For the answer, just ask Harvest. A New York-based company founded by a couple of designers fed up with the tools available to track time and bill clients, six-year old Harvest now has 22 employees, a third of whom are spread around the country – and a unique approach to management and communicating without being co-located, as co-founder Danny Wen explained in an interview.

Tools

The heart of Harvest’s method is a pair of tools. First, the one they sell – a product to help professionals easily log where all their minutes go. But they also built a second sister product dubbed Co-op which is available free online (though presumably will be of more limited use without it’s paid-for sibling). Together they function as Harvest’s virtual office. “Co-op is essentially a private Twitter for business. In this case, the product in integrated with Harvest, so throughout the day when somebody’s updating a status about what they’re working on, they’re actually starting a Harvest timer as well,” explains Wen.

But before you think of this set-up as just a way to monitor that no moment is wasted, Wen explains that everything, even the most frivolous of office activities, gets logged. “Co-op provides the informal channel for sharing things that are interesting around the web — articles or lately it’s been a lot of animated gifs just to help people kind of kick back. You have the work updates but there’s also this layer of general cultural sharing,” and that, he argues, has been key to gluing distant members of the team together.

“We realized a lot of stuff that may happen in the office — for example it’s somebody’s birthday and we do some sort of celebration — we think is all fun and games because we’re caught up in the moment. We’re here in person, but what we don’t realize is our remote team are wondering what happened to everyone on Co-op. And it’s our job to bring that mix back into Co-op,” Wen says, disagreeing with others who have argued for keeping different streams of work-related and off-topic chat segregated.

Co-op is a virtual space for team bonding, but it’s tracking function is also a valuable way to help management allocate tasks. “One of the guys on the team recently started to train two of our younger developers,” Wen offers as an example. “Through Co-op and Harvest and having the knowledge of where the time is going. We’re started to assess just how much time it takes to train a new person. Having the knowledge of how much time is being used for something you might have initially thought is no big deal, has really helped us to have more realistic expectations.”

Talent

The Co-op-centric work style at Harvest means a facility with communicating at a distance is key to getting hired. So if you’re looking for a gig there, put a little effort in to demonstrating you can express yourself across tech channels. “When we start the process of interviewing for somebody remote, in the extreme cases where they’re building a web page just to sell themselves, to say here’s my story and here’s why I think Harvest is a great fit for me, it’s great. I think that automatically put them in a certain funnel,” says Wen.

So worry about how you present yourself, but not your location. “We just search for the people who are the best at their craft wherever they are,” Wen says. And if you do manage to get hired, don’t expect to be handed a ream of rules and regulations. “We have this really lightweight employee handbook. It states people should work the hours where they find themselves to be the most productive,” explains Wen.

Tips

Besides Harvest’s data-driven remote management style and integration of team building and time tracking, the company also relies on modern updates of old-fashioned institutions to tie distant employees together. Take the ‘Harvest Reading Club,’ for example. “We use Instapaper, where when we find interesting articles and we star them. It gets aggregated into a daily email and distributed to the team. So somebody is in New York commuting in on the subway reading an article that somebody in Montana might have found interesting the night before,” says Wen.

They’ve also adapted old-fashioned training for their spread-out team. “We’ve set up what we call the Harvest Academy. It’s basically a resource for anybody within the team to write something internally about something that they’ve learned or if they attended a conference they can share some thoughts,” Wen explains. “It is just an internal WordPress blog, but it really helps people to feel like they’re part of the team.”

All tech toys aside, Wen still feels, like many of those we’ve spoken to for Tales from the Trenches, that occasional face-to-face gatherings are invaluable. Harvest brings everyone together for twice yearly summits in New York. “We think it’s hugely important to take people offline because after those few days of getting an understanding for each other face to face, people really have a different way of bonding and therefore a different way of working with each other when everybody goes back to their remote posts,” he says.

That being said, Wen doesn’t agree with Zaarly exec Shane Mac, who recently came out against the idea of remote teams for early stage startups, saying distance is a break on serendipity and creativity. Harvest has been remote right from the start, and Wen believes the structure never stunted idea generation. “Yesterday we were working on a design for one of our Harvest branded screen wipes and I happened to be working from home but I was working with a designer that’s here in the office,” he offers as an example. “We could sketch ideas back and forth very easily using sketching applications like Paper for iPad and just using HipChat we could iterate quickly back and forth, using Skitch to show ideas to each other. For us collaborating remotely is using these tools in the right way. It’s not about the remote situation but the tools and the people that can make that process work.”

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

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Timers, alarms and stopwatches

Sometimes, all we need is a little added motivation, like an egg timer or alarm, to challenge us to remain focused and get to the finish line. If that’s the case for you, a simple online alarm clock or timer can help boost productivity.

• Naked Alarm Clock. A simple and free online alarm clock, Naked Alarm Clock makes it easy to lose yourself in the task at hand without worrying that you’ll miss your next appointment.

• Your Meditation Timer. If you get annoyed with more-traditional-sounding alarms, a meditation timer might be music to your ears. A soft gong or Tibetan bell can let you know it’s time to change tasks.

• Online Stopwatch. For every type of timer imaginable, look no further than this Online Stopwatch.

Pomodoro timers/trackers

The Pomodoro Technique involves breaking work up into timed 25-minute chunks (known as pomodoros), separated by short breaks to help improve concentration. There are several apps based on the idea.

• Focus Booster. This app helps eliminate the anxiety of time and enhances your focus using the Pomodoro Techinique.

• Pomodoro (Mac only). Another Pomodoro supporter, this app helps you to avoid procrastination and get things done.

Time monitoring/tracking

For the analytical among us, more-detailed automated time tracking and monitoring may do the trick for increasing productive time online.

• RescueTime. This tool lets you track your Internet usage while also allowing you to voluntarily block distracting websites.

• TrackTime. This app allows you to track the time you spend on projects, as well as your web-browsing habits.

Time-out/break reminders

Sometimes the problem with getting things done isn’t our lack of effort but rather constantly overextending ourselves. This is where a forced break or time-out can help.

• Time Out (Mac only). Time Out gently reminds you to take breaks on a regular basis.

• SmartBreak (Windows only). SmartBreak also reminds you to take breaks when working on your computer for long hours.

Website-blocking tools

For many of us, the Internet is filled with tempting distractions that keep us from the task at hand, which is where website-blocking tools come in handy.

• StayFocusd (Chrome extension). This productivity extension for Google Chrome restricts the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites.

• Anti-Social (Mac only). Anti-Social keeps you focused by turning off the “social parts” of the Internet, such as Facebook, Twitter and any other sites you specify.

• Freedom. This app locks you away from the Internet for up to eight hours at a time.

• SelfControl (Mac only). SelfControl blocks email and websites for a predetermined period of time.

Concentration/work environments

For those of us who need complete isolation in order to get focused, there are certain tools that hone in on a single task until the job is done.

• FocusWriter. FocusWriter provides a simple, distraction-free writing environment.

• Think (Mac only). This tool limits your attention to one application at any time to keep you from getting distracted.

• Quiet (Mac only). Quiet allows you to focus on a single window while simultaneously fading out others.

• Haze Over (Mac only). This app helps you stay focused on your main window by dimming inactive windows.

• Concentrate (Mac only). Perhaps the most robust of all the apps, Concentrate allows you to create “activities” (for example: design, study, write) with customized actions that run every time you concentrate on a given task.

• Isolator. This tool helps you concentrate by covering up your desktop, its icons and the windows of other applications.

While the Internet has its advantages when it comes to work, it can also be a distraction. But with the right app to help maintain concentration and focus, it’s a lot easier to stay on track and get things done.

What are your favorite focus-boosting apps and tools?

Photo courtesy Flickr user BY-YOUR-⌘

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Tracking and Record Keeping

TimeDoctor focuses on tracking how employees spend their time. The software also includes monitoring and record keeping features. You can see at a glance what your team is working on, and can receive reports on what your team has accomplished in specific time periods. The program effectively acts as a task management tool, as well as tracking software.

The monitoring tools incorporated into TimeDoctor are not entirely automatic. While the software can automatically monitor the use of certain websites, the developers are still working on adding application tracking. Employees will also need to report the specific projects that they’re working on. TimeDoctor randomly takes screen captures to ensure that team members’ reports match reality.

The developers of TimeDoctor also provide time-management tips to help employees make better use of their time during working hours.

You can access a free beta version of TimeDoctor through its website. Once it exits beta, the developers plan to charge 20 cents per work hour logged. The program is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

The Question of Motivation

I do have a concern about the problems that using a tool like TimeDoctor may create. Team members could easily see such tools as an invasion of privacy. It’s common for employees to feel that it’s okay to take short breaks from their work — in a way, Facebook breaks have become the new smoke breaks.

Managers need to bring in a tool like TimeDoctor with some sensitivity to this issue. Otherwise, it could lead to poor morale, team members attempting to circumvent the system, or less efficiency, because employees feel like they must be always on task. Since TimeDoctor requires interaction by the employee (turning on the software, entering project information, and so on), simply requiring employees to start using such a tool would be problematic at best.

It is absolutely necessary to present software like TimeDoctor as something that will be helpful to employees.  Such tools shouldn’t be used to punish underperforming employees, but should be ways to help employees identify their own work habits and make them more productive.

How do you track your time, and your team’s time?

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The Productivity Meter gives you a “distracted browsing” score, depending on how much time you spend visiting sites like Facebook vs. how much time you spend visiting “productive” sites. You can check your score via a toolbar button, and see how you compare to other Productivity Meter users — to get a more detailed view of your browsing habits, you can click the “Get Detailed Stats” link, which has charts galore. It’s worth noting that the time tracking data is recorded anonymously; you don’t need to create an account or log in to use the service, and you can pause recording at any time.

You can also tweak the settings through the stats page if the sites that are deemed “distracting” or “productive” aren’t applicable for you — for example, RescueTime thinks WebWorkerDaily is distracting, which is obviously inaccurate for me as it takes up a large portion of my working day!

The Productivity Meter is not as detailed as some of the other time tracking apps we’ve featured, and it can only measure time spent in your browser. However, it’s free and only requires a one-click install, and it might just provide some eye-opening insight into your browsing habits. If you read RescueTime founder Tony Wright’s guest post here on WWD last year, you’ll know that he believes time tracking and monitoring tools can be used to improve productivity by giving individuals (and perhaps more controversially, their employers) a deeper understanding of exactly how much time they spend on different activities. Indeed, the Productivity Meter is a way to start down that path of self-knowledge.

How much of your browsing time is productive?

(via Download Squad)

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Freckle is a joy to use, the syntax is easy to learn and the reporting and the “pulse” view is great. What that said, it’s always been kind of a hassle to take this info from Freckle and build my invoices, so I was thrilled to hear that the Freckle team had added invoicing to the service.

I’ve been using Freckle for a while and have a lot of time recorded in there, so I was pleased that I could choose a date and call items before my cutoff as “already billed.” This let me set a clean slate for billable time moving forward for invoicing purposes.

Creating invoices is simple and in true Freckle fashion you can just hop right in. No need to set up anything in advance — choose your project, click “invoice,” adjust the date options if required, and you’re set. You can add your company and client information during invoice creation.

When you create your invoice you can choose to include a full reporting of the time spent or just a total. I like having this choice as it lets me accommodate the needs of the client and our billing terms. For those clients where I can just provide totals the quick reports in Freckle have always let me pull up what I needed, and I could just enter that into my other invoicing app. It was when I needed to provide a full account of my time in detail that it became time-consuming, cutting and pasting line-by-line. It’s a joy to just get that data right onto my invoices now.

This is a first release, though, and still in beta, and while I didn’t have any problems with it, there are some enhancements I’d still like to see.

For each invoice created Freckle provides a link that I can send to my client, or I can easily print a PDF or hard copy. But that means that I still have to go and mail or email my invoices — I guess I’ve been spoiled by my existing service that just takes care of all of that for me automatically.

There is also no way to charge a mixed rate. My company offers different services that often bill at different rates — with Freckle the rate is entered once and applied to every line. An override for specific lines would be great.

Finally, there is no link to Paypal or other payment gateway. Most of my clients pay by check so this isn’t a deal breaker for everyone but there are some who prefer Paypal or credit card and that integration makes it so much easier for them — and I obviously like to make it easy for folks to pay me.

Overall, for the clients and projects that I can fit into its functionality, the addition of invoicing is useful, but I quite can’t get rid of my other invoicing apps just yet.

Invoicing is included with any paid Freckle account plan.

How do you manage your time tracking and invoicing?

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Qlockwork is an Outlook plug-in that automatically tracks the time you spend working on your PC and records your activities in a calendar. It tracks the time spent in all applications (not just Outlook), and can generate reports showing how your time was spent across a number of different projects, which has the potential to make filing out invoices and timesheets a breeze.

The first three readers to comment on this post will get a free license.

You don’t need to work hard to figure out the simple interface, either. A calendar sits on the left side of the screen that lets you go back and review any day, week, month or selected timeframe to see how you spend your time. Categories appear below the calendar. The rest of the interface splits into two sections: Active Time and Away Time. That’s it.

Chrometa's Main Screen

Initially, all activities appear under “Uncategorized.” You can leave it like that, if you’d like. Or you can create new categories by project, client or others. If you want an application to always appear under an assigned category, Chrometa can do that. For example, you could tag Hootsuite and Tweetdeck so those entries always go into the “social media” category, or tag Thunderbird and Outlook  entries for the “email” category (note that if you use a web-based email app like Gmail, this won’t work unless you use a unique browser for Gmail only). Chrometa not only shows how much time you spend in email, but also it gives you an idea of what emails you worked on based on the subject of the email. Web browser activities work similarly, relying on the web site’s title.

Sometimes it’s hard to identify an activity. That’s not Chrometa’s fault. For example, say you start a new Word document that you have not yet saved. Unsaved documents show up in Chrometa as “Document1,” Word’s default name for an unnamed document. Confusing web site items are also out of Chrometa’s control. Furthermore, you can’t edit Active Time descriptions. This is both a good and bad thing. It’s good because clients who need to see where you spend your time know that they can trust the information. It’s bad because not everyone needs to share data with others.

Chrometa runs minimized, sitting in your system tray out of your way. When you step away, you don’t need to do anything to track your non-PC time. Chrometa knows you’re idle when you stop using the computer for a set time. Upon your return, an alert box appears so you can enter how you want to record the non-PC time or ignore it. This is the only time the app pops up without your involvement.

You can easily block applications that you don’t want to track. Additionally, we all visit web pages or look at an email for a few seconds. This can add up to a lot of activities, but you can hide activities that are shorter than one minute, five minutes and 10 minutes. Like blocked applications, this cuts the noise and concentrates on the real activities.

Other features include the ability to export data to an Excel spreadsheet, and Timestamps for showing a chronological record of your daily activities in one-hour blocks.

Chrometa's Timestamps Screen

You may pause the app when you use the computer for activities not related to work that you don’t want to record. But be warned that it won’t remind you that you’ve paused the time in case you forget to turn it back on. A future release will need to address this.

The program has only a couple of niggles. The Active Time data sometimes disappears, and the only way to get it back is to close and open the application. The app could also stand some usability improvements to make it easier to change categories, or to move things around. However, the time management application is ahead of many others in its ease of use and effectiveness. The impressive thing about Chrometa is that you can benefit from the collected data without doing anything.

You can download Chrometa for free. The free version has all of the features of the paid version, and works for 30 days. After 30 days, you’ll need a license key to continue using the app either by purchasing Chrometa for a one-time fee of $99 or qualifying for a free license.

What do you think of Chrometa?

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Although I like feeling organized, I don’t want to spend ages learning how to use software, and one thing that really frustrates me is unintuitive systems with poor usability. Generally, I think the simpler things are, the better. So I was excited to hear about 1DayLater, a new time-, cash- and distance-tracking service that is nothing if not straightforward.

For me to put the words “excited” and “tracking service” in the same sentence is a big deal. I decided not to get my hopes up. But using the service lived up to expectations: 1DayLater seems to be just what I needed.

The Basics

1DayLater is a free web-based service (additional premium features will be added as the service moves out of beta). Create an account, and you can use the clear interface to enter the “values” associated with the activities that you do: money, time and distance. You associate that value with a client and a date. Simple. If you like, you can add notes to that entry; my entries identify what tasks I completed for each client. There’s also a auto-timer that you can use to track your work in real time. Very handy.

From this point, users currently have a couple of options. The first is “Analysis.” The system can provide you with charts that reflect, for example, the time data you’ve entered, providing a graphical overview of where all your time’s going. This should provide some very interesting (or is that alarming?) information once I’ve been using the system for a while.

The second is “Export,” which lets you download data in OpenOffice spreadsheet format. You can select to download data about a certain client, “value” type — time, expenses, income, mileage — or on the basis of search criteria that you define.

The 1DayLater team is, of course, working on additional features which will include invoicing and mileage claims; these features are likely to form part of the paid component of the 1DayLater service. The Export facility was released as I was reviewing the service, so hopefully these extra features won’t be too far away.

Equally important is mobile access to the service. Those on the go will undoubtedly be disappointed that there are currently no mobile or desktop apps for this service. While this may seem like a big oversight, the 1DayLater blog explains that the team is now working to develop these (not surprisingly often-requested) apps.

Who’s it For?

The brothers who developed this service, Paul and David King, describe their inspiration for the service:

At the start of 2008 we were working separately as freelancers and realised that there was a problem common to both of us — we found it hard to keep track of how much time we were spending on our clients, and that this problem was reflected in our invoices.

As someone who’s in exactly the same place, I find the service is just what I want; a lot of the other software and services I looked at were too complex and detailed for my simple needs. I didn’t need to share my data with anyone else, except maybe an accountant — so what some would perceive as the limits of the 1DayLater service are great news to me.

OK, so the service doesn’t sync with my calendar; most of my time is unscheduled, so this isn’t a feature I need. OK, so it’s a one-person-per-account system; there’s only one of me, so I don’t need to aggregate my data with others (though if I did, I could probably do it manually through the spreadsheet export).

I do think, though, that the present lack of mobile and desktop apps is a limitation that would reduce the convenience of this service for a large portion of web workers — fortunately, not for long!

See For Yourself

You can view the demo for 1DayLater without signing up, but registration is free, so you might as well go ahead and see what the service does for you.

Have you tried 1Daylater? What other time, cash, or expense tracking services can you recommend?

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The trick with time tracking is arriving upon a degree of detail that’s both useful and efficient. It doesn’t help you if keeping track of things is all you end up doing because it’s such a time and attention-intensive process. Conversely, a general account of “Peformed project-related work” for a time block of eight hours isn’t particularly illuminating, either for the client or yourself. So how granular should your time tracking and reporting be?

I worked with one company that insisted on providing time reporting for all project staff in 15-minute increments to all of its clients. It might seem impossible, and in practice, it was, though that didn’t change the wording of the guidelines. What ended up happening was that either the client would demand simpler reporting, or company assets on assignment would “go native” and refuse to submit such ridiculously extensive accounting of their time.

Over time, the most sensible way of going about time tracking for the company became apparent. Generally speaking, project staff would report changes in activity throughout the day in blocks of time of no less than half an hour, and no more than three. Then before passing on said info to the client, administrative staff would edit it, depending on the needs and wants of the particular client stakeholder receiving the report.

As a web worker working on a contract basis from home, your process should be similar. The easy part is knowing to what degree of detail you need for your own purposes of professional development: experience will tell you that. Determining what a client wants is trickier, but should follow a similar logic. Arrive at a standard first through trial and error with some early projects, and then use that as the template for all future engagements. Solicit and pay attention to client feedback after that to determine what’s right for the person you’re currently working with.

As with most things, the best way to go about it is to avoid extremes. Report too much or too little, and you’re likely to either over- or underwhelm a client. The perfect balance is hard to achieve, but a good balance shouldn’t be too hard to arrive at.

How do you determine how granular to make your time tracking?

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Where many time tracking tools expect you to export reports and then break out information about specific projects or clients, Yast lets you share your tracking information on a project-by-project basis. That simple difference is actually quite important: I can track the time I spend on one client’s project and send off that information, without showing the amount of time I’ve spent on my own projects and without having to do any copying, pasting or deleting of information. All I need to do is share that project with my client.

Beyond the ability to share information, Yast has a simple interface that allows you to switch between projects just by clicking. It is a web-based application, which may make it less useful for some users, but the interface is very visual. You can quickly tell what project you’re currently tracking, along with other details, just by glancing at it. The timer itself is organized along a timeline that gives perspective about how much time you’re really devoting to a project. You can zoom in and out on the timeline to see information at different scales. You can also label specific types of projects with different colors, drag and drop them into different folders and keep everything organized.

Exporting reports on your time use is a matter of selecting the period that you want to look at and choosing a format. Yast offers Excel, PDF and CSV exports, as well as an online preview. You can also generate reports based on specific projects, or all the projects in a folder. The reports don’t really offer much analysis of how you’re spending time, but since you can pull them into Excel, you can probably run any analysis or comparison that you really want to, although you can get a general idea of where your time is going by taking a broad look at the timeline.

Yast is free to use, requiring only a very simple sign up — just provide an email address and a password and you can start tracking time. The site has been in beta for about a month, which is long enough for the team behind Yast to have already rolled out both performance upgrades and new features, like the addition of exporting to Excel and CSV files. The creators are still creating new features, and are currently working on synchronizing Yast with Google Calendar.

Have you tried Yast for time tracking? How did it work out for you?

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