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.

Five hour energy shot and sleep to increase #Productivity

5 Hour energy shots work for me and get this, they work exactly 5 hours. Weird huh.  Now if you feel tired and can't get yourself to exercise or work on your business, book, blog or whatever. Give it a try.

Getting enough sleep is also a way to increase your productivity. If you haven't been getting enough, try sleeping more for one week and see how you feel.

Just don't take the 5 hour energy shots near bedtime.

How to get rid of your stuff (aka crap) you can't part with?

I was thinking about why does crap build up, too many books, shoes, tasks, friends, projects?

It's because you add new things but don't delete, remove, throw out stuff. If you can't stop getting new things then get rid of the old.

Try to get into the habit of throwing out two things every time you bring one thing into your home.

It's the same with tasks. If your to-do list is too big then don't add a new item until you complete/delete two items. If you don't want to delete items then don't add an "A" priority task without making two of them "B" priorities.

Headphones Help Productivity

It's pretty noisy in my office so I decided to wear headphones while I work. The noise is from:

• People talking on the phone through their ear piece
• People on speaker phone
• People meeting next to me
• One guy loves to drum on his desk and the floor
• Co-workers talking in a foreign language

So I went with the Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones. Now this has definitely increased my productivity. First I don't get distracted by others conversations. Second, people don't interrupt me as much as the did before. For some reason when you wear headphones people won't interrupt you as much as they normally do.

The only down side to this is that it may be frowned upon by your boss.  I find that if I listen to music I'm familiar with it allows me to think without being distracted.

What do you think?

Detecting Sheet Change Event in #Excel

One feature I want to build in Time-Creator.com is to change anything in the spreadsheet if a sheet name changes.

I have many places that use the sheet name so I'd like to keep stuff consistent when this occurs.

Excel VBA doesn't have a sheet change event so I coded the following in the ThisWorkbook object:


Option Explicit

Public gsEntrySheetName As String

Private Sub Workbook_BeforeClose(Cancel As Boolean)
If ActiveSheet.Name <> gsEntrySheetName Then
    UpdateAllReferences gsEntrySheetName, ActiveSheet.Name ' if user says it's ok?
    gsEntrySheetName = ActiveSheet.Name
End If
End Sub

Private Sub Workbook_SheetActivate(ByVal Sh As Object)
gsEntrySheetName = ActiveSheet.Name
End Sub

Private Sub Workbook_SheetChange(ByVal Sh As Object, ByVal Target As Range)
If ActiveSheet.Name <> gsEntrySheetName Then
   
    UpdateAllReferences gsEntrySheetName, Sh.Name ' if user says it's ok?
    gsEntrySheetName = ActiveSheet.Name
End If

End Sub

Private Sub Workbook_SheetDeactivate(ByVal Sh As Object)
If Sh.Name <> gsEntrySheetName Then
    UpdateAllReferences gsEntrySheetName, Sh.Name ' if user says it's ok?
End If

End Sub

Private Sub Workbook_SheetSelectionChange(ByVal Sh As Object, ByVal Target As Range)
If ActiveSheet.Name <> gsEntrySheetName Then

    UpdateAllReferences gsEntrySheetName, Sh.Name ' if user says it's ok?
   gsEntrySheetName = ActiveSheet.Name
End If

End Sub

Sub UpdateAllReferences(sOld, sNew)

MsgBox "Sheet " & sOld & " chged to " & sNew

End Sub

Now all you have to do is replace the code in UpdateAllReferences with whatever your code should do.

How to Estimate with the Estimating Formula

If you want to estimate it helps having a formula.

Accurate estimating is a valuable skill. It's the answer to the question "How long will it take?"  If your boss, user or customer asks this question and you answer it incorrectly it could be a problem of

• Working overtime
• Not meeting expectations 
• Not being trusted
• Receiving a lower hourly rate for your work

If your boss asks for an estimate and you underestimate the work you may be working lots of overtime to meet your commitment. Had you had an accurate estimate you could tell him what that is and hopefully not work the overtime.

If you estimate time to build a website at 10 hours, $100/hour then you'll quote a price of $1,000. But what if your estimate is wrong and it takes 30 hours. It can be hard to charge the $3,000 you worked. Don't plan on getting repeat business. An accurate estimate would allow you to do better to come in on time with the site.

The formula for accurate estimating can be answered with the question of when will you finish this 300 page book? I use the book example, because once you understand it, estimate other things will be a matter of collecting the proper information and applying the formula.

Now if you read a page a minute it will take you 300 minutes or 5 hours (300/60) to complete the book. This is the actual time to read the book but not the elapsed time. If you read an hour a day it will take you 5 days to complete it. If you read 1/2 a day then 10 days to complete it. 

This brings us to the formula 

Estimated Completion Date = 

                                                                  pages to read 

        Today's Date  +       ---------------------------------------------------

                                       Pages per min  x  Time reading each day in minutes

So this is the basics of the Estimating Formula.  This formula will soon be implemented in Time-Creator.com, but it does help you with the variables of Pages/minute and Time reading each day.

You can download as spreadsheet to see this calculation in action.

If want job security, more customers, better employment reviews it does start with simple accurate estimating.

Random is Good or God

I was way into random before the iPod shuffle came along. Years back on my Atari 800 XL I built a program called Random Album Selection. This was a time before the CD or MP3 existed and everything was on vinyl.

Using Atari Basic, I wrote a program that allowed me to enter my albums and it would randomly select an album and side to play. I realized the benefit from this as I realized that Random is Good.

I would buy new albums and play them over and over again until it would sit with my other records never to listened to again. But after developing the program, I would be listening to albums that I wouldn't normally listen to and enjoying it very much. There was something to this random stuff.

Flash forward years later and I'm working on a version of Time-Creator.com. I start to think that if random is good for albums it's probably good for selecting what I should do. If you're in the habit of doing certain things and those things aren't getting you to where you want to be then Random Task Selection might be better than you selecting what to do.

I've built this feature into Time-Creator. You can filter on your "A" or top priority tasks and randomly select one to do. Now like the iPod shuffle, random task selection is good.  Matter a fact I like to think of it as asking God what to do. So Random is Good and Random is God.

You can download the latest version of Time-creator at my website.  Note it's an early alpha version a little buggy but very useful. You do need Excel 2007 or 2010 right now to use it.