employers lost productivity and un-focused workers that spend hours each week either physically doing, or at least thinking about their fantasy football teams over the 17 week period.

Now where did I put that Red flag – I want a Coach’s Challenge and review on this one.

Luckily armchair warriors, I’m here today to provide you with a bit of armor against such BS.  CC Holland of bnet.com thinks the same way I do, and ran a nice article about fantasy football NOT contributing to lost productivity.  CC Holland is a personal favorite of mine, and she’s written for the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Law.com, ZDNet, Cnet, and the list goes on.  In other words, this is a voice of authority.

We both agree that Fantasy Football not only does NOT contribute to lost productivity, but rather contributes to overall office comradery, AND includes the positive benefit of “Take a short break, do something else, and then come back and tackle this task with a fresh set of eyes and mind”.

Tom Van Riper at Forbes puts it in a slightly different light:

Clearly no employees ever engaged in any downtime on the job prior to the days of the Internet and fantasy sports. How managers must long for the days when no workers ate lunch, used the restroom, chatted around the water cooler or ran an errand during a typical eight-hour day.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, and probably the one most of us can relate to, a guy named Bentley posts to the Football Guys Forums:

The problem with a study like this is that they assume that people would spend their time doing something productive if there wasn’t fantasy football. It’s been my experience that people inclined to #&$* off are going to #&$* off.

So in summation dear fans of the gridiron, I’m not going to encourage you to spend hours and hours of company time pouring over QB stats and figuring out your starting lineup (that’s what commute times are for), but also, don’t feel guilty for the occasional “Man, we’re getting nowhere with this.  Let’s take 5,” and go give your fantasy team(s) a check.  Who knows, perhaps Bill from accounting just got a whole new take on the budget projections given that Brady is out for the season, and Green Bay sans Favre is still leading the charge in the NFC North.

I wasn’t always an early riser.  Many a morning has come and gone in my life where the sound of the alarm has either been turned off without a second’s thought, or has repeated itself, seemingly forever, with a push of that magical little button labelled ‘SNOOZE’.  Now, however, I regularly rise in the early hours.  Only recently since coming to work for TSheets, have I really stopped to analyze what it was that helped me make the transition from a slothful servant of sleep to an early morning evangelist.  Working at a company that eats, sleeps, and breathes time tracking and timesheets tends to make you a little more aware of how your time is spent throughout the day.  So, for your benefit, I’ve compiled a list of things I believe will help you establish the habit of waking up early [1].

Commit to a trial period for waking up early

It is daunting to make a permanent change in your behavior and most people give up before they ever begin.  They don’t believe they can sustain the change.  According to the ‘21 day habit theory‘, it takes at least that long to form a new habit and have a good chance of it becoming permanent.  Most people give up on a new resolution simply because they feel that they won’t have the wherewithal to stick to their new behavior for the long haul.  But if you know from the beginning that this is just going to be a “try it and see” type of exercise, then it makes it much easier to stick to your guns.  That way there’s an end point, a summit, where you’ll be able to stop, take a breath, and reevaluate how it’s gone so far and whether you want to continue.  I recommend at least 21 days, that’s only 3 weeks that you have to do it; then you get a chance to decide how to proceed after that.

Establish a morning routine

This is important.  If you wake up early and don’t have anything in particular to do, you might make it downstairs to your couch and promptly fall back asleep there.  You need a repeatable routine that will get you through the first 10 or 15 minutes of the morning, long enough to get past the grogginess that comes after getting up, so that you start thinking a little more clearly and begin feeling like it wasn’t so bad waking up early after all.  I generally come downstairs and eat a bowl of cereal while reading through the latest stories on Slashdot.

Wake up at the same time every day, no matter what

During your trial period, you need to wake up at a consistent time, regardless of what time you finally fall asleep the night before.  This may be painful at times, but it is important for two reasons. (1) You will be training your body to wake up at a particular time, and (2) you will learn how much sleep your body needs each night.  If you get too little sleep one night, you’ll naturally be sleepy earlier the next night.  Over time you’ll get a feel for how much sleep you need in order to wake at your target time.  The amount of sleep you need each night may fluctuate slightly depending on your activities that day.  I’ve found that I do well on between 6 to 7 hours of sleep at night – and I’ll go to bed earlier or later depending on whether I’ve played hard that day or not done much.

Get out of bed immediately

When your alarm goes off in the morning, how many times have you said to yourself, ‘Just five more minutes..’ ?  If you turn off the alarm or hit snooze and start to indulge yourself in self-talk, the minutes will quickly slip by and before you know it you’ll open your eyes and 15, 20, or 45 minutes will be gone.  Not to mention the strange dreams involving fried chicken and Ed McMahon that you’ll most likely encounter (or is that just me?).  Wake up and get out of bed and start your morning routine immediately (see #2).  Your mind will eventually catch up to your body and you’ll be grateful for all that you’ll be able to accomplish in the wee hours of the morning.

Start your day with an enjoyable activity

Make sure that you’re looking forward to whatever you do early in the morning.  If you’re dreading it, it will be too easy to talk yourself out of getting up.  However, if you can’t wait to do it, getting up isn’t a chore, it’s the gateway to an enjoyable day.  Think about all of the hunters, golfers, fishermen, runners, etc. you know that practice their craft before the sun comes up.  You don’t have to make it a party, just put something you’ll enjoy as the first thing on your list, then once that’s finished, you can move on to whatever else needs to be done.

A while ago I decided to track my own sleep habits for a couple of weeks using the Freelancer version of TSheets.  During this period I was setting my alarm for 6:30am, but getting out of bed if I woke up earlier.  Here’s a screenshot of my efforts.

Good luck becoming an early morning evangelist – share any other tips you have in the comments below!

[1] Sometime in 2006 I was trying to change my ways and make waking up early more of a habit in my own life.  I Google’d “how to wake up early” and found this post by Steve Pavlina on becoming an early riser.  I wanted to mention it here because it influenced me greatly and thus influenced the content of this post as well.  I recommend giving it a read.

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?

My good friend Aaron Stanton called me the other day with an incredible story about the recent tornadoes in Kansas.  I asked him to tell his story and share these amazing photos, so here it is!

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The tornado that hit the KSU campus last week in Manhattan, Kansas was particularly disturbing for me.  My parents live in Manhattan, where they both work at KSU and live about two blocks from the campus.  The night the tornado touched down, I was treated to a running update via text message as they huddled in the basement.

“Power’s out.  We’re ok.  Have water, food, blankets.  Don’t worry.”

They were sending these “we’re in the dark, don’t worry” messages while their neighbor’s house was being picked apart and stripped to its foundations a few houses down, something my parents neglected to mention until the next morning.  It’s one of those times when you realize you can’t trust your parents when they send you a text message that contains both the words, “tornado” and “don’t worry” at the same time.

The next day, CNN had iReports of people showing pictures of smashed cars.  The windows in my father’s office had been blown open, and the storm had stripped everything from the walls, taken down the ceiling (literally), and flipped his iMac off his desk and onto the floor, screen first.  That was peripheral damage – the tornado had actually passed over the building next door.

But when all was said and done, the storm ended with one final thumbs up from a higher power, what I like to think of as a sort of, “It’s all good,” gesture from the big fellow upstairs.  During the clean up of debris that was littering the city, one of my father’s students named Sam Marin walked out her front door and found a single sheet of paper resting neatly on her front yard – a torn out, beaten up, weathered page from The Wizard of Oz.  In fact, it’s the scene where the Wizard of Oz reveals himself, and has to live up to his promises of giving everyone brains, hearts, and homes.  Better than videos of flipped cars, this is the image that should have been on CNN the morning after the Kansas tornado:

Where the rest of the book is, or who it belonged to, we may never know.  But I think the irony is just excellent. :)

More first-hand shots of the wreckage:

Technological advances have a way of creeping up on you. It’s not until you begin reminiscing about “Ya know…when I was your age,” that you begin to realize how old you sound to people just 10 years younger than you are. I can only imagine how I’m going to sound to my grandchildren when telling them about the days of yore, and how things used to be:

• “Our computers were so big that we had to carry them around in special bags that nothing else would fit in, and we were lucky if the batteries would last 3 hours without having to recharge. They were called ‘Laptops’”

• “Before you could travel into space you had to be accepted and train at N.A.S.A. They would spin you around on some machine at a bazillion mph so they could check whether you’d pass out or blow chunks during the actual flight.”

• “We would rent videos to watch and then we’d have to return them the next day or pay late fees.” “…videos are what we had before there were DVDs.  They were made of electromagnetic tape, and required a massive analogue machine to play them via our cathode ray tubes.” “…what do you mean, what’s a DVD?!!”

• “Our cell phones used to allow us to do only one thing. Talk.”

• “When we first began using Email, we were only able to send text – and we didn’t have any fancy schmancy formatting either! It was all PLAIN text.”

• “Fossil Fuel based Petroleum Gas only cost $4 per gallon, and that was all our cars ran on.”

• “When I first started connecting to the Internet, it was done over a plain old telephone line at 28.8Kbps. At that time we were pretty much limited to 2 choices, America Online or Compuserve.  Doing the math here, that means it would have taken you roughly a year to download a movie to your computer.”

• “I had to drive; not fly, not port, but drive 30 min to/from work where I worked in an office with 1 inch walls separating me from my co-workers in what was called a ‘cubicle’.  You kids remember that classic horror film ‘Office Space’ I showed you?  Well…it’s not fiction!”

• “Once they arrived in a ‘portable’ format, I could only talk on my cell phone for about 700 minutes a month, or I’d get charged for every extra minute that I used.”

• “We used to use paper timesheets to do time tracking.”

I may be looked upon as a dinosaur someday by my progeny – but I’ll still be taking pride in my ability to whoop them at Asteroids, Missile Command, and Frogger..

An interesting proposal. Can time be sexy? We had a brief discussion about this over at the TLabs the other day which led me to think on it overnight.

Time. What is time? What does time mean to me? What does time mean to you? Everybody’s got time. Coffee time, time to walk the dog, commute time, relaxation time, serious focused work time, dinner time, TV time, game time, bed time. It’s all about time. In today’s hectic go go go world, have we managed to parcel out time and fit it into individual compartments? And if so, do these parcels then have a value?

If you could put a value on time, what would it be? Would your work time be more valuable than family time? Would time out on the open water be worth more than the time (and money) spent maintaining the boat? Would the time you put in on the deal-winning proposal have more value than the time you spend mowing the lawn?

Seen through these eyes, it’s not hard to visualize that time in itself is a very valuable commodity. Other valuable commodities might include that hot new Porsche 911, the classic Oyster Perpetual Rolex, Gold Bullion, Diamonds, etc. More often than not, a number of these items are purchased not only for the pleasure and enjoyment of the purchaser, but also to some degree to impress, even attract others.

Wikipedia redirects sexy to Sexual Attraction. An excerpt from the definition reads:

Certain aspects of what is sexually attractive to humans may differ amongst particular cultures or regions…or simply by the preferences of the individual.

Since we’ve already proven that when seen as a commodity, time can prove to be one of the most valuable objects known to man. Flashy sports cars, designer watches, shoes, clothes, etc. can all be used just as male peacocks use their impressive plumes to attract the opposite sex.

If we’re to use time as valued currency in today’s world, pair it with peacock feathers used to attract a mate, well then friends…time might possibly be one of THE sexiest things I’ve ever seen!

Not completely sold on my Freudian analysis of Time=Sexy, Head TScientist Brandon Zehm set off to prove my theory with his fancy pants calculus adding machine gizmo. After hanging around the TLabs waiting room for a few hours I decided to call it a night. The next morning I arrived with the following written on the whiteboard behind my desk:

As I’ve already stated: Time = Sexy.

With gas prices hitting all-time record highs, many are considering alternative ways to reduce costs and conserve energy.  While most have to physically be at their jobs (manual labor, retail, etc), a large percentage of the workforce can attend their jobs virtually.  Not only does this save in commute time, it also can help significantly reduce fossil fuel consumption.

While telecommuting hasn’t always been possible, current technologies enable you to work virtually from almost anywhere that has an internet connection.  Technologies such as instant messaging, video conferencing, online document sharing and online time tracking have helped open the door to the virtual workplace.

Most employees will agree that not having to commute to work is a good thing, but how does this benefit the employer?  According to these survey results, the employer benefits from more productive (and happier) employees.  In fact, most employees are more productive at home than at the office.

While working from home may be more productive, it certainly is more energy efficient.  On average, most Americans travel approximately 50 miles each way to work, or 100 miles round trip.  If your vehicle gets 25 mpg, you use 4 gallons of fuel per day, or 80 gallons per month!  This doesn’t even count any other extra driving you do.

With the price of gas being $4 per gallon, this amounts to $320 spent on gas traveling back and forth to work per month.  While working from home every day might not be feasible for some, working from home one day per week can result in fuel savings of up to 16 gallons, or $64 per month.

How much can working from home one day a week reduce your carbon footprint? Considering that a gallon of gasoline produces 19.4 pounds of carbon dioxide, you can reduce your carbon footprint by 3,725 pounds a year!

So, if you’re an employee or employer alike, you should strongly consider the excellent benefits that can be achieved from telecommuting.

Blackberry buzzing at 4am to report previous days’ sales figures. Review budget and change sales forecast. 6am Breakfast with potential investor. Blaze through 100+ emails. Oh, and don’t forget the ‘Tweets‘ in between. All this and more before 9am. And do they love it? Do they live and breathe it? You bet they do. And how do you get a CEO to unguardedly show their frustration? How do you get the coolest of cool to boil like a 4^th of July lobster pot?

Bring up the topic of “Productivity”.

As the CEO of TSheets, a productivity tool for business leaders, I have set out on a quest to find and interview CEOs on every level to find out what makes them tick, what makes them productive, and what their “secret sauce” is. I am calling this list the “Top 10 Productivity Tools CEO’s use to Manage their Time” From Steve Jobs to the start up CEO in their garage, I want YOU to weigh in.

My goal is to get into the heads of business owners on all levels, from local mom and pop drycleaners to Fortune 500 companies and the best-of-the-best Web 2.0 executives to find out how they stay productive and what they do to stay on top of their game.

So far, I have interviewed 15 CEO’s such as Frank Gruber, Brad Feld and Seth Godin, and there is a common thread – Passion! These CEOs are all relentlessly passionate about getting things done and making things happen but often get bogged down in the minutia.

Over the next few weeks, I want to speak with 50 CEOs on every level about this very issue. Specifically, I would love to hear from guys like Kevin Rose, Pete Cashmore, Jason Fried, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Arrington, Marc Benioff and Steve Jobs.

The icing on the cake: I have been asked to present my findings to Shel Israel and Robert Scoble on their new Work Fast Show. So consider this a shout out to CEO’s everywhere!

If you are a CEO ~ Here’s how to weigh-in: Email me (matt@tsheets.com) or Click here for updates on Twitter.

Let’s get into the minds of the best of the best!

I was driving home recently when I glanced over at the license plate of the vehicle next to me, and saw the letters ‘MUADIB’ on it.  I’m enough of a Sci-Fi junkie that I immediately recognized the name of one of the greatest sand-worm riders of all time.  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can read a little bit of history on the Dune movie here.  From my recollection, Muadib was the name of the guy whose eyes glowed blue from inhaling slightly narcotic spices on some planet that was actually just one huge desert. 

The spice actually turns out to be made from excretions from the giant sand worms that live on the planet.  Muadib learns how to ride these worms and he’s able to kill people using only his voice (I’m guessing he was a bass).  Other than that I remember a really cool knife fight in the movie and that they wore special suits which allowed them to recycle and drink their own sweat.  Not hard to see why someone would pick ‘MUADIB’ for their license plate – who wouldn’t want to be associated with giant worms and drinking your own bodily fluids?

Something I don’t think many people ever think about is how they’ll tell time in the future.  How confusing would it be to grow up on a planet with two suns like Luke Skywalker?  And can you imagine the jet lag that would come from travelling millions of light years in a single day?  I’ll bet the watches will be really cool in the future.  Much better than the TV/watch combo I yearned for when I was a kid.

image courtesy of i4U.com