MakeUseOf » time management

10 Timers And Clocks For iDevices You Can Download [iPhone, iPad, iPod]

Bakari Chavanu — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:00:14 +0000

All versions of the iOS for the iPhone include Apple’s default clock app that features alarm settings, a timer, a world clock, and a stop watch. The clock app works well, but there are several pages of other free and inexpensive timer apps in the iTunes Store for both the iPhone and the iPad, the latter of which does not include a timer by default.

These timer and clock apps range from the very simple timer displays to more unique functions, such as interval timers, a few apps for timing meetings and presentations, and even a couple for clocking labor contractions.

I went through the pickings and selected ten representative apps, but you will find many more that might fit your needs. If you have a favorite timer app, please let us know about it in the comment section.

Interval Timer

The ad-based version of Interval Timer is a nifty fitness and workout app in which you can keep track of your work and rest periods during workouts.

The customizable sets for high/low intensity intervals is easy to configure, and it comes with a variety of alarm sounds (Bell, Boing, HipHop, Tiger, etc.) The app integrates with the iTunes library in your iPhone so you can listen to music when the timer is running. The ads are not too obtrusive, but if you rather not see them, you can get the Pro version for .99 cents.

Full Term

You may only use this labor contraction timer app a few times in life, but according to user comments in iTunes, it really is handy.

The user interface is simple, and it includes a feature for emailing a log history of contractions. Specifying the intensity of each contraction, and adding notes to or deleting a specific contraction entry are features included in the most recent version.

Nag

The design of this multiple timer with alarms is not as attractive as it could be, but I keep Nag in my iPhone’s main utility folder because it a simple way to set a specified time without having to perform several taps to do so.

Nag (.99 cents) is useful for the kitchen, meetings, parking meter reminders, etc.

Alarm Clock 4 Free

Alarm Clock 4 Free allows you to showcase the time on your iPhone or iPad. It’s an ad supported app (the pro version is .99 cents), but when you turn your device in landscape mode, the ads disappear.

The app also includes a sleep timer, notification alarms, battery level indicator, and much more.

Timer with Sections

Timer with Sections ($1.99) is another handy app I sometimes use in meetings and workshops I conduct. It allows you set up various times for parts of a meeting, presentation, workout, etc.

You can leave open the visual display and glance at it when needed. During the timing, you can adjust the times, pause and skip sections, or reset it all together. The timer even continues the count when you leave the app. When you return to it the performance assistant view will recover its previous state, including elapsed time.

Your individual performance setups can be saved, edited, and used again. It would be nice however if you could customize the color scheme. I would prefer a simple black and white.

LED Photo Timer Lite

The ad supported lite version of LED Photo Timer is seriously easy to use. Launch it, tap one of the time presets for activating the shutter of your iPhone camera, start the timer, and you’re good to go.

This is app is useful for when you want to include yourself in a group photo, or you when you need to steady your shot.

Seconds Free

Seconds Free is another interval setting timer with a more stylish interface than Interval Timer described above. The free version of this app however does not allow you to save your settings. The pro version is $2.99.

Seconds Free also looks great on the iPad with a large display and color coding–great for glancing over at it from a distance when you’re doing a workout.

iStandard Clock

iStandard Clock for the iPad (.99 cents) is the only app I came across that mirrors the design of Apple’s default clock app featured in the iPhone. It includes a World Clock, Stopwatch, and of course a Timer.

Unlike with the iPhone, iStandard Clock supports landscape as well as portrait view.

Night Stand for iPad

If you’re looking to prop up your iPad and display the time and weather, you might want to download the free, ad supported version of Night Stand for the iPad. The developers held back a lot of features found in the pro version (.99 cents), but it will give you idea for the look and feel of this app before you decide to purchase the full version.

The time display app might useful for when you’re charging your app and you want a useful way to view the time at night or even in the morning as you’re getting ready for work.

The free version does not provide support for Twitter and Facebook timeline displays. But it does include weather and a non-customizable RSS news feed with built-in web browser.

Easy Timer

If you need a fat, can’t-miss-it count down or count up display timer, Easy Timer might just do the trick. Easy Timer includes three presets and alarms, and can be displayed in landscape or portrait mode.

The changing bar of ads at the top of the display may be a little distracting, but maybe not from a distance.

There are over a hundred more timer apps to choose from. Let us know what you have found and favor. For other timer related applications, check out 6 Useful Desktop Time Tracking Software, 10 Different Types of Online Timers for Everyday Stuff, and 10 Powerful & Useful iPhone Camera Apps to Help You Take Better Pictures.

Save Time & Increase Productivity With These 5 Awesome Extensions [Chrome]

Yaara Lancet — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 00:31:39 +0000

Increased productivity is hard to appreciate until we attain it. The average person wastes lots of time each day typing the same word, switching between confusing tabs, not to mention drowning in an overwhelming amount of tabs they can never make sense of. This happens to all of us at least some of the time. But there are actually some easy solutions.

Browser extensions are a quick and simple way to increase productivity quickly. Installation is a breeze, configuration takes minutes, and the time and energy it can save you is invaluable. The only thing that does take time is finding really good and simple extensions that do this. Here is a list of some excellent yet simple Chrome extensions that WILL increase your productivity.

Decreased Productivity

Despite its name, Decreased Productivity can actually help you increase it. With Decreased Productivity, you can control what you want to see on a page, and do so in a tab-specific way. Want a certain website to always cloak images, hide flash, and appear with pink text on blue background? No problem.

There are numerous other things you can control. From hiding titles and favicons, to changing fonts and changing image opacity. You can also have the settings toggle with a hotkey, and create a blacklist and whitelist for your settings.

As for colors, you can create your own color scheme or choose from a list of presets. You can change the background, text, links, and table borders. There’s a handy little demo area below these settings so you can immediately see what it looks like.

The only thing I couldn’t find is a way to create several different settings for different lists of websites, but even so, Decreased Productivity is a useful little extension that can definitely increase your productivity.

Dossier

How many times have you found yourself with 30 some-odd tabs open at the end of the day, all of which you opened for a reason, but now you don’t have the time or energy to look them all? How do you go about saving so many open tabs in a way that doesn’t create a huge mess? Dossier is one excellent way.

Dossier lets you bundle tabs into handy dandy lists, which you can access later, when you actually have time or feel like doing it. To create a list, click on the red and yellow square icon, and name your new list. Then go ahead and pick the websites you want on that list, and hit “Bundle Tabs!”. This will close all the chosen tabs and open a new tab with the list.

If you don’t want Dossier to close the tabs, you can choose “Bundle Tabs (do NOT remove from window)” instead. From the list you can access each individual website, restore all the tabs, copy the addresses to the clipboard or delete the list.

Now instead of 30 tabs, you can have 3-4 tabs, organized by whatever category you choose. Efficiency galore!

Kuunga

If you use Chrome’s bookmarks and have them well organized, or if you wish to start but find the interface cumbersome, give Kuunga a try. Kuunga creates a whole now starting page, so each time you open a new tab, you actually get Kuunga.

This extension will automatically take your bookmarks and arrange them into huge yellow sticky notes. If you add a link to a list, you’re actually adding a bookmark. If you delete something, you’re deleting an actual bookmark. To add a new sticky note, choose “Add note” from the tabs on the top, and start adding links to it. This will add a new folder to your real bookmarks.

Along with the bookmarks, Kuunga offers access to your most viewed and recently viewed pages, your apps, and all the bookmarks you haven’t so far arranged into folders.

Kuunga works best if you already have organized folders or if you’re starting from scratch. If you’re not, you might do well organizing your bookmarks before you start using it – an advantage by itself!

Tab Position Customizer

Tab Position Customizer is a very simple extension without a lot of bells and whistles, but what it does, it does very effectively. If you don’t like Chrome’s default opening and closing settings for tabs, here is where you can change them. You can choose where new tabs will open, if they open as activated or not activated, and choose which tab will be activated when you close a tab. You’d be surprised how convenient this can be!

Popchrom

Popchrom is one of those extensions that once you start using it, you won’t be able to stop. Do you spend a lot of time typing the same things over and over again? Let Popchrom do it for you!

All you have to do is choose your words/phrases, add abbreviations, assign your hotkey, and you’re good to go. Now type your abbreviation in any textbox in Chrome, hit your hotkey, and… magic! You can use this for e-mail signatures, names you write a lot and even dates. Check out the help section for some useful syntax information.

Conclusion

For people who work with computers all day, small changes can mean major improvements in productivity. We’re all looking for ways to make our lives easier and our work more fluent, and for these purposes, these chrome productivity extensions are definitely keepers.

For productivity outside Chrome, check out:

Know of some more ways to keep productive? Share some tips in the comments!

Image credit: Shutterstock

Wakeup: An Alarm Clock That Tells You What’s Going On [Linux]

Justin Pot — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 19:01:31 +0000

Wake up to your computer telling you what’s going on. Whether you want to know the weather or how many emails you need to respond to, Linux application Wakeup can start up your powered-off computer and announce a variety of things.

We’ve profiled a few alarm programs before, but Wakeup is unique. First, it can read a variety of information to you, pulled straight from the web, in a computerized voice. Second, it can, depending on your BIOS, boot your computer in order to do so, meaning you don’t need to leave your computer on all night just to hear your alarm. Keeping your computer off at night saves energy and keeps your computer working longer.

With the ability to recite everything from your incoming emails to your task list to the latest headlines on any website, Wakeup is an efficient, if somewhat disconcerting, way to wake up each morning.

Set Up Wakeup

Start Wakeup for the first time and you’ll see the main interface. Basically, you have the chance to write a sentence:

You can write whatever you want. For example: you could just have it say “Good morning, you splendid specimen of a human being. Continue being awesome!” But that’s not very useful.

What is useful however, are the various words you see preceded by dollar signs in the screenshot above. These are essentially commands, allowing Wakeup to find a bit of information it can read to you. For example: “$gmail” tells you how many unread email messages are waiting for you, and “$temperature” lets you know the current temperature. “$todo” and “$schedule” pulls your task list and calendar from Evolution.

String together a sentence, then click the “Play” button to hear how it will sound. You might want to play with this in order to build the right sentence, but that’s half the fun!

Configure Sources

In order to use these various plugins, of course, you will need to do some configuration. Head to the preferences for that:

Enter your email address and password to configure Gmail, for example. Add whatever RSS feed you’d like to hear headlines read to you from. Explore the options and you’ll get the idea quickly.

Set A Time

Naturally, for this to function as an alarm clock, you’ll need to set what time you want to wake up. Head to the main tab of the preferences page for that:

Need to wake up at different times on different days? No problem; you can configure this at the bottom of the main screen. Add multiple alarms and you’re good to go.

Install Wakeup

Ready to install and try WakeUp? Ubuntu users can simply click here to install Wakeup. Users of other Linux distributions should check their package manager.

Can’t find anything? Find Wakeup’s official page here, complete with source code which you can compile on other systems, if you’re talented enough. Sadly this program is almost impossible to Google.

How do you like Wakeup? I’ll be hanging around in the comments below, so feel free to join me and talk about it.

Toggl Helps You Discover Where Your Time Goes

Justin Pot — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:00:17 +0000

Where does all your time go? It’s an easy question to answer, if you track your time. Toggl is a deceptively simple web application that lets you do just that.

If you’re like most people, your job (or jobs) requires that you focus on more than one task every day. It’s easy, under such circumstances, to have no idea which tasks are taking up most of your time – or, for that matter, which tasks are wasting your time.

With a full-featured web client plus apps for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android, Toggl can help you track your time anywhere you might be.

We’ve featured more than a few time tracking applications in the past. Toggl is unique, though, because it’s extremely easy to use and works on pretty much every device known to man. Let’s take a look.

Easy To Start

Before you do anything you’ll need to head to toggl.com and sign up for a free account. Once you’ve got your account up and running you’ll quickly be taken to the main time tracking interface:

If this looks simple to you, you’re right. All you need to do is write what it is you’re doing, then click the blue “start” button to start tracking your time.Are you adding a project you’ve already been working on for a while? Easy: just fill in the timer manually; for example, type “10 minutes” and Toggl will add 10 minutes to your new project, then count up from there when you click “start.”

You can add clients and projects to a given task, a very useful way to break your time down by category later.

Like the concept, but don’t want to manage your time in a browser? Don’t worry: there are apps for that. Download Toggl apps for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android here.

The apps all look basically the same. Here’s what it looks like for Ubuntu Linux users:

I keep this open at all times on my desktop and laptop. I find that a ticking clock gives me motivation to keep working. Note that these apps can’t do everything; the web app is certainly more full-featured. Still, these apps are great to have around.

If these apps aren’t enough for you, search the web. There are a few third party clients out there, including this Mac dashboard client for Toggl.

Output reports

It’s not useful to collect data if you can’t access it later. Happily, Toggl makes creating reports of your hours easy.

You can show weekly reports, find out which projects are eating up your time, or just display a list. Want to only see hours pertaining to a specific project? You can do that too.

Need to send this information to someone else? You can easily export the data to PDF or CSV. There are plenty more options under reports, so be sure to explore to really find out what Toggl can do.

Limits to Freedom

Toggl is free to use, but many features need to be paid for. Tracking time for multiple people in one organization, for example, or tracking billable hours for the purpose of invoicing. Still, for most people, the free version should cut it.

Conclusion

Toggl doesn’t just track your time; it encourages you to use your time wisely. Knowing that a clock is ticking can drive you to get tasks done and to avoid distractions; at least, that’s been the case for me in the past couple of weeks.

Still, Toggl may not be to your taste. That’s okay: check out these 6 desktop time tracking applications for Windows, or read about capturing missing time with Klok.

Do you find time tracking to be valuable? Let me know in the comments below, along with any cool Toggl hacks you might know about.

Keep Track Of Your Time With Hamster [Linux]

Justin Pot — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 19:31:04 +0000

Not sure where your time goes? Keep track of it. Hamster is a Linux application that helps you do just that. Computers help us get work done, but they can also be distracting. That’s why it’s important to keep track of when you’re actually working; time management saves you time. Beyond distractions, however, it’s a good idea to figure out which daily tasks are eating up your time. This can help you schedule, or help you bill accurately if you’re a freelancer.

Hamster is a piece of Linux software built from the ground up to make time tracking easy. Get into the habit of using it and you’ll get a very accurate view of which tasks are taking the most time. This can go a long way toward making you efficient.

Tracking Your Time With Hamster

Whenever you begin a task, quickly open Hamster and let the software know what you’re doing:

Add a name for the task, then add some tags. How you use the tags is up to you, but they can really help you figure out where your time is going later on. If you want to know how much time you spend on research compared to the time you spend actually writing, for example, tag tasks for your research and writing accordingly. This way you’ll know what you’re spending your time doing.

Tags are also a great way for freelancers to track their billable hours. Just tag tasks with a specific job or client and you’ll be tracking your hours for the job.

When you’ve completed a task, or switched to another one, let Hamster know. Time tracking only works if you track your time!

You can review the information at any time, by clicking summary:

As you can see, Hamster lets you know what you’ve been doing with your time. You can make changes, useful if you ever accidently leave Hamster tracking after you’ve completed a project. You can also review how much time your various “tags” are taking up in a given week or other period of time.

Do you want to show other people where your time is going? Hamster allows you to export tasks to HTML files you can share easily with others, including clients.

You can set Hamster to stop tracking you when your computer is off or sleeping:

If a lot of your work is away from the computer you’re going to want to turn this off. Other settings worth checking out include reminders and syncing with tasks list from Evolution and Getting Things Gnome, which keeps Linux user organized.

Using Workspaces To Track Time

If you’re anything like me, you use the various workspaces Linux offers for different things. One for email and web browsing; another for writing; another for social networks; the last for testing software.

You can set Hamster to automatically track how much time you’re spending on your various desktops. Assuming you use your desktops as consistently as I do, you can use this feature to track how much time you spend doing certain things automatically. This is a great way to track your time if you don’t want to manually enter information for each task.

How To Install Hamster

Installing Hamster is easy on most Linux distributions; just look for “hamster” in your package manager. Ubuntu users can simply click here to install Hamster.

If you can’t find Hamster in your repositories you may need to compile the code yourself. Find more about that here, but don’t expect it to be simple.

Install The Hamster Indicator Applet

Users of Gnome 2 can add a Hamster applet to a Gnome panel. Users of Ubuntu 11.04 and later don’t have this option, but don’t worry: there is a handy indicator applet for Hamster:

Find out how to install the Hamster indicator for Unity at Webupd8; their tutorial includes installation instructions and various tweaks for the applet.

Conclusion

Hamster is a great time tracking device. As someone who jumps between multiple operating systems a lot I wish it was cross platform, but for those who use Linux all the time there isn’t a better way to track time than Hamster.

I’ve been wrong before. Do you know a better tool for the job than Hamster? Fill us in. Also feel free to let us know how Hamster helps you; we’d love to hear.

Image Credit : Doenertier82

Capture Missing Time In Your Work Schedule With Klok Time Tracking

Ryan Dube — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:31:09 +0000

Over the past few months, I’ve discovered a very strange phenomenon creeping into my work schedule. I seem to keep losing time.

How do you lose time? It’s easier than you might think. You get started on an article or working on some project, and then it strikes you to check email. After answering two or three emails, you get back to your project. Then, it strikes you to check Facebook, and then Twitter too. After responding to a few comments on your friend’s wall and posting a few tweets, you get back to your project. You glance at the clock and realize that somewhere in there you’ve just lost two hours. Ever since the advent of Facebook and social networking in general, time seems to disappear. It’s not that I am not working hard, it’s just that I get distracted, and from what I hear from friends – a lot of people suffer from this situation.

One solution – actually, probably the best solution – is to really track your time so that you can see what you’re really spending all of your time doing. Over the years, we’ve offered a number of great tools to help track time, like Shankar’s list of 5 tools, Damien’s list of 6 desktop tools, and directory listings like CronSync or MyHours.

Klok Tracks & Invoices Time

To solve my personal dilemma and discover my “missing time”, I did some hunting and decided on an app that I thought offered the most features with the best interface. That time tracking software is Klok. Klok is a desktop time-tracking tool based on Adobe Air. It has a very small learning curve, and it’s a powerful desktop time tracking tool that not only lets you keep track of your time but it also includes a built in invoicing feature that requires hardly any work to maintain or use.

The layout is simple, yet everything is at your fingertips. The calendar of time used is displayed on the right and all of your projects are listed to the left. Then there are all of the timesheet reports and archives on the lower left, and of course the menu at the top.

When you’re ready to start working, just click the green “Add” button at the top left, and type in the name of the project you want to track. If you are billing hourly for the task, click on the “Billable” checkbox and type the hourly rate that you charge.

You can color code each project, which makes the graph and pie-chart reports make more sense. You can also add sub-projects to each project. For example, I have about 4 or 5 responsibilities that go along with doing SEO work for MakeUseOf, so I’ve created an SEO project, and under that I added the related tasks as sub projects.

As you can see here, you can really organize your tasks and break down your time in a way that helps you eventually get a better picture of where you spend most of your time and effort every day while you’re working at your computer.

Tracking time requires very little effort – you won’t find yourself wasting time dealing with this program. Just click on the project or task you plan to work on, and click the “Start Working” button at the top (or right click on the project and click “Work On“).

By the way – the automated time entries are not set in stone. If you need to tweak any of the time entries, just click the “Time Entries” tab, click on the entry item, and you can edit any of the details for that entry at the bottom of the screen.

The coolest part of Klok, in my opinion, is the dynamic calendar display that graphically changes as you track your time. As tasks are logged, you’ll see color coded entries automatically appear in the calendar. This is nice later on as you’re trying to come up with a realistic schedule for yourself. Just look back and see how long specific tasks really took – not how long you would like them to take. You can also modify these automated entries quickly by moving them to a new start time or stretching out the end time.

Click on any of the timesheet links at the lower left corner of the window and you’ll see a detailed display of your timesheet, including all of the time you’ve logged and all projects you’ve logged to. Time is broken down for each day as well as the overall total. If you’ve marked any tasks as billable, you’ll see those totals here too. You can save this information as an Excel spreadsheet, making billing your clients a breeze.

Within just a few days, this software helped me identify the culprit in my schedule – answering emails. On some days, I had clicked to work on the “managing emails” task, and it was nearly an hour and a half by the time I was done reading and answering emails.

It may seem like common sense to figure out where you’re wasting unproductive time, but in reality, using the computer is like walking into a time warp. You can play a game, explore forums or spend time on social networks and hours can pass without you even realizing it. Apps like Klok help you keep yourself accountable, and it can really help freelancers keep track of, and correctly bill, for all time spent doing work for clients.

So give Klok a spin and compare it to other time tracking software solutions you’ve tried. In my opinion, it really is the cleanest and easiest tracker to use – what’s your take? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Maarten Uilenbroek

Addicted To Google Plus? Here Are 4 Ways To Block Addictive Websites & Get Back To Work

Yaara Lancet — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:31:00 +0000

The new player in the field may be addictive, but even before it came along there was no lack of websites that are way more beckoning than work. Be it Facebook, email, Google Reader, or just your favorite blog, the Internet today is distraction galore.

While some of us work in offices where these sites are blocked, some of us have to exercise incredible willpower on a daily basis when we try not to waste our time on these websites. There are many solutions out there, and today I’m going to to review the best blocking solutions I could find. No matter what browser or operating system you use, one of these is bound to work for you.

Websites

KeepMeOut

KeepMeOut lets you set a certain amount of time in which you’re only allowed to visit the culprit website once. Meaning, if you want to visit Facebook no more than once every hour, this is a solution for you.

Aside from setting the time-gap limit, you can set it to work only on weekdays and set certain hours of the day in which the blocking would work. It’s not very flexible — you can only choose all days or just weekdays, and you can’t choose different times for different days, or separate time spans like 0900-1200, 1400-1700.

KeepMeOut works by creating a new link to your website of choice, which you are meant to use every time you want to visit this website. The best way to use it is to bookmark the new address in a way that is most accessible to you. If you visit this new address more than once in your allowed time span, the website will be blocked.

Keep in mind that if you use just the regular address and not the one created by KeepMeOut, nothing will be blocked. There is also no time limit per visit, so if you really want to cheat you can just leave the page open and come back to it, or browse your feed for 2 hours without interruption.

MinutesPlease

MinutesPlease is another web-based solution that uses a different principle. It works by allotting you a certain amount of time to spend on a website, and blocks you when your time is up. It doesn’t actually block the website per se, but simply closes the website’s tab automatically. Nothing prevents you from opening it again once it does this, so a certain amount of willpower is still required.

As can be seen in the screenshot, you don’t have to visit the MinutesPlease website to use it. You can enter an address directly that will open your requested website for the requested time. You can also bookmark these addresses if you want to use them regularly. You can open several websites at once with MinutesPlease, and it will keep track of your remaining time in all of them. You can pause, add time, or cancel the limit any time you want, so again, some willpower is still a must.

While surfing your forbidden website, you’ll see the timer ticking away on the MinutePlease open tab (if you chose to use it). It will only show the last timer you set, though.

Note that your time is still running out even if you’ve switched tabs, so don’t waste it!

Add-ons

StayFocusd [Chrome]

StayFocusd provides a much more flexible and sound solution for those of you who are looking for something more sturdy. Once you install it, you’ll find the StayFocusd blue icon in your Chrome toolbar, which you can use to block the site you’re currently on or to access further options.

StayFocusd can block whole sites, block only specific subdomains (or allow them), and block multiple sites. Once you visit one of the blocked sites, the StayFocusd icon will turn red, and the countdown will start. The timer is set at 10 minutes by default, but this can be changed, of course. The timer will only run when the blocked site’s tab is active, so you don’t have to worry about wasting your precious time. Once your time is up, the website is blocked.

StayFocusd comes with plenty of configurable options, and you can set it up exactly to your liking (or dis-liking, once it blocks your favorite website). If you’re really desperate, you can choose “The Nuclear Option”, which will block all your websites for the whole day – and there’s no turning back!

LeechBlock [Firefox]

LeechBlock is an old hat in the blocking game, and it feels like the most solid one of the bunch. If you like everything to be just so and feel the need to create multiple blocking schemes for each hour of the day, give LeechBlock a spin.

LeechBlock leads you through the creation of a Block Set (of which you can create up to 6), and let’s you configure every little nook and cranny in it.

Once you enter one of the blocked websites, a small timer will start running at the bottom right corner of the window. The timer stops when the tab loses focus.

Once your time is up, your out of luck. The website is blocked for you. Unlike StayFocusd, you can configure it to block it only for a certain amount of time, and then surf it again for a limited time. This way you can look at Facebook for 5 minutes every hour, and no more!

Conclusion

Whether you choose the web-based option or the add-ons, you’d still need a certain amount of willpower to stay focused on your work. But there’s nothing like a good countdown to make us feel guilty enough to stop!

If you still need motivation, check out some tools that track the amount of time you waste online.

How do you stay focused on your work? Share your solutions in the comments!

Image credit: Shutterstock

6 Instant Online Services That Boost Online Productivity

Ryan Dube — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:30:50 +0000

If there is one requirement that I have for most online productivity services that I choose to use, it is ease of use. I want to be able to instantly start using the service without any hassle (preferably without any signup), and there should be virtually no learning curve.

There are several things that make a person more productive. These include remembering tasks or appointments, easy capturing and sharing of information, organization, and quick collaboration with others.

Since I’m not usually in just one location when I do my work, I really need most of my tools accessible from anywhere, so online tools are the way to go. A few good examples are the ones Nancy covered not too long ago. Then you’ve got the many individual tools covered here at MUO, like Teamly, WorkTrek and many more

I have a list of online productivity software tools that I use almost every day, and others that I’ve recently discovered. I’ve decided to share my own favorites that best serve each of the productivity needs listed above.

6 Online Productivity Tools

I can have a horrible memory sometimes, there’s no doubt about it. Unless someone reminds me, there are times I would forget my own birthday.

kisReminder to Stay on Task

To make up for those memory issues, I make use of a number of applications that keep me on task. One of my favorites is called kisReminder.

kisReminder doesn’t require any sign-up. Just visit the website, and type in the reminder email that you need. The system will email you at the pre-defined time.

I usually set the e-mail address to the one that goes to my mobile phone. This way, my phone will alert me that a new email has come in, I’ll check it, and will be reminded right on time. This service has saved me from being late for meetings and appointments more times than I can count.

URLCapt For Quick Website Snapshots

Another time-saving online tool is a cool website called URLcapt, which will take a full-length snapshot of any website, and turn it into a high-resolution image.

The value of this service can not be understated. Many times in the morning, when I don’t have time to read all of my favorite blogs, I will open this service in one tab, and then open the top articles from a few of my favorite blogs. I copy and paste the URL into the URLcapt field, and then send the image to my mobile email address.

As you can see above, you are also provided with a URL address to access the picture if you would rather not download the file. When you visit the URL, you’ll see a thumbnail of the full image.

Just click on it to zoom and you’ll see a high-resolution image snapshot of the page. This is also a really simple way to share online content with any friends that might have a heavily filtered internet connection. So long as they can receive your image attachment, they can read the page content.

After The Deadline

Another nice tool that is especially useful for online writers is AfterTheDeadline, an online grammar and spell-check service. Again, no sign-up is required. Just copy and paste your article (or email) into the field and click “Check Writing”.

The service will quickly run through your writing and it will underline any potential errors with red for spelling, green for grammar and blue for potential style or clarity issues.

The nice thing about this service is that it’s available absolutely anywhere. This is really useful for public computers that may not have MS Word or other writing-check word processing software installed.

Quick Diagrams With My.Origramy

Another task that I do often is drawing diagrams to brainstorm ideas, plan out projects and even to organize my schedule. There are plenty of free diagram applications, but I really wanted an online app that I could access anywhere without any install required.

For this job, My.Origramy fits the bill. Registration takes about 30 seconds, and no email confirmation is required to get started. The online tool has four categories of pre-built icons.

I tend to think and organize my thoughts in the same way computer programs are laid out, so I use algorithm most often. Drawing a diagram is fast and very intuitive.

Object properties are on the right, and moving objects is as simple as dragging them across the drawing with your mouse.

Protect Your Email With Scr.IM

Another thing that I do online very often is give out my email address, on web pages, forums and via email. If you don’t want your address scraped by the spam bots and used for spam delivery, you’d best hide your email address with an online service like Scr.IM.

In my opinion, if you spend any time posting anything online that requires your email address, this is a basic necessity. No one wants to end up on the receiving end of a spam machine.

Collaborate With Vyew

The final free online service that I wanted to share is hosting an online conferencing session using Vyew.

Vyew offers a ridiculously simple way to chat with a group of people in an environment where you can type text, draw, post audio, post screenshots, have a video-chat, and even share files. Jessica briefly mentioned it in her article on video conferencing solutions, but in my opinion it really is one of the best because it’s so fast and simple to get started almost instantly.

So, if you’re looking for a few quick ways to save time, increase your overall efficiency and get more done with less effort, add a few of these online services to your list of bookmarks and start using them. Are there any online productivity software on this list you didn’t know about? Are there any that you know about that you like better? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Check Out These 2 Smart Calendar Apps With Task Integration

Jessica Cam Wong — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 01:31:15 +0000

I have fiddled with many organization systems, trying to find one that I could stick with. I’ve used Remember the Milk (a sophisticated system whose iPhone app just didn’t cut it for me), Springpad (with its refreshing features that I thought could still mature a bit more), Toodledo (which, despite being a great place for valuable notes and tasks, it proved a bit too advanced), Reqall (with its great iPhone app whose development seems to have paused), and now, I’m trying to go with the simpler Google Calendar and Google Tasks.

After trying so many different ones, I noticed that I yearned for specific features in a not-too-complicated system, like for example, integration between a calendar app and the task app in question. When it comes to calendar integration, the experience just isn’t completely optimized in Google Calendar and Google Tasks yet (e.g. you can’t view tasks in mobile calendar apps, even though Tasks shows up as a Google Calendar), which is a shame because calendar and task apps should work closely together. I consider this to be pretty much a difficulty brought by Google Calendar’s import/sync issues. GCal usually syncs once a day or less (except for native calendar clients like on the iPhone). If you’ve tried to import a calendar by URL to GCal from, say, Springpad, you will know GCal doesn’t act instantaneously when changes are made.

Thus, in my search for alternative calendar/task list applications, I’ve found two, Coolendar and 1Calendar, that seem to focus a bit more on this integration. Hit the jump to find out more about these two applications.

Coolendar

Besides looking very coolly designed, Coolendar accepts calendar/task entries in plain English, as long as you type the due date or time first, and then the event or task. All undated entries can be sorted in a specific order of your preference, and the ones that have due dates will be listed chronologically in the main list and in the appropriate tabs of either today, tomorrow or this week. Notice that there’s no matrix-like grid for month view. If ordering undated entries according to your own order isn’t enough, you can prioritize tasks by clicking on the red circle to the left of the entry.

That’s where Coolendar distinguishes itself from Google Tasks. The latter displays tasks in either your order or by due date. On the other hand, Coolendar lets you have both, but also lets you view tasks that are due today, tomorrow or this week, which means that if you’re on the iPhone or iPod Touch, you don’t need two separate GCal and GTasks apps. One (the official Coolendar iPhone app) will do.

Since Coolendar has a different philosophy on task or event duration and recurrence, it doesn’t have options to specify these two details. Coolendar believes that you can decide when you get reminded via SMS or Twitter about whether or not you need to reschedule the event for next time. In regards to event duration, Coolendar considers this a poison concept that simply doesn’t work. In these two aspects, Coolendar does work like Google Tasks.

If you want a simple, all-in-one solution to bring together your calendar and your task list, check out Coolendar. All you need to try the service is to sign in with your Google Account as there’s no registration procedure. If you’ve decided that Coolendar totally suits your needs, be sure to download the free iPhone/iPod Touch app. Coolendar developers promise that the Android app is nearing completion, but if you’re still impatient, check out the mobile Coolendar web interface at http://m.coolendar.com/.

1Calendar

1Calendar will look similar to the GCal desktop interface as the former contains a matrix-like grid for a weekly view of events in the center of the application, while to its left lies a sidebar of calendars in different colors.

On the right of the application, you’ll be able to create new tasks, as well as see previously added tasks in all their color-coded glory.

1Calendar differs from GCal in that it can sync Facebook events, as well import timetables from high schools and universities, though there are, of course, plenty of schools that need to get added.

1Calendar’s development seems to still be in its infancy, but its iPhone app (and the Android app probably, too) at least offers an event list view, which I wish most free GTD or task list apps could have.

Though the iPhone app looks simple, this setup is much cleaner and does not involve poking around two different, separate apps, namely the native Calendar app and either Notes or third-party to-do list app.

	Google Calendar	Google Tasks	Coolendar	1Calendar
Month view	Yes	No	List view	Week view
Prioritize tasks	No	Manual	Yes	No
Tag entries	No	No	Yes	No
Entry recurrence	Yes	No	No	Yes
Entry duration	Yes	No	No	Yes
Custom entry order	No	Yes	Yes	No
Alerts	SMS, email, browser notification	No	GTalk, email	Limited to subscribed schools

Overall, these two apps, though still young, are refreshing alternatives to sometimes frustrating to-do list apps that lack integration with calendars.

Do you prefer to have separate apps to view your calendar and tasks, or do you wish to see more integration between your favorite calendar/task list apps? Let us know in the comments also if you know of other similar apps.

Image credit: rdragan79

Integrate Google Calendar Into Your Chrome Browser With Checker Plus

Ryan Dube — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:31:55 +0000

There are a lot of calendars and to-do apps out there, and to be honest, I think I’ve tried almost every one of them. The one difficulty that I’ve always had is that I don’t like the need to either open an application or to visit a website to check my calendar. In my opinion, any calendar system should be fully integrated into your normal Internet use, and it should be available at a quick glance.

When I think of any online calendar system, I definitely stuck with Google Calendar the longest. The reason is that it offers just about everything you’d need in a personal scheduling system – a to-do list, easy event and appointment creation and access via either a desktop app or the website. Google Calendar is even accessible from Google Mail, or other email clients like Outlook or Thunderbird.

After a while, I always tend to stop using my calendar because I’m usually too busy to check it! Well if you’re like me, then you’ll be glad to learn about a useful Google Calendar checker plugin for Chrome that brings your calendar right to your fingertips as you browse the net.

Installing Google Calendar Checker Plus

When you first install the Chrome plugin, you’ll initially see the options screen. Go through these carefully, because there are a lot of very cool features that you can enable on the screen. For examples, you can enable “voice activation”, which will alert you when an event or appointment is impending with an audio voice. This is pretty cool if you want to be able to step away from your computer but don’t want to miss any calendar notifications.

Once it’s installed, the plugin will insert a small calendar icon next to the location field of your browser. If you’re not logged in yet, left click on the icon and select “Sign In” to log into the Google account where your calendar is stored.

Once you’re logged in, all you have to do to get a quick glimpse of your Calendar overview for today and tomorrow is to hover your mouse over the icon. You’ll see a small pop-up listing all events for those two days. It doesn’t get much more convenient than that!

If you want to see a full-blown version of your calendar, just left click on the icon. When you do, your entire calendar opens in a pop-up box right inside your browser. Unlike so many other widgets or plugins out there that integrate you with Google Calendar, this one doesn’t just send you off to the Calendar site, it actually gives you nearly full access to your Calendar right inside the browser.

Want to change to weekly view, or view your agenda for the day? Just click on the View drop-down box and choose how you would like the integrated calendar to display.

Another nice feature is if you want to view appointment details, you still don’t have to go to the actual Calendar website. Everything is available right inside the add-on. Just click on a Calendar item, and the appointment details will pop up on top of the calendar. If you click “more details>>“, only then will Google Calendar open in a new tab to the details for that event or appointment.

You can also add new appointments by either quickly entering it into the “Quick Add” field at the top of the calendar, or you can click on any day of the month and a pop-up will appear where you can type in the event details. This means that even if you’re in the middle of browsing through Google results or reading an article, within just a couple of clicks this plug-in lets you add an event to your Calendar without even leaving the website that you’re on.

There are a few additional little perks with this Chrome add-on as well. You’ll notice that today and the next several days have a little icon of the weather on the upper left corner of the month display. If you click on this icon, you can see a quick 3-day forecast of the weather – which certainly helps when you’re planning out those trips and adding your appointments and activities to the calendar!

When you click on the “View” dropdown and choose “Customize” from the menu, you’ll be brought to the part of the Options page where you can customize your Calendar display using HTML code. Using this feature, you can modify the hight, width, colors and a lot of other display features for your pop-up calendar. Click on the “Calendar Helper” to come up with the code that will do what you want.

As you can see, Calendar Checker Plus is a pretty versatile add-on to Chrome that will pretty much wipe out any need to visit the Google Calendar page itself! From now on you can just glide your mouse up to the Checker icon in your browser, and in seconds have full access to your calendar and to all of your appointments.

Do you use Calendar Checker? Which features do you find useful, and what do you think is missing? Try it out and share your thoughts in the comments section below!

Image Credit: uwbobio