Just a few people are trained in information management, even fewer are trained in workload management. Yet every job in the world entails balancing a series of to-dos with the clock. Priority Management’s research with over 1,000,000 of our customers worldwide in best-practice productivity processes, shows that very few people have a realistic plan for each day. Most plans that we see are long lists of unprioritised tasks-more of a wish list than a plan.

Here is a quick check as to how your workload management processes compare to best practice. Firstly, think about where you presently keep all the things you have to do. How many of the following tools do you use each day? Notepad, paper to-do list, scraps of paper, post-it notes, whiteboard, piles on the desk, Inbox, electronic to-do list, diary, electronic calendar and your memory. No wonder we so quickly lose the plot and find ourselves working late.

Best practice demands just one place to plan (yes, that’s ONE). When our work is in one place then we have something we can manage and control.

Now we have consolidated our tasks into one location we have a process that will get you home on time!

1. Write down all the things you need to do tomorrow in one place.
2. Estimate how long it is going to take to get each item done. Total the time - does it fit into an 8 hour work day?
3. Are you likely to be interrupted tomorrow? If so, how will that impact your work? It will most likely double the time it takes to accomplish your work. Ask yourself if you can still get the work done after the interruption time is added?
4. Have you included time for lunch? What about travel time to and from your appointments? What about time to check your email? Remember that non-productive time for lunch, coffee breaks and checking email can easily add up to one-and-a-half hours.
5. Now total the realistic time and block out your calendar. What time are you going home? Is it the time you want to go home?

Start today to develop the skills that will help you stay balanced and in control of your personal agenda. By developing essential skills such as personal organization, life/work balance and workload management you will improve every aspect of your life.

These tips were brought to you by our guest blogger Dermot Rice from Priority Management. We met recently to discuss time management and some of the great training services they offer to companies and individuals to better manage their time.

Contact Dermot Rice to coordinate your training requirements across USA or Europe.
Phone: +353 1 8359946
email :drice [at] prioritymanagement.com
web: www.prioritymanagement.com

Now all users can add and view their 1time timesheets on their mobile phone.

Each employee can login, add/edit timesheets and record time off such as holiday or sick days. In order to access the 1time mobile edition just add ‘/m’ to the end of your 1time domain in a mobile web browser and login as normal (e.g. http://mycompany.1time.net/m). You’ll be presented with options to change the daily view and update your timesheets. Bookmark the page to make it really easy to add time from anywhere.

All changes on the mobile site are automatically synced with the main desktop web version. It works on almost all modern mobile phones including the iPhone, Nokia N-series, Blackberry and many more.

We are very excited about this new way for users to add and view their time on the go and we have more features on the way. If you have any feedback, please let us know in the comments below. If you haven’t got an account yet, sign up to our for the free trial and give it a try.

We have just added a great new feature which will be very beneficial to those of you who bill out your time.  We have created a new report external to the private administrator area that you can send to your client as a web page link, PDF or CSV file.  This is an ideal way for a client to keep track of how much time is going into a project or it can be sent as a report at the end of a project as an attachment to an invoice. Either way this is going to streamline the process of reporting time spent on any billed projects to your client in a very professional manner.

You can find the link to the new report on any project view page. If you click on a specific project from the dashboard or from the relevant client page you will see a new link like the one here on the right.

The location of the report is secure (SSL) and the URL is scrambled so only a person you send the link to will know where to find it.

Within each project view the client will be able to view who has logged hours against their project and how much each day. It is also possible to download the report as a PDF or in CSV format and break it down by a specific month as seen the in the sample below.

If you have any questions on how to use the new feature or if you have any suggestions on how it works please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us through the comments below or on the feedback link at the bottom of each page within your 1time interface.

Sign-up for a 30 day free trial now! »

We have upgrade the email reminders so you can choose what time of the day email reminders will be sent out at.  You can now also determine how many email reminders are sent to remind employee’s each day.

Previously you could only turn email reminders on or off for a particular employee.  If email reminders was set to on then that employee would get three reminders the next day until they filled out timesheets equivalent in time to the working day length set for your company.

You can now set the times of the day that reminders are sent out and how often.

This gives you more control and we hope you like the new add on.

Now you can see the weekly report you used to get by email every Tuesday anytime from our new “Weekly Employee Report” screen. You can also traverse to previous weekly reports so you have historical data at hand.

From this screenshot you can see how many hours each employee has worked each day or if they marked it as on holiday or sick. You will notice from the screenshots that an employee who has entered in the enough time for the working day shows up in green. If they haven’t entered in enough time it shows in red and allocated time off shows up in orange.

This is all part of the approval process, where by if there are any descrpencies you can contact the relevant person and request any updates.

Thats all for now, more updates to come soon.

This is a notice to let you know that all 1time services will be down for tomorrow (Friday 2nd March) between 9am and 2pm GMT for scheduled upgrades. When the site is back up and running you will be running version 1.5 of the software.

If you have any questions contact us at support [at] 1time.ie

Update: The down time will actually now start at 3pm GMT on Friday.  Any attempt to view your 1time site will automatically re-direct you to this blog.  The sites will be up and running again on monday at 12pm GMT with the new version of the software.

Over the past 6 months you have been one of over 1100 companies in 83 different countries who signed up our 1time beta testing programme. During that time we have received lots of feedback from our users and we are pleased to announce a significant upgrade which reflects your input. We note that most of you feel that this service is the best and easiest to use on the net. The purpose of this upgrade is to keep us ahead of the game, and we’ll continue to drive our R&D forward based on your input.

This new release (1.5) will be rolled out on Friday March 2nd and will include these new features:

• Easier to use timesheet entry pages.
• Editable Time off options (e.g. Jury Duty, Absent without pay, etc)
• Project Estimate reporting on Real vs Estimated costs
• Percentage complete with projected cost analysis
• Task is now known as Activity Type for clarity through out the system
• Employee utilization reporting (how productive is each employee)
• Improved management reporting
• Some template Excel documents you can use to import CSV files from 1time to generate a new reports (free to share with the community)
• Integration with Basecamp project management software (import clients, sent time report messages)

We are taking this opportunity to also introduce a new dot-com brand-name: 1timetracking.com. We will be using this name in our communications henceforth, but you don’t need to change any of your bookmarks, as 1time.ie will continue to bring you to the latest 1time service.

Your existing data will not be disturbed by the new release, you’ll just notice on the web-site the various additional functions.

Up until now we’ve been happy to provide the 1time service free of charge, but unfortunately even we have to pay bills… Therefore once this new release has itself bedded down successfully we will be migrating to a commercial basis. However we have come up with a very competitive pricing model with our subscribers having a choice of monthly or annual payment plans which will apply from 2nd March 2007. We will continue to offer free usage of 1time’s basic services to single users. All plans will be free for a month to existing customers before any payment is required so you can test out the new system.

—Price Plans—:
1 User : Free
2-5 : €14 per month
6-10 : €30
11-20 : €55
21-30 : €80
31-50 : €120
51-100 : €210

As a way of thanking you for your participation we are offering each of our existing users an incentive to sign up as a full subscriber. If you take out an annual subscription to 1timetracking.com during the month of March you will receive 18 months’ subscription for the price of 12.

We have even more great ideas from you that didn’t make it into this release, and we will continue to work on them. We really want your feedback to keep coming, so please tell us what you think of the changes we have made and what other features you would like to see in the future.

If you have any questions on the new upgrade, please do not hesitate to contact me or my team at support [at] 1time.ie

Remember the site and the application will upgrade this day week so come back then for more info. (Friday, 2nd of March)

Best regards,
Derek Organ
CEO
Timewarden Ltd.

*subject to terms and conditions

Hi again,

While we have been quiet lately, we have been working hard to take all the feedback we have received(thanks again for all of this) and creating solutions that still fits in with our philosophy of making the application as easy to use as possible. At the same time, we have pushed ahead with development of some other features, so buckle in and I will fly over some of them;

1. Turn employee reminders on/off for each employee
2. Improved Graph reporting
3. Improved CSV Reporting
4. Some new General Settings

Some other things in the works include, more username and password control and more control over working days and when reminders get sent out.

We will be pretty busy updating the whole service over the coming months right up to our official launch of Version 1 of the software.

Thank you all for the feedback over the last few months, we are working very hard now on updating the software and we’ll keep you updated as we go. We have some great feature ideas in mind so keep an eye out.

Hi all,

We are delighted to inform you that after loads of feedback from our 300 beta companies we are almost ready to launch the fully fledged version 1 of the software. We’ve listed below some of the upgrades we’ve made over the last month.

1. Reminders are now tied into your what ever timezone you choose
2. Upgraded language support with UTF-8 encoding
3. CSV exports for timesheets
4. Printable reports
5. Forget Password options
6. You can now have more than one administrator for the system
7. Administrators can now view and add timesheets for other employees

We welcome any feedback on these upgrades at support@1time.ie.

Recently Rafe Needleman from CNET Reviews took a look at 1time and gave it a once over. He made one point in particular that made us stand up and take notice:

“1time is easy to understand, although a bit modal to use. By that I mean you have to make sure you’re in the right section and logged in the right way to do what you want. For example, if you’re in admin view, you can see a nice overview of your projects and clients, but you can’t enter hours. You have to switch to employee view to do so. If you’re a one-person shop, that’s a needless distinction.”

From this we realised that our distinction between admin mode and timesheet mode was unnecessary. By changing this we would solve one other problem that came up with a few different first time users of the system; “where do I add my timesheets?” as well.

So in response we have changed it so the “Add Timesheet” and “Weekly Overview” links are now available in the main admin interface. This takes away an unnecessary click and makes it easier to find these options.

You might have noticed a few other minor updates as well over the last few days. Please if you have any suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact us at support[at]1time.ie.