This post talks about yaTimer 2.1 that will be officially released on February 1st and will be a free upgrade to all customers, with the release I'm also raising the price – so if you buy now you'll get the new version and save 20$. yaTimer 2.1 got a new look, one reason for the new look is the graphic redesign I'm doing company-wide, (I published the new yaTimer logo a while back, the blog changed and the rest of the site will follow in a few days. But the real reason behind the change is compatibility, I switched the technology I...

Check your e-mail only twice a day, if you're interested in productivity you've probably already seen this advice before, but if you don't already do this you should really try it. Every time you switch between your work and your e-mail you spend a little bit of time re-orienting yourself and then a bit more until you get up to speed with the new task, this is not a lot of wasted time – mostly you don't even notice it, just a few seconds wasted here and there, but a few seconds here and there quickly add up. You don't really have...

Most time management systems are designed to let you do more, to get more done, to do things faster, this is all good and nice but they tend to forget something very important – productivity is not only about how much you get done, it's also about what you do. I suggest that you can be more productive by doing less – by focusing only on the important tasks you can maximize the value of your time. Let me explain, everyone has one or two things he does really well, things that are his core business, when doing those things he is...

If the blog looks strange you might need to refresh the page. The old blog design was a very advanced, simple, semantic-markup, pure xhtml/css design – the result of this very web-savvy design paradigm is that the very advanced layout didn't display correctly on, well, all browsers, but each browser displayed it incorrectly in a different way. I'm going to stop now so this doesn't become a rant about the poor state of web design and just introduce you to this new poorly coded not advanced at all design that both looks nice and actually works on all browsers. The blog is just...

yaTimer started as a very simple timer and is priced accordingly at just about the minimum price I can still make a profit. Since then I released several versions of yaTimer and it has become a very capable time tracking solution, I did a short competitor search on-line and I think yaTimer is one of the cheapest alternatives available. On the other hand the US dollar has dropped and left me with less money per sale then I planned for. So, I decided to raise my price, on February 1st version 2.1 of yaTimer will be released at the new price of 49$...

Managing your time is not productive work, its overhead – the only reason tracking and managing your time is worthwhile is that it saves you so much time later. Now if you accept that time management is overhead and not productive work we need to see how we can minimize it. The worst way to manage your time is to manually fill timesheets once a week, it takes too much time to try and remember what you did every hour of the previous week – and you are sure to miss quite a few hours and either bill one client for time...

Keeping track of how much time you spend on your tasks has many obvious advantages: The first and most obvious - you know how much to bill your clients. You can find out what parts of your process you need to improve. You can make sure your time is not being monopolized by just one of the things you should do You can improve you estimation skills Your time management becomes streamlined and more efficient. But there is one more advantage...

I originally planned to release yaTimer 2.1 in early December, but December came and it was obvious there's still much work to do, so I rescheduled it to late December – I almost released it on time but I have been delayed by some bugs that were discovered late in the development process. Now yaTimer 2.1 is finally ready and I'm starting my release process: Today the new version will be sent to family and friends In a few days, if there are no show-stoppers I'll also send it to customers that were promised...