Using Hours Within a Workday

Quick reference

• 00:04 Hello everyone, and welcome back to Essential Productivity.
• 00:08 My name's Francesco, and in this feature,
• 00:10 we're going to be talking about how you can optimize your time using Hours.
• 00:14 And as I explained in the previous one, ours can be used to tally clients, and
• 00:18 information like that.
• 00:19 And as you can see, you can start timers quite easily across your day,
• 00:22 just by a simple tap at the button, you could stop them quite easily too,
• 00:25 which is very beneficial.
• 00:27 In this feature, we're really gonna discuss how you can go a bit more granular
• 00:31 with time, and clients, and also tasks that you can associate around Hours.
• 00:37 The iOS app is quite limited in the extent of,
• 00:41 you don't get as many reports as you do on the web version.
• 00:44 However, for the freemium experience, it is very good, and
• 00:47 it's something that I recommend starting off with.
• 00:49 What we're gonna do is start a new timer.
• 00:51 You could start a new timer at the bottom, it's very simple to do.
• 00:54 You can associate it to an existing project, so for example,
• 00:57 if you see another client, and you want to work with, but in this case, I want to add
• 01:02 it to a new one, so we're gonna call it Go Skills Essential Productivity,
• 01:10 you can actually create this new project.
• 01:12 Once you create the new project, you get the offering to associate it to a client.
• 01:16 Well, I have three clients here.
• 01:17 If I click GoSkills, it will associate it with that, so
• 01:20 it's a project within the client, which is very beneficial.
• 01:23 You can choose a host of colors to go with it, I'm gonna go with green, but
• 01:27 there's obviously a few more there.
• 01:30 I think there's a total of 16 colors there which is very helpful.
• 01:32 Once you've chosen the color you like, hit Save,
• 01:34 and all you have to do is go back to this menu.
• 01:38 As you can see, you can hit Switch project,
• 01:40 which will actually change the information to it, if you like.
• 01:44 You can choose the task that are optional, too.
• 01:46 Say for example, if you want a specific task with it,
• 01:50 let's say I spend a lot of time content creating, so Video creation.
• 01:56 And I want to log that.
• 01:58 So as you can see, it's associated to that task.
• 02:00 You can restore other timers.
• 02:02 So other timers I've created in the past, that might be beneficial.
• 02:05 Ones I've had is the likes of meditation/sleep, which I'll explain in a minute.
• 02:09 And I've clicked Add.
• 02:11 As you can see, it should appear up at the top.
• 02:13 There we are, in the green.
• 02:14 So if I want to log any specific activities based on that,
• 02:17 all I have to do is hit that timer.
• 02:19 When it comes to using it in your daily routine,
• 02:21 there's obviously a host of different ways you can use it.
• 02:24 I had a few here, I had fitness, family friends,
• 02:28 university, YouTube, freelance writing, and then all the other clients as well, so
• 02:32 I've actually made it not just for work necessarily, but for other existing stuff.
• 02:37 Imagine if I woke up at 6:30, and spent a bit of time with family and
• 02:41 friends, is obviously not much need in doing this.
• 02:44 However, if you want to really audit the time you spend doing work and
• 02:49 on work, over the week, it can be very beneficial.
• 02:52 So for example, what we would be doing in the exercise is really covering
• 02:56 auditing your time, so being able to audit.
• 02:58 This is an interesting concept.
• 03:00 As you can see on here, we have a timeline.
• 03:02 Once you do this for a week, you'll have a better picture of how you spend your time.
• 03:08 Now that's very beneficial, because what you can do with that, is build up this big
• 03:11 picture of actually what you spend your time on, and how you spend your time on.
• 03:15 And that can be very beneficial to making certain decisions.
• 03:18 So for example, if I finish my auditing of my week, I have a big review, and
• 03:23 I go, my God, I spent a lot of time on e-mail.
• 03:25 Is there a way that I can decrease the amount of time I spend on e-mail,
• 03:28 and increase the amount of time I spend on family and friends.
• 03:32 Or, I spent a lot of time on a certain client, and I over-spend the time
• 03:36 that I work with them, which can be a case in certain situations.
• 03:40 You might necessarily be doing certain little items or things across your day
• 03:43 that you don't actually notice that add up, and you could be spending
• 03:46 way too much time with a certain client that you're not being paid for.
• 03:50 So this way, you can audit yourself, and actually become a way for
• 03:54 your to improve and correlate your time associated to money.
• 03:58 So there are a couple of other features and settings that can be beneficial.
• 04:02 The one thing I'd recommend is setting a reminder, you can set reminder based on
• 04:06 work days, for example, I have start my calendar by 1 o'clock, and it remind you,
• 04:10 and it's running over an hour, and I haven't set my timer, and I have not been
• 04:14 tracking for one hour, this way, you can get certain reminders based on stuff.
• 04:18 And that's quite cool, because if you just wanna make sure that you get reminders
• 04:23 on stuff, that's really beneficial, it's like a little nudge for yourself.
• 04:27 There's also hints here as well, so if you want to learn more about hints.
• 04:30 Snapping, ramming up, which is quite cool if your record time is eight minutes,
• 04:35 for example, it will round up to 15 as a way to report in a more effective style.
• 04:40 You can actually link it to FreshBooks, which is quite cool.
• 04:42 Say for example, if you want to associate it to time based on the client,
• 04:46 based on how much you charge per hour, so
• 04:48 you can actually associate that to all of the activities.
• 04:51 This is a beneficial thing for your day, what I recommend doing
• 04:54 is actually trying a whole day auditing, and then a whole week auditing your time.
• 04:59 Then you 'll get a better picture of how you spend your time, and
• 05:02 you'll be able to see granularly how you can improve that.
• 05:05 I hope you enjoyed this feature.
• 05:07 Let me know if you have any questions.
• 05:09 However, there will be exercises to cover more of this in greater detail.
• 05:13 Thank you very much.
• 05:13 Looking forward to next feature, and I'll see you in the next segments.
• 05:17 Cheers!

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.