March 2008 Blog Posts

yaTimer Documentation

I’m working on updating the yaTimer documentation, the first part of the documentation is scheduled to be available on the second week of April. You can find the page with short descriptions of the buttons on the main yaTimer window here I'll be happy to answer any questions you have about yaTimer you can contact me using the contact form or by leaving a comment on this blog. If you have any suggestions for the documentation or areas of the software that need clarifications please contact me or leave a comment on this post. UPDATE: I will release a new version of yaTimer late...

Usability of the ToolBar

The first version of yaTimer had just one button in the toolbar, the version after that had 4, the latest version has five and the next version will add two or three more for a total of seven or eight. While eight toolbar buttons are still much less then what you’ll find in most applications yaTimer is designed to be able to run in a very small window – and there is just not enough space for 8 buttons in a small window. I can think of four simple ways to deal with this problem: The first is to never add toolbar buttons,...

Productivity Tip – Get More Done By Doing Less

Our long term goal in becoming more productive is rarely to just get more done, it may be to finish a project quickly so we can work on other things or it may be to have more free time, the important thing to remember is that being more productive is not our goal – it’s a means to an end. Remembering that productivity or efficiency is a tool and not a goal is important, productivity methodologies almost always concentrate on doing things quickly, they almost never talk about considering if things are worth doing at all. For example, let’s say we have...

Browser-shots

If you do any web development this service has to be in your bookmarks. You type in the Url of a web site and you get images of how it renders in a variety of operating systems and browsers. http://browsershots.org/

Productivity Tip – What To Do When You Have a Mental Block

We all have those days, we have something we need to do but we just can't get ourselves to do it. We start working and find ourselves surfing the net, reading blogs, visiting discussion boards, having an instant messenger chat or cleaning our office, anything except the actual job we have to do. It happens to all of us and there are ways to beat this and regain our productivity. The first and easiest is to do something else, if you have different types of work to do maybe you can do something different right now and return to the original task later,...

Free PDF Print Driver

CutePDF writer is a free utility that let you "print" to PDF. It's really simple, it install a virtual printer and when you use that printer it saves the results to a PDF file. you can get it at: http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp Don't forget to download and install the free conveter. It's a good solution if you want to create PDF files from any application, like my own yaTimer.

Productivity Tip – Set Meeting's Agenda – And Stick to It

The first step in turning meetings from huge time wasters into something even approaching productivity is having an agenda for every meeting. Just writing the agenda is an improvement, you can't write an agenda for a meeting about nothing and sometimes, it may be obvious from the agenda that the meeting is unnecessary. There are just four simple rules to follow: Every meeting MUST have an agenda. To say that it's ok for some meeting to not have an agenda is the same as saying it's ok for some meeting to be a giant waste of...