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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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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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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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Burned Out? Improve Your Work-Life Balance with Timing
Can something as simple as a time tracking application on your desktop change your mental, physical, and emotional health and well-being? Used creatively, yes! Here, we show you how.
If you were born in the 80s or 90s, you’re a millennial. And if you’re a millennial, then you’re probably stressed. It is official — we are the most stressed generation. This time of year doesn’t help either: The days are much shorter, meaning that by the time you look up from your laptop it’s dark, and the holiday season is approaching, pushing up your deadlines so you can take time off to be with your family. Don’t even get me started on the stress of being around your family, buying gifts, preparing for everything! By the time January comes, you need a holiday — but unfortunately, January is the worst month for mental health, so no chance of that, either…
If you’re feeling tired just reading this, then you’re definitely at least one step too close to burning out. It’s time to put off making excuses, and start looking after yourself by recalibrating your work-life balance. Using Timing, we’re going to show you exactly how you can do this. After all, without your health you have nothing — so why use a time-tracking tool that doesn’t help you stay in the best health possible, to do your best work possible?
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Track your writing time with Ulysses and Timing — your chance to win a Ulysses subscription!
Do you write? Whether you’re a professional writer or just enjoy writing as a hobby in your spare time — if you write a lot, you should have a look at Ulysses, the writing app for Mac, iPhone and iPad.
The app is popular among freelance writers, bloggers and novelists alike and has even been awarded with an Apple Design Award in 2016!
And with Ulysses 12 and Timing 2.2.1, we joined forces with the Ulysses team for much tighter integration between the apps, allowing for detailed tracking of your writing time.
Read on for more details on Ulysses and the integration, as well as the chance to win one of five one-year subscriptions for Ulysses!
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How to accept payments for your digital products — without losing your mind about taxes
In the latest episode of Core
Intuition,
Daniel Jalkut talks about switching from PayPal to Stripe as the payment method
for his Mac app MarsEdit. This sparked a
discussion on the corresponding Slack team about the
pros and cons of different ways to handle selling your digital products.European VAT rules, accounting and other distractions make this harder than you
think!In this article, I will outline the common payment options for digital products
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and their individual advantages and disadvantages. This is from the
perspective of a Mac developer, but apart from the licensing aspect,
it applies to all other digital products as well, including SaaS subscriptions
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What we learned evolving an App through 20 (!) Alphas and 10 Betas
One month ago (on May 9th, 2017), Timing
2
was released. Time for some navel-gazing!More seriously, development started in April 2016 and the app’s interface
changed quite a bit over the course of those 13 months:
This article illustrates how an app’s UI evolves during development, and
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highlights some subtle but important changes.
