June 2009 Blog Posts

Productivity Tip: Talk with Your Customer

It’s easy to work hard and create something nobody wants - I don’t consider this a productive use of your time, while technically you are producing something you can get nearly the same effect by doing nothing, that is why it’s important to talk with your clients or customers. You have to talk to your customers directly, don’t settle for documents (requests, specification and such) or experts that explain what the customer wants – and you have to ask questions and find the motivation behind what the customer is asking for. The customer doesn’t know what you can...

Blog Design Updated

I’ve upgraded the blog software and updated the blog design, on first glance the new design may look almost the same as the old design just with a smaller page header like the rest of the site but actually the new design has some bigger changes. First, if you are reading this on the web (as opposed to an RSS reader) you probably see the big box at the top telling you who I am and inviting you to subscribe to the RSS feed and follow me on twitter – this box will only appear the first 5 times...

Productivity Tip: It’s Ok to Fail

Yes, it’s ok to fail, it’s ok to make mistakes and it’s ok to throw away hard work because of your mistakes – it can even make you more productive. We all learn from an early are that failure is bad and that avoiding failure is good – but that’s not always true, the hard truth is that avoiding failure isn’t productive work. It’s easy to spend more time preventing failure than it would have taken to fail in the first place, when you are going to start a new project you can plan, analyze and research all...

Make Time for Marketing

I’ve accidently found the post Launch a Business, Not a Side Project and I couldn’t agree more, it talks about web applications but it’s true for any business. Marketing (especially effective marketing) is difficult and it takes time and effort, usually a lot of time and effort – and it’s also the difference between the successful products and companies and those that are just going along barely breaking even (or failing entirely).

yaTimer 2.4 Released

I’ve just uploaded the new version of yaTimer to the server, you can download the latest version of the best time tracking program or upgrade from previous versions at the usual locations. The biggest feature in this version is the ability to synchronize with a portable copy of yaTimer, this has been the number one request ever since it’s been possible to run from a portable drive, completing this single feature has taken way longer than I planned for it, it is the reason most of the features planned for this version were delayed to the next version and also what...