| February 26th, 2008
The Internet is a great boon to small business productivity efforts, but it is also a distraction. The Internet leaks as much of our time, if not more, than television. This distraction negatively affects small businesses who track their time and charge by the hour, meaning they lose money to procrastination and decrease their free […]
| February 25th, 2008
Estimating and tracking time is a learned discipline that does not come easy to most, including ourselves. One practice we found useful was to implement a ’round up’ feature in Intervals, to round up our timers to the nearest one-eighth (.125) of an hour. Why one-eighth? Because it’s a nice, neat number and is usually […]
| February 21st, 2008
I was fortunate to have studied graphic design at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, where I was educated and trained in several areas of design. I spent quarters at a time devoted solely to the disciplines of typography, editorial design, package design, and logo design. The experience was thorough, but it wasn’t complete. When I […]
| February 6th, 2008
Every monday morning we pile into Michael’s Volkswagen Vanagon and head across town to the Beachbreak Cafe for our weekly meeting. After a round of coffee and chilaquiles, we get down to business. The first thing we do as a team is evaluate the previous week using the Intervals Crosschart report. The axis can be […]
| February 5th, 2008
Time tracking is a common dilemma for most small businesses that bill hourly for their time, or who need to account for employee time. One popular solution is to track time on paper timesheets. While this practice certainly does get people to track their time, it doesn’t do much more than that. At Pelago, we […]
| January 31st, 2008
When we track our time accurately and efficiently, we establish a wealth of data for analyzing past efforts and estimating forward. But we need a way to visualize this data to gain any insight from it. Tracking our time in a web-based project management application like Intervals gives us a distinct advantage in this area. […]
| January 30th, 2008
In a previous post, I concluded that working on fewer projects per day is ideal. On most days, this idealistic goal isn’t much of a reality. The workday is full of interruptions. We built multiple timers into Intervals because we need — as do many other small businesses like us — a way to account […]
| January 28th, 2008
One of the more advanced and abstract features of Intervals is it’s ability to group time into modules. These can be thought of as buckets, or classifications, of time. They make more sense when addressed from the perspective of a project manager, who needs to track a project in terms of phases, or break a […]
