Hasta La Ideas

Keeping track of how you spend your time is a necessity when you’re billing segments of your workday to multiple clients, but it’s also valuable for determining your efficiency and productivity. Lifehacker recently reviewed and rated the Five Best Time-Tracking Applications and awarded Klok (free and usable on all platforms) as the top application:

Built with Adobe AIR, Klok is a lightweight and cross-platform tracking solution. You can create a hierarchy of projects and sub-projects in the task-management sidebar and then track the time spent on each by dragging and dropping them into the workflow for the day. While you can delve into the details of each block of time, simple adjustments like expanding the amount of time you’ve worked on a project is as easy as grabbing the edge of the block with your mouse and tugging it down.

Also on their list are Manic Time (Windows), SlimTimer (web-based), RescueTime (Windows and Mac), and Project Hamster (Linux). All five of the applications mentioned in the article are free to access or download.

If you haven’t tracked your time before, I recommend keeping records for at least two weeks to see how you spend your time. The data you will acquire will give you insight into your most productive hours of the day, your low-performance times, when people tend to interrupt you, and how much time you waste during an average day. Then, you can start to tweak your work habits to get the most out of your time in the office.

The October issue of Real Simple magazine quotes a Microsoft and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign study that claims it takes 17 minutes “for a worker interrupted by e-mail to get back to what she was doing.”

If this statistic is true, and I know from experience that there is a refractory time after any distraction, it is strong evidence against leaving the notification alert active on your e-mail program. Instead, you should schedule time in your day to check your e-mail. Based on the type of office environment you work in, you might need to check your e-mail at the top of every hour. However, most people can get by only checking their e-mail two to four times during the work day.

I also recommend checking e-mail during the times when you are usually distracted during the day. Whether this is when others tend to interrupt you or when your mind typically wanders on its own, it’s best not to try to do high-functioning activities when you plan to work through your e-mail inbox. For me, this is right after lunch when I find it difficult to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. I check e-mail, return phone calls, and do a little bit of filing.

Try turning off the notification alert on your e-mail system and only checking e-mail on a schedule and see if it improves your productivity. If the interruption refractory period really is 17 minutes, you should immediately notice significant gains in your focus.

Un nouveau concept pour Toshiba, par le designer chinois Siwei Liu âgé de 22 ans. Un téléphone destiné aux non-voyants : il ne possède pas d’écran tactile mais simplement des touches en reliefs pour une meilleur accessibilité. Un clavier en braille qui contraste avec les mobiles traditionnels.

Previously on Fubiz

• Orefon Phone
• Window Phone
• Clown Portraits

Images: Top – Susan Murtaugh, Bottom – Andrew Meehan

There’s an app for that: finding a taco stand, playing Frere Jacques on the pan flute, figuring how much to tip, making fart sounds… As the iPhone App Store climbs towards the 100,000 offering mark, we occasionally sigh and wonder when something genuinely useful to professional designers will appear. As of 9am EST tomorrow morning, that may finally be answered, with Autodesk’s release of Sketchboook Mobile, the handheld counterpart to their “worth buying a Wacom for it” Sketchbook Pro design sketching software. The interface for SB Mobile is more than a little reminiscent of its bigger, older counterpart, featuring a simplified marking menu for tool selection, and a similar set of icons and workflows.

A quick browse through the App Store turns up plenty of drawing utilities, so there’s nothing momentous about adding one more. The most famous so far is Brushes, which gained notoriety in June when Jorge Colombo used it to create a cover for the New Yorker, spurring its sales, and spawning an evocative series of short videos depicting the stroke-by-stroke construction of various NYC scenes on Jorge’s touchscreen.

Compelling as they are, though, these videos highlight one of Brushes’ (and pretty much every other drawings app’s) main shortcomings as a serious design tool: poor layer control. Each image is constructed in a rigorous back-to-front order, and while that’s fine and familiar to artists used to acrylics and oil paints, it’s excruciating for the Photoshop and Corel proficient. The latest Brushes release does offer layers — four of them — but the interface is clunky and childish, and few users seem to employ them. While still limited, SB Mobile offers six layers which can be re-ordered with an elegant Photoshop-meets-Apple kind of interface, as well as some other features familiar to design professionals: customizable brushes, sample-based color selection, multiple undos, and sketch symmetry.

Image: Rae Morris — Seriously, you did that on an iPhone?

Image: Sidney Cheang

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