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How to Structure Your Day Using Time Tracking Techniques
Want to be more productive, have a better work-life balance, and reduce your stress levels? You need to start structuring your day.
Getting real structure into your day, and sticking to it, isn’t something that comes easily. At least, not for most people out there. Without a doubt, though, structure is something we need more of. From entrepreneurs to studies in childhood development, we know the importance of self-discipline when it comes to delayed gratification. Without structured time management, hitting goals in our personal and professional lives can be near-impossible, something we looked at in more detail in our recent article on effective goal setting.
If you’ve read that article already, you’ll know that it finished with some actionable tasks regarding why you want to time track, and what you hope to achieve from it. Now we’re going to talk about ways you can structure your day. Not one for long blocks of time? Need lots of play? Focus better when you’re tackling something large? Don’t worry, this isn’t a cookie-cutter plan for you to follow; it’s a way to create structure for your day in a way that is effective for who you are.
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Protect Your Privacy Online: a Complete Guide to Apps and Best Practices
Billions of dollars are being stolen each year, so how do you protect yourself against the threats to your online security?
We live in a time with more awareness, more techniques, and more tools for staying safe online than ever before. Yet last year in 2017, there were 16.7 million victims of identity fraud in the U.S. alone, according to a study by Javelin Security. That’s 1.3 million victims more than in 2016, and amounts to $16.8 billion dollars being stolen — an average of around $1000 dollars per person. Most of the time, fraud costs you a couple of dollars, amounts that the fraudulent companies think consumers won’t notice or check. At worst, you could find your accounts completely maxed out before you have time to retaliate. As if this isn’t bad enough, everyone is gathering data on us through ads, trackers, cookies. Our footsteps across the web are emblazoned clearly, for all companies to see.
We’re living in the most complex era for fraud and privacy prevention, and the technological advances constantly taking place around us are only increasing this complexity. The question is, how do we protect ourselves from trackers, hackers, and those collecting data? This month at Timing we’ve been focusing on privacy, starting with our article specifically about time tracking apps and privacy. We’re kicking it up a notch this comprehensive guide to protecting your data when using the internet. With the minefield of misinformation out there, this guide aims to simplify things and bring you only the facts.
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Time Tracking Apps & Privacy Concerns — How Can I Safely Track My Time?
Big Brother is watching you. Or at least your employer, your clients, and countless strangers on the Internet are watching you. In 2018, no part of our lives seems to be private anymore — but at least there are attempts being made to regain our ‘right to be forgotten’. We’re three months away from the EU imposing their new data protection regulations, which means the spotlight is on what’s being done with our information. It’s a law which seems to be being treated alarmingly calmly by the majority of organizations, two-thirds of which reportedly aren’t prepared. Essentially, companies need to take better care of consumer information — or risk facing colossal fines.
This is the first of two articles we’re publishing this month focusing on data protection and online privacy. If you’re concerned about time tracking apps tracking your personal information — not to mention Internet activity — we’re going to answer some of those questions. We’ll also tell you how (and why) to protect what you want to remain private. Because detail about what you’ve been doing is great… until it’s detail you don’t want, or simply too much. Whether you’re an employee using time tracking software, or a freelancer invoicing your clients, it’s your right to know where your information is going.
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Mac Productivity Tools To Fall in Love With This Valentine’s (2018 Edition) — Exclusive Discounts Inside!
Want a little more romance in your life? It’s time to fall in love… with making your life more efficient this February.
It’s nearly Valentine’s Day! If you don’t have big plans involving string quartets, chocolates, and candlelit dinners, that’s no reason to take all the romance out of your month. We believe that love can be everywhere this holiday, whether it’s in the eyes of your sweetheart across the table… or the attractive code of a piece of software you’re using to streamline your life. Yes, you read that right — it’s time to fall in love with some new Mac Apps!
We don’t suggest you fall for just any Mac Apps, though. Just because it’s Valentine’s Day, no need to become a floozy about your app choices. We’ve compiled the best Mac Productivity tools which will make your life easier and more efficient. And why limit yourself to only falling in love once? There are so many great tools for simplifying your life, you can fall in love over and over and over again.
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Track Your Time Down to the Second — Mac Apps to Use With Timing
Ever wondered if Timing can tell you not only which app you were using, but also what you were doing with it? Well, Timing’s pretty nifty at integrating itself with your work — here’s how.
Imagine a world where you can tell exactly what you’ve been using your time for… down to the very second. How long did writing that email take? Did you procrastinate much on Facebook? Have you spent enough time working on all your projects? Sounds pretty efficient, right? The good news is, it’s not just something you have to imagine — or even go out of your way to achieve. From documents to communication tools, if you’re using Timing, then you could (and should) be tracking the minutiae of your day.
In fact, Timing can track most apps that conform to macOS standards, meaning that there’s no setup or manual integrations for you. We’re going to run through the most common Timing-supported apps you might find yourself using, as well as some little tips and tricks to make using them even more efficient and seamless. For all these apps, Timing can track exactly what you have been doing, which makes it even easier for you to review your day and create adequate automation rules.
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Use the Snippets Technique with Timing to Stay on Top of Your Work
Silicon Valley, the birthplace of Apple, Google, and Facebook, is a living legend thanks to the controversial stories that it has spawned. It’s now a well-established fact that Silicon Valley has spread far beyond the San Francisco bay to change the way we work. In some ways for the better and some for the worse… (cough misogynism in tech cough glorifying overworking cough).
The fact remains, however, that Silicon Valley has been able to churn out companies that operate on a worldwide scale time and time again, which quickly become household names. So what’s the magic formula, and how can you get some? Well, it won’t turn you into Bill Gates overnight, but Snippeting is a good place to start. Let’s look at what it is, and how to effortlessly integrate the practice into your work week. Doing so will increase your productivity and help you establish what high-level tasks you accomplished, versus where you procrastinated or lost time.
What are Snippets?
If you haven’t already heard of Google Snippeting, the technique developed by Larry Schwimmer during Google’s growth phase, then it’s time you pull up a chair and learn about it. The simple but extremely effective habit of reflecting on your day or week has been called ‘snippeting,’ Snippets are short, weekly “micro-reports” where you fill in all the things you worked on and accomplished during this past week. This lets you instantly reflect on what you’ve been working on, making it much easier to answer the question “What the heck did I spend all that time on?”
Come Friday, you simply write down all the things you did that week (that is, if you still remember them). If you are like us and have already forgotten half of these by then, that’s where Timing can help (more on that below). Whether you’re a hobbyist in the spare bedroom, a small business owner, or building a medium size company, you can use Timing and snippets to make yourself and your team more productive, more accountable, and generally just better.
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7 Hacks to Turbocharge Your Productivity
Feeling like time is slipping through your fingers, with no real concept of where it’s gone? It sounds like you’re in need of our productivity hacks. It’s time to take back control!
At the end of 2017, we wrote an article on how to make 2018 your most productive year yet. If you haven’t read it yet and printed out the PDF for your wall, then go and do that now — we’re not even halfway through January, so there’s still time to set yourself some New Year’s resolutions. If you did read it and you set yourself New Year’s resolutions about timekeeping, how’s that going?
Like many people, after the first week and the initial motivation has passed, you’re probably starting to falter on those things that you were “definitely, really going to do this year, honest.” So we thought we’d give you a little help and motivation by putting together this piece on hacks to make yourself the Terminator of productivity: an unstoppable machine who is going to dominate 2018 and make it yours.
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10 Resolutions to Make 2018 Your Most Productive Year Yet
Think that New Year’s resolutions are as passé as 2016’s software upgrades? That doesn’t mean that almost half of all Americans aren’t still making them. Of course that doesn’t mean they’re all keeping them, either, but resolutions can be a great chance to think about what you’d like to change from the previous year and what motivations you want to drive you this coming year. At Timing, we’ve been thinking about how we can be more productive — while also having lower stress levels and being happier, of course. We’ve put together these ten resolutions which we think will help make 2018 your most productive year yet.
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The Complete Guide to Mac Bookkeeping Tools
If you’ve just made the leap from employment to freelancing or small-business ownership, or even if you’ve been doing it a while now, you’ve probably discovered the massive drain of keeping your accounts in order. It was all so simple when a different department was in charge, wasn’t it? Suddenly invoicing, payroll, tracking tax payments, and listing expenses seems to be taking up all the time you should be spending running your business.
Timing is all about saving you time; it’s what we live and breathe for — so you’re in luck. We’ve put together a complete guide to Mac Bookkeeping Tools for small and medium businesses. So if you’re finding that when you review your day a large chunk of your time is going into your accounts, we’re about to save you from that. We’ve mainly focused on cloud-based accounting software — the benefit of which is that it’s accessible from anywhere and on any device, and you need to worry less about keeping that data backed up. Small business accounting software which isn’t in the cloud can suck up too much time and money. Imagine billing yourself at your hourly rate for your accounts. Is it worth it?
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Starting Out as a Freelancer? Here Are the 5 Steps You Need to Do Now
You just quit your job! Congratulations, and welcome to the freelancer club. Before you put on your pajamas and enjoy trashy TV, though, you need to set yourself up for success.
Fear. Excitement. More fear. A desire to eat a lot of carbs. The emotions you’re feeling if you’ve just handed in your notice are complex ones. And tempting though it might be, now isn’t the time to sit back and relax. Self-employment, small business ownership, or freelancing isn’t as simple as putting an ad in the paper and watching the money come in. Done right, freelancers are significantly happier. Done wrong, freelancing can burn you out, burn out your bank account, or both.
How do you avoid that, and make the learning process of becoming your own boss as easy as possible? Here are the first five steps you need to take. Not tomorrow, or next week, but now. Which brings us directly to the first point.
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