Qlockwork Blog

Tracking Your Time: 2 minutes, 5 minutes or 10 minutes?

Posted on March 21, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

Our clients do tend to use Qlockwork in a wide variety of different ways to track their time. We have some who even find a 2 minute timeslot a little long whilst others have asked us to introduce 30 minute slots.

On balance, more seem to like the smaller increments than the larger ones, particularly if they spend a lot of time handling email in Outlook, where they can be moving between emails very rapidly.

In the office here, we tend to use 5 minutes as we want to try to force ourselves to stay longer on each task, although arguably 2 minute intervals are tougher discipline for that. If you can look back on your day and see long single tasks without interruptions then you can be fairly sure you have been pretty productive.

Posted in time tracking

How to Assign a Dropdown List to Cells in Excel

Posted on March 15, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

Very useful tip from Microsoft on how to create a dropdown list of values and provide them as options for filling out a cell in Excel.

First create a list of valid dropdown values in a single column or row in Excel (no blanks).

Now select your list, right click and choose “Define Name”. Give it a name.

Now (according to MS):

Select the cell(s) where you want the drop-down list.
On the Data menu, click Validation, and then click the Settings tab.
In the Allow box, click List.
To specify the location of the list of valid entries, enter the name that you defined for your list in the Source box. Make sure that the name is preceded with an equal sign (=). For example, enter =ValidDepts.
Make sure that the In-cell drop-down check box is selected.

Posted in Excel, Office 2010

Qlockwork New Feature Development Continues

Posted on March 14, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

Today was a reasonably productive day at Qlockwork development HQ. We have agreed to implement a set of new Qlockwork features for a European client, which we’ll roll out to the client first and then include in a future public Qlockwork version.

Today we tested several of the new features:

shared project lists (for teams)
project reports (again for teams)

The idea (one that has been asked for a few times recently) is that you can share your project lists with other people in your team in a peer-to-peer way. This means anyone can publish specific projects to anyone else they choose. That’s extremely flexible and rather powerful. When we rolled it out our clients spotted rather quickly we’d need a way to report on who was sharing which project with us, so we tested that feature today and it looks good so far.

We’re attempting to add team function in a way that doesn’t require a central server – no requirement for Exchange and no separate database to install. Fundamentally, we like to keep things simple and we want to add team function to Qlockwork without making installation more difficult.

Posted in Qlockwork

Organisations Don’t Tweet, People Do

Posted on March 14, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

A great book by UK social media expert Euan Semple is now available in eBook form.

It’s a good read – well written in bite-sized chunks. It describes a sensible approach to using social networking (forums, twitter, blogs etc..) within your business to improve knowledge sharing and retention.

One of the ideas that we found most interesting was blogging about everything you do, day to day. Partly for information sharing but, more interestingly we thought, to force you to explain your thinking out loud. We all agreed that we get huge benefit from explaining a thought to a colleague, even if the colleague says absolutely nothing back! Just expressing your thoughts out loud helps you to spot flaws in your thinking.

We do blog (obviously) but after reading Euan’s book, we think we should be doing it a lot more and in a lot more detail.

Posted in Business, Productivity

Google Bets $1M on Chrome Security

Posted on March 6, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

Chrome is a fast browser, but is it safe?

Google seem to think so and are putting up a stake of up to $1M for hackers who can demonstrate control of Windows 7 through Chrome using bugs in Chrome itself.

We are big Chrome fans – it’s a lightweight, fast browser that works particularly well on older PCs and laptops that have rather run out of the steam required for Internet Explorer.

Posted in Software

In Top 5 Regrets of the Dying: Working Too Hard

Posted on March 4, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

A very interesting article in the UK’s Guardian online newspaper last month on a book by an Australian palliative care nurse about the most common regrets voiced by dying folk in her care.

The top 5 regrets were:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

“Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.”

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

“This came from every male patient that I nursed”

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

“Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others”.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

“Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down”.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

“This is a surprisingly common one”.

Posted in Psychology

Windows 8 Consumer Preview Now Available

Posted on March 1, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

Microsoft have now released a beta version of their next operating system, Windows 8, for download. Windows 8 will probably not be available to buy until the end of 2012.

We are currently in the process of validating that Qlockwork will run well on Windows 8 when it becomes available to purchase. We don’t anticipate problems as the underlying operating system is apparently fairly unchanged, although we will be giving you updates on the new Windows user interface as we start to try it out. We’ll start with Windows 8 combined with Outlook 2010 and the Qlockwork add-in.

Posted in Office 2010, Outlook 2010, Software, Windows 8

Even More Microsoft Outlook 2010 Tips: How to Insert a Screenshot in an Email

Posted on February 29, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

This is a nice new feature in Outlook 2010. Write your email message as usual and when you want to insert a screenshot, click the Insert tab, then click Screenshot.

You’ll then see a set of thumbnails of all your opened, unminimized windows.

Double click the one you want to insert and it will be added to your email.

That’s nice and easy, but if you’d like something more sophisticated, we’d recommend the free GadWin Printscreen screenshotting application, because with that you can choose exactly which area of the screen to capture. If you want even more sophistication and you don’t mind shelling out some money, SnagIt is another nice tool.

Posted in Office 2010, Outlook 2010

Productivity Tip – How to Turn off Skype Notifications

Posted on February 28, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

We love Skype, but getting popups on your desktop whenever anyone in your contact list comes online is a definite distraction. Better time management is about avoiding distractions and not breaking your concentration.

You can turn off those notification popups in Skype by going to the Tools menu, selecting Options and clicking on Notifications. Uncheck the notification for “comes online”.

Now you can use Skype, but you won’t get a system tray popup every time anyone you know comes back to their desk with a coffee!

We’re assuming you’ve already turned off email notications from Outlook. If not, you can do that by going to Outlook->File->Options->Mail and turning off the notifications on message arrival. Email and Skype are just too darned intriguing. It’s more time-efficient to just check them periodically.

Posted in Office 2010, Outlook 2010, Productivity, time management, time tracking

More Outlook 2010 Tips: Automatically Close Emails Once You’ve Replied

Posted on February 27, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

Outlook 2010 has another nice feature you can set, which stops you accumulating tens of open mail windows on your desktop. You can choose to automatically close emails when you reply to them.

Just go to Outlook->File->Options->Mail. Scroll down to “Replies and Forwards” and check “Close Original Message Window when Replying or Forwarding” then hit OK to save.