NR Time for Mac OS X 10.5

It’s an awesome day, really. I just released my first product for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard — NR Time — and it’s available for trial downloads and license purchases of course.

NR Time is a tool that makes your time logging completely transparent. Period.

As a freelancer, I always needed a tool that could tell me precisely how much time did I spend working for one client or on one task and what was it for another. If nothing else, the earnings depend on this and having no convenient tool meant that I was stuck with the paper notepad where I recorded the beginning and ending times for every task.

If you ever did that, you can imagine what kind of headache coffee breaks are. You need to record the time when you go out, and then remember to jot the time of return. Finally, the calculation time comes when at the end of the day you juggle with numbers to figure what it was that you spent working today. It gives me creeps every time I think how I lived all these years.

So what does NR Time do for you, briefly:

• Let’s you enter as many tasks as you like
• Let’s you start and stop any number of them at the same time
• Updates the time for each task in real time and shows it in tenths of hour (1.1 stands for 1 hour 6 minutes and is easier to operate with hourly rate)
• Updates the total for all tasks and displays it in the status area in hours (1:06)
• Let’s you pause all running tasks by clicking on the notification area icon and resume with the same gesture
• Gives you an intuitive keyboard controls over the tasks
  • ⌅ – to enter / exit the task name edit more
  • 0-9, “.” – to start entering the time spent manually
  • SPACE – to toggle activity flag
  • ⌘ + N / ⌫ – to add / remove selected tasks

The trial version is fully functional for 15 days. If you find it useful, consider purchasing a license for only $10 (details on the product home page).

Give it a spin! It’s a very simple application solving a very simple task, but it saved me lots of silver hair. Hopefully, you will find it useful.

Productivity Tip

Today, as I was playing with ideas after a big chunk of work, one interesting thought came, and it’s worth sharing. Everybody likes when the job is simple, straightforward and easy to do. Sometimes though times come when an assignment is … well, different.

I like to shoot these tasks first and, speaking in the context of PROgramming, like to make everything possible to never get back. If it implies writing a hundred of tests, that’s fine, just never again… you hear me? It’s not that I hate what I do, it’s that I, as a living being, hate stress.

Usually, I took the rest of the day off right after dealing with a complex or mundane to refresh the mind. It worked well, but took a lot of time and had a bitter taste of excuse to skip working hours. Today I invented something different for myself.

Here the summary of points that I (and hope you) usually keep in mind when working:

• Focus on the task
• Stop watching the clock
• Keep a clear plan of attack with very small sub-tasks to cross them out as quickly as possible
• Do whatever it takes to protect yourself from getting back (comprehensive tests suite, clear design etc)
• Make a lot of comments to give you a hand if you still need to change something later

And now something new:

• When the task is over, check in the sources, run all tests, and finish anything else that attaches you to the task, and then
• Take a coffee break and detach yourself from it and the results as if somebody else did the job and you are left with an easy part (calling the module, using freshly designed database etc)
• Start (not continue) working refreshed and, possibly, give you some easy and fun tasks to get the happy feeling of great job you always did

These are all simple steps, but I know no one who would follow them. I read many standard advices, like 50 minutes of work / 10 minutes of rest that are far from a silver bullet. They sound like a quick and dirty rule for those (or by those) who don’t really want to think WHY these breaks are important and, what’s more important, what to do during them.

With this last summary I feel I got closer to a better understanding of my own brain and how it works. Now I know how to reset that anxiety and stress to continue moving on without passively waiting for the same effect first.

Hope I induced some fresh ideas and insights. Feel free to share back.

Cheers!

Get a Life, be Free!

We all make new year resolutions, and what’s tricky about it is that adding an item to the list often means becoming unhappier. How is that?

Well, the moment you start building the list you start hand-cuffing yourself. Every moment later you will be checking with your list to see if whatever you do at this very moment helps your goals or is it an awful “waste of time”. Even if it is a better thing to do, you will be sorry as it doesn’t help your own plans. Sticking to the plan is good, being flexible is better.

Enjoy the moment, be yourself!

Here’s some great inspirational read for you, entering this new 2008 year — 12 Ways to be More Free in 2007 by Pamela Slim. Yes, it’s a guide for the leaving year, but I reviewed it just now and can feel how right she is.

So enjoy your read, make the coming year better, and make it suite you best!