I Hate Yearly Reviews at Work

It's that time for my yearly review at work. I hate doing these. I did so much during the year but don't remember all of the useful things. That's where Time-Creator comes in. I've setup a new sheet in time creator with rows containing the months and the columns containing the days.

I also set up a daily alarm to open this sheet at 4 pm. This way, each day I can put down something that's important to include on my review and when it's time to do the review I can easily bring up this sheet and complete it without asking the wtf did I do question.

You can get the the latest version of Time-Creator at http://Time-Creator.com

Easy 80/20 Decluttering

For those of you who don't know about the 80-20 rule, simply states that you wear 20% of your clothes 80% of the time for example or 20% of your tasks comprise 80% of your time, 20% of your customers get you 80% of your profits. You get the picture. There's a small, useful amount that gives you mostly what you want.

So how do you decide what's the 20% and what's the 80%. A simple method to get you to 25-75, is to take what you have whether tasks, goals, product, books to write, etc. and get rid of 50%. Then do this one more time and you've hit the 25% value.

Some ways to do this is if you have lots of books on a book shelf, then take two shelves and combine them to one. Get rid of or sell the books you want to dump. Then do it one more time.

One way to get rid of 1/2 is to go through a shelf on your book case. Make two piles, books you'll keep and books you'll get rid of. Keep the piles equal in height and you've gotten rid of 50% of your clutter.

You can do this with files in your draws or filing cabinets, junk collected in your garage, tasks or goals you're trying to achieve.

A Bad Impression on my Boss's Boss's Boss

Things are always changing. The seasons, your appearance, your job and change is difficult.  The reason is that change affects your habits and habits are what makes life easy.

Recently, there was a reorg at my company and my boss's, boss got a new boss. I'll call her Debby.

Now one of the habits I have is to eat an Atkins protein bar at my desk. It saves time, increases my productivity and prevents me from waiting on long lines to get lunch.

But, I had lunch plans this day.

I probably hadn't taken a lunch away from my desk in 3 months.  So what happens while I'm away?  My boss's boss's boss needs a report for her boss's boss (I'll call him Rob).  That's 5 levels above my position and I'm no where to be found.

I probably took a little over an hour for lunch and got back to my desk at around 2 PM.

A co-worker and my boss's boss try to reach me.

So I have to do some emergency work that needs to get out by the end of the day for Debby and Rob

Dealing with your boss's boss's boss for the first time, you want to make a great first impression. But the impression I started with is "I take long lunches."  I mention to her that I never take a lunch and now I've made a second impression "I'm not honest."  Who doesn't take lunches?

Now Debby seems smart and wants me to do a report in Excel. I'm having trouble following what she wants because she knows the new changes better than I do, because I haven't been involved with them and I don't want to appear dumb.

To make matters worse, I don't work that well under pressure and this is a lot of pressure to get out a report before the end of the day working on it with your boss's boss's boss for your boss's boss's boss's boss's boss.

So I start on the report and it's already 2:30 PM.  I've already told my wife that I'd pick her up at work.

In the morning I wound up taking my wife's keys to work with me by accident. She had to get rides to and from work. So I called her and offered to pick her up but then had to cancel on her.

So I get an number of spreadsheets from Debby and copy of email from Ron and I set out to build the requested report.

Debby keeps on changing what she wants and tells me different calculations to include that don't make sense.  First she says that a field is  A - (B - C) and then later she says it's A - B - C.

I tell her that they're not the say and she doesn't understand why.  So I send her an example

2 - (3 - 1) = 0
2 - 3 - 1 = -2

So she sends me changes and I send her back results. Now it's 8:30 PM and I'm pooped, can't think straight.

I decide to leave so I can make my 9:42 train and be home by 11 PM.  I send her the final results and leave. It turns out that the email never gets to her. It gets stuck in my Outlook outbox because I don't have enough space to send it.

I get home and 11 PM and try to log in to work, but my computer reboots and my Chrome browser can no longer access work.

By 12:30 AM I try to use IE and I get into my work computer and find out that I never sent Debby the email.

Woops.

Some lessons learned:

1. Don't take you wife's keys to work with you
2. Don't take a lunch
3. Keep up on all the new terminology of what's going on in your group or dept.
4. When sending an important email make sure it gets delivered before leaving
5. You get one chance to make a good first impression don't blow it like I did

Should I Develop Software for me or for You?

I've reached the point in developing Time-Creator that I've put out a version of the spreadsheet but I'm spending too much time on the project. Matter a fact I can't even easily tell you how much time I've spent  and that's one of the goals of the software.

I've decided to refocus my priorities to build Time-Creator for me, not that I don't like you, it's just that I like me more. And by helping me it should help you in the long run.

When it comes down to it, just getting people to try the software will be very difficult, no less getting them to pay me. The odds that I'll make $ from this project is very very low.

Now if I could develop for me and automatically give you something then that would be fine. But I'm finding that I'm spending so much time to productize Time-Creator that I'm not moving the project forward the way I'd like. It seems like 80% of my time is spent creating a product to download/sell and 20% is actually moving the project forward. Some of the things I have to spend time on is:

• Writing this blog
• Dealing with cases where Excel doesn't behave nicely
• Website
• Demos
• Marketing
• Testing. For me there can be bugs but for you there can't
• Usability
• Appearance
• Upgrading 
• Protecting the intellectual property
• Bugs I don't care about
• Different versions of the software
• Competition
• Error handling

So I'm taking a little vacation from doing it for you. Don't take it personally, in the end we'll both be happier.

So my writing to this blog will slow down and already has.

Some of the things I'll be focusing on instead are making Time-Creator the coolest project.  It's hard to change sometimes, I guess it's due to the habits we have. But without change there is no progress.

Please write, I answer all emails

Unable to connect to the Internet

I just tried connecting to the internet and got the following message:

Unable to connect to the Internet

Google Chrome can't display the webpage because your computer isn't connected to the Internet.

You can try to diagnose the problem by taking the following steps:

Go to Start > Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center > Troubleshoot Problems (at the bottom) > Internet Connections.
Error 106 (net::ERR_INTERNET_DISCONNECTED): The Internet connection has been lost.

I had already

1. Rebooted my cable modem
2. Rebooted my laptop

But I still was getting the error and doing the following two steps fixed the problem in the past.

Then it occurs to me that I didn't plug the network cable into the laptop. Problem solved.

The error message should have said the top 3 things to do. Numbers 1 and 2 are listed above and number 3 is
    3. Make sure computer is plugged into the network.

New at a Job, Set a Great First Impression

If you're new to a job, don't underestimate first impressions. Prepare to be your best so you set that as a first impression. Some things you could do is:

• Get to work when everyone arrives leave when everyone leaves
• Ask questions as you're new and stupid questions will be allowed for a while
• Know who you're a threat to and who will help you
• Dress and groom your best, no bad breath allowed
• Fit in. As the saying goes "When in Rome do as the Romans do"
• Limit the number of times you interrupt people to maybe once or twice a day, batch your questions
• Spend as much time as possible getting up to speed, even when not at work
• Don't ask for vacation, remote connections, etc. until you've been around at least 3 months
• If the hiring process was weak (they didn't vet you much) they may fire quickly
• Listen and follow instructions others give you
• Don't make excuses
• Don't complain about stuff at your new company
• Try to be part of the group. Do what the group does
• Don't threaten, complain, challenge unless that's what you were hired for
• Show your boss as early as possible that he or she made a great selection
• Take notes when shown new stuff, type up and email to person to see if you got them right
• Keep a glossary of terminology you don't understand and figure out asap what they mean

If you have other tips, please post below. Hope I made a good first impression. 

Tracking your Time was Hard

I hated tracking my time. If you write status reports, or bill your time you know what I mean. Your too busy to be bothered with it. It's never accurate and you just forget to do it.

Now it's the end of the week or month and you have to write that status report or put in your billable hours and it's uh-oh. What the f@#k did I work on . I was here late but I was so busy I don't remember.

How about your employment review. Will you even remember what you did over the past year.

A tool like Time-Creator can help you in a number of ways.

First it integrates your to-do list and time tracking. You create your to-do list in Excel and then can easily track your time from any cell by just pressing Ctrl+T keystroke (the T is for tracking).

Second, it's easy to get your tasks to your to-do list because of the button bar shown below

The (X) button above will take you right to your to-do list. Time-Creator will also support a shortcut key combination to bring up your to-do list directly.

The Button bar has a small footprint and is known as an "Always on top" window. This means that other windows can't block it from your view. In the window you can see what you're working on and for how long.

You can see exactly what you're working on and for how long. As you use Time-Creator all time gets tracked to the "Log" Sheet.

Not only that you can easily track interruptions by double clicking the task, where it says "TC -Webpage" in the picture above. The button bar will show "..." (three dots) in the button bar.

Now you can replace these ... with the task that interrupted you. Just select any cell on the Time-Creator spreadsheet and press Ctrl+R (R for replace)  and that task will be tracked.

If after the interruption you want to get back to what you were working on you can press the "Re" button (4th one) on the Button Bar to Restart your previous task.

Time-Creator can also deal with the case where you missed tracking a task. Just press the "Mi" button (10th one above) and the Missed dialog will display with the current selected item on the sheet.

You can also press the "T" button (7th one) which brings you to the Log sheet and allows you to manually modify your time.

All of these function are also available from the Excel Ribbon.

There's more.  You can set up alarms say to Call client at 10 am. and when the alarm pops up, just "Accept" the alarm and your time is being tracked.

Time-Creator also can also track your time via a button on the Button Bar or auto-track based on what sheet you're on or Window you're on.

In future version you'll be able to import your time into the time system you use or even generate bills to clients.

I'll be posting a video to see how you can easily track your time with Time-Creator. You can download the spreadsheet from http://Time-Creator.com/download.html, and best of all right now it's free.