December 11, 2003

time tracking tip

Because I know people love Useful Tips, and because I care about you and your productivity, here’s a Useful Tip for professional services folks or unprofessional services folks that need to keep track of their time. If you’re using iCal from Apple or Outlook 2003 from Microsoft, it’s fairly simple to set up an additional calendar. View them side by side, and use one as your appointment calendar, the other as an activity journal. For me, it’s easier than keeping a time log, it’s visual, and it gives me a good indication of whether I’m spending my time in short bursts (bad) or in long, thoughtful (even leisurely!) stretches (good). Do this for a while, and you’ll start to have flashbacks of the Day Planner days of old, before all these touchscreen Bluetooth thing-a-ma-bobs were cluttering my desk drawers.

Plus, if one were enterprising, and one were required to actually bill their time, one could write a script to slurp an iCal file or an Exchange database and auto-feed those into a time-tracking and billing system. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves now.

Note to self: is this what your publishing life has been reduced to? Time management tips? What happened to all the big ideas? The high falutin’ talk of the future of new media? The commentary on the fascinating interplay of technology, business and culture?