The first and most important thing to do in order to organize your time better is to start tracking how you spend it. After you have some solid information about how you spend your time there is a lot you can do to improve. I publish a series of blog posts about productivity and time management, in this series I write about one aspect of time management – and one way to improve your productivity - every week, you can see all productivity tips here, and subscribe via RSS to the series here. You can download yaTimer - my easy to use time...

This post talks about a version 2.1 of yaTimer, version 2.1 is not released yet but will be a free update to all customers, you can get the current version here and you will be notified when the new version is available. There are four new reports in yaTimer 2.1, three of them are "daily timesheets" they show details of what you did divided into days. The daily timesheet report shows what tasks you spent time on, the daily client timesheet and daily project timesheet shows the daily total for the client or project. A weekly and monthly variation of those reports will...

We all have a lot of things that we have to do, if you are a freelancer or consultant you probably have more than one customer, and even if you have just one customer (or employer) there always several things that have to get done. The standard technique for choosing what to work on next is to just pick the task that looks most urgent and do it, a task often gets to this "most urgent" status just by belonging to the most annoying client or the most stressful project – or sometimes, if you know how to prioritize, than to...

As part of the next version yaTimer is getting a new logo. yaTimer version 2.1 is getting closer to release, there are no major (known) problems left and its all about testing, testing, testing and more testing. Version 2.1 isn’t available yet, but it will be a free upgrade to all customers, you can download the current version here.

This post describes a future version of yaTimer, this version will be a free upgrade to all yaTimer customers. Version 2.1 is not available yet, but you can download the current version or buy the current version (and get the new version for free when it's released). This is the most requested feature for this version, it was planned for version 2.2 and moved forward to version 2.1 because of those requests. Clicking the "Completed Tasks" button on the main menu (this button replaces the "Undo Complete" button from previous versions) opens this window: You can see the list of completed tasks, filtered by...

In this blog post I'm going to tell you how to work less and get more done at the same time. The first thing you need is a complete and accurate record of how you spend your time, yaTimer, my time tracking tool is (obviously) perfect for that, you just have to make sure you time everything,   don't cheat and time tasks, not projects. After you have those complete and accurate records – I assume you need at least a week to get started, the more information you have the more you can improve. Now it's time to increase you're productivity. You probably...

The next version of yaTimer (2.1) is scheduled to be released this month (December 2007). yaTimer is now in the first stage of preparation for release – only features I already added to yaTimer will make it for this release, no new features will be added only bug will be fixed, that coupled with extensive testing should produce a high quality release. Over the next few days I'll publish some of the new features of yaTimer 2.1 here.

WPF’s styling and templating support is amazing, but some controls are easier to template then others, one of the least intuitive to style controls is the ListBox, it’s very difficult to change the ListBoxItem selection background color for example. Here is a post on the WPF SDK blog that explains how to do it. I’ve posted this here so I’ll know where to look the next time I want to style a list box

In future posts I'm going to show you how valuable is your past time tracking information, but it's only valuable if you break down your tasks correctly. If you track your entire day, project or everything you do for a client as a single tasks you're going to know how much to bill them but you're not going to be able to use that information  to improve your productivity. In order to have the information to improve you have to track your time at the tasks level, but what is a task? A task is the smallest thing worth tracking: ...