(Image: amriphoto / iStockphoto)

Life can get pretty complicated. You’re balancing multiple projects at work. You’ve got bills to pay. You’ve got mouths to feed. The human brain can only handle so much and that’s why it helps to turn to the world of technology. Thankfully, with thousands of apps available on the Apple iPhone, there are tons that are designed specifically to make your life a little more manageable.

These top iPhone apps may not help to clear the clutter off your desk or clear your mind before you go to bed, but at least they can keep you on track and help you remember all those things that you tend to forget. This list certainly isn’t exhaustive, but that’s the beauty of smartphone apps; there are always more to discover. After getting down with Dropbox and Evernote, you may expand your arsenal with these iPhone apps for organizing your life.

FedEx Mobile for iPhone

Price: Free (iTunes link)

Do you send and receive a lot of packages with FedEx? Do you find yourself scribbling those tracking numbers of several slips of paper, only to lose said slips among the mess of receipts and forms piling up on your desk? This iPhone app is for you. With it, you can not only check your Fedex.com address book and track shipments, you can even create a shipping label while on site helping a client.

1Password for iPhone

Price: $9.99 (iTunes link)

We all have so many different accounts on the Internet these days. The security experts tell us that we should vary our usernames and passwords, making them as complicated as possible with a combination of letters, numbers, lower-case, upper-case, special characters, and so on. The human brain can’t possibly remember all of that. With the 1Password app, you set a master password and it manages the rest in a safe and secure fashion. You can even sync it up with your Mac. This is easily one of the best iPhone apps.

Bento

Price: $4.99 (iTunes link)

A bento box is an organized way to enjoy a Japanese lunch, putting everything into neat compartments. The Bento app for iPhone does the same thing, except with everything to do with your life. This app can be used to organize contacts, plan events, track projects, and otherwise “manage things.” It comes pre-loaded with database templates that can be customized and it will integrate with other iPhone apps, allowing you to get single taps to phone contacts, viewing websites, and displaying maps.

OmniFocus for iPhone

Price: $19.99 (iTunes link)

Working in tandem with its desktop counterpart, this task management application lets you plan your projects, work in context, and organize your tasks by goals. Everything gets synchronized to the cloud via MobileMe or Omni’s free solution. Other highlights include subtasks, attachments, and “nearby contexts” that helps to plan your day’s errands by listing “contexts” that are nearby. It may not be listed among cool iPhone apps, but it could be one of the most useful.

Simplenote

Price: Free (iTunes link)

Sometimes, organizing your life just means writing it down. Sometimes, you don’t need all sorts of extra bells and whistles to complicate your already complicated life. For times like those, Simplenote does exactly what its name seems to imply: it takes simple notes. These can then be automatically synchronized back to your computer, helping you stay on top of those little tidbits of information.

Mint Personal Finance

Price: Free (iTunes link)

If you want to manage your money, Mint.com is one of the best solutions out there. The great thing is that you don’t have to be at your computer, since the Mint iPhone app gives you access to just about all the personal finance tools you normally find on the site. When it comes to free iPhone apps, this is one of the best. Take care of budgeting, expenses, online bank accounts, and more.

TripDeck

Price: Free (iTunes link)

Gone are the days when you had to have a giant portfolio of documents every time you decided to take a trip. You don’t need to print out a physical ticket. You don’t need to print out your hotel confirmation. You don’t need to print out your car rental reservation. Instead, load all that info into the TripDeck application and always have it at your fingertips. It’s a complete travel itinerary manager.

reQall

Price: Free (iTunes link)

Basically, this is a reminder app. You can save your ideas and your to-do lists and reQall will remind you when you need to do those things. It offers a voice-to-text feature too, so you don’t have to type it out if you don’t want to tap away. The personal reminder service is pretty handy too.

iThoughts

Price: $7.99 (iTunes link)

People who are a little more scatterbrained (and even those who aren’t) need a means of organizing their thoughts into something meaningful and with structure. iThoughts is a mind-mapping tool that is largely geared toward brainstorming, but it can also be used for course notes, goal setting, and so on. The various icons help to keep the mindmap more understandable and then you can export it as a PDF or PNG file for later review and revision.

Timewerks Mobile Billing

Price: $2.99 (iTunes link)

If you’re a freelancer or an independent contractor of some kind, you need to keep track of your time so you can more accurately bill your clients. I know this is a challenge I face frequently. The Timewerks app lets you track your time and materials for customer invoicing, making it crystal clear why the bill came to what it did. The app can be used to send PDF invoices and estimates too. If you want to give it a try, there’s also a “Lite” version that’s available as a free download.

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(Image: youngguns.me)

QR codes (an abbreviation of “quick response codes”) were invented in 1994 by a subsidiary of Toyota Motors. They were originally designed to track car parts during the manufacturing process, but it quickly became clear that the technology could be re-purposed for a wide variety of uses.

Despite being around for over a decade, QR codes were a fairly obscure technology until the advent of smartphones made them a fairly common part of modern life. Marketers and technologists are experimenting with all sorts of different ideas to make the most of QR code technology. Below I’ve highlighted — in no particular order — five of the best and five of the worst uses of QR code technology to date.

5 Brilliant QR Code Uses

#1: Free Sudoku Puzzles and Books in Denver International Airport – FirstBank

In Denver International Airport, you’ll find stark, simple billboards with little else except for several large QR codes. When scanned, the codes take you to free Sudoku puzzles or full versions of free books. If you’ve ever found yourself stranded in an airport due to a layover or flight cancellation, you can see the obvious potential in FirstBank’s QR campaign.

QR codes in Denver International Airport by FirstBank (Image source: kaitlyndennihy.com)

An unprepared, stranded traveler can download Treasure Island, Moby Dick or The Art of War on their mobile device, and make far better use of their time than they would otherwise. FirstBank has identified travel troubles as one of the biggest pain points for their customers, and they’ve offered these books and puzzles are part of their “helpfulness” campaign. The fact that the books are public domain — circumventing all copyright issues — makes these QR codes truly brilliant.

#2: PYOW! – The Rocket Science Group

QR codes aren’t just for large corporations anymore. Thanks to The Rocket Science Group, small business owners can email personalized QR codes for their customers for as little as….free. Using MailChimp, a popular email marketing platform, marketers can use their latest feature (which they call “PYOW!”) to send a unique QR code to each recipient.

A Business Owner Using "PYOW!" by MailChimp (image source: blog.mailchimp.com)

The QR code could offer a discount, freebie or any other kind of gift or incentive. You can even determine the number of times each code can be used. Enabling the use of QR technology for small businesses and start-ups – at literally no cost – has earned “PYOW!” recognition for brilliant use of QR codes. The (aptly-named) Rocket Scientist Group has made QR codes accessible to even the smallest organizations.

#3: Virtual Tickets – MogoTix

Despite being the industry standard, paper tickets have a lot of downsides. First, they need to be printed, often with holograms or foil stamps to prove authenticity. This ultimately raises costs for both company and customer, and it’s wasteful to put money and materials into short-lived, one-time-use items. Mogotix has invented a virtual ticketing system that is greener, cheaper and more convenient, and you’ll never guess what kind of technology they use.

A MogoTix Virtual Ticket (image source: mogotix.com)

Their tickets are essentially individualized QR codes. They don’t need to be printed, it’s very hard to lose them, and they fit the purpose with efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Plus, if you’re old-fashioned type who just has to have everything in paper form, you can always print out the virtual ticket. Just be prepared for a few smirks and chuckles at the ticket line as you neglect your smartphone to search for a crumpled piece of paper.

#4: Interactive Menu at Radisson Edwardian

Radisson Edwardian, a British hotel chain, has employed QR codes on their restaurant menus that lead to videos of the preparation of their dishes. Menus could never be as descriptive as HD video, and as a result they often leave the customer with questions like “how exactly is this prepared?” or “What does this dish look like?”

A QR Code in The Radisson Edwardian's Interactive Menu (image source: econsultancy.com)

Because picture-filled menus are considered a sign of a low-class eatery, QR codes provide the visual information while keeping the menu modern and classy. This careful accommodation of both proper menu design and technology is a brilliant combination.

#5: Content-Rich Resume by Victor Petit

While this QR code use doesn’t benefit the bottom-line of a business, it’s still a brilliantly creative use of the technology. French student Victor Petit effectively rewrites the book on “Making Your Resume Stand Out.” If this doesn’t get the attention of a hiring manager, nothing will. You have to see it to understand:

Content-Rich Resume by Victor Petit

5 Worst QR Code Blunders

#1: QR Code Scarf by Lendorff Kaywa

Lendorff Kaywa is a collaborative project between knitters from London and mobile technologists from Switzerland. The association between these two companies is strange, and their flagship product is even stranger.

QR Code Scarf by Lendorff Kaywa

It’s essentially a scarf with a large QR code knit into the tail. It’s not really clear where the QR code leads, or if you can even request a certain URL for your scarf. I guess you just buy a scarf and find out later exactly what you’re advertising on your chest. If you don’t like where your QR code leads, then you’ll probably like it even less when people chase you with a smartphone trying to get a clean read on your scarf. This is mostly fashion, very little function.

#2: New York Subway Ad by Pix 11

While this QR code attempt isn’t particularly obnoxious, it does have some fatal flaws. The small, unobtrusive code doesn’t overtake the large poster ad, but keep in mind that this poster exists underground in a New York subway tunnel.

Underground QR Code Advertisement in New York City (image source: splatf.com)

Cell phone reception is very poor at best underground. The fact that it leads to a video download – a much bigger file than a webpage or image – only compounds the problem. I’m not sure this QR code campaign was thought all the way through, and for that reason, it earns its spot among the 5 worst. (JetBlue had a similar advertisement involving QR codes several hundred feet underground.)

#3: QR Codes on Direct Mail Envelopes by Geico

I hate to pick on Geico; their advertising is better than most, and they really do offer good insurance. But, their combination of direct mail and mobile marketing is a little questionable. Geico experimented with QR codes on the outside of direct mail envelopes.

GEICO's Confusing QR Code Envelope (image source: blog.euservices.com)

Do I scan it or open it? The biggest challenge in direct mail marketing is getting the recipient to open the envelope. These QR codes are on the outside of the envelope, distracting the customer and even discouraging them from opening it.

If the customer opens the envelope, it’s a failed mobile marketing initiative.If they scan the QR code, it’s a failed direct mail campaign. It’s almost as if Geico’s mobile marketing team and their direct mail team are having some kind of contest to determine which will prevail between cutting-edge, experimental mobile marketing and tried-and-true direct mail. Whether the recipient chooses the code or the envelope, Geico ends up with wasted effort. The customer might just neglect the confusing envelope entirely, which would be doubly bad.

#4: QR Codes on Croatian License Plates by Bruketa & Zinic

Bruketa & Zinic proposed that all Croatian license plates display a QR code that leads to the Croatian Tourist Board’s website. This would supposedly promote tourism, but I’m guessing it would only promote car accidents.

QR Codes on Croatian License Plates (image source: bruketa-zinic.com)

What could be safer? You simply take one hand off of a wheel while driving, look down at your smartphone, thumb to your QR code app, and then attempt some one-handed, high-speed tailgating on the Croatian car in front of you while desperately pointing your smartphone at its license plate. If you happen to scan it, you can then browse a tourism website while you continue to drive (recklessly) on Croatia’s narrow, twisty, mountainous roads.

I’m guessing this effort to increase the amount of tourists with mobile marketing might actually decrease the amount of tourists, because they’d all be dying by rear-end collision or by accidentally driving off a Croatian cliff.

#5: QR Codes on Tombstones

I don’t mean to disrespect the dead or the mourning, but I was very surprised to learn that quite a few dead people have QR codes on their tombstones. These often lead to websites that state obituaries and information about the deceased.

QR Codes on Tombstones? (image source: abcnews.com)

This is problematic for a few reasons. First, QR codes are not exactly mainstream, and they might never be. Not every graveyard visitor has a scanning app, or even knows what a QR code is. Less tech-savvy visitors are essentially left in the dark. Second, QR codes could become just another fleeting fad. Would you want a Betamax biography to serve as your lasting impression on the planet? Or perhaps an autobiography available only on MiniDisc? QR codes may look silly in a few years, and I can’t think of anything more permanent than a tombstone. Third and most important, it involves the upkeep of a website about the deceased, which is likely left to an aging widow(er) or descendant who isn’t always a web or mobile enthusiast. They might just want closure, and updating their deceased spouse’s website to be HTML7 compatible or iPhone 8 compatible would be painful for a lot of reasons.

Conclusion

QR codes are a highly experimental technology. It’s not surprising that we’ve discovered a wide variety of good and bad ways to use them. This is a common part of any development process: We used to make denim jackets before we learned that it was best to just make jeans. Dimes used to be 90% silver before we realized that the raw metal was worth more than the dime itself. Progress is made through blunders and brilliance; let’s hope that QR Codes find their true purpose and stick around for a while.

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Ah, the Internet: the world’s greatest double-edged sword. It offers such an incredible wealth of information, but it could also lead you completely astray. And you don’t want to be led astray when it comes to something as important as proper legal advice.

While it may be true that some of the legal advice online is potentially worse than useless, much of it has done a great deal of good for people who can’t afford to have a team of lawyers at their beck and call. Thankfully, it is also possible to crowdsource your legal advice from people who are really experts in that field. There aren’t too many sites that do this, but the couple that do can really help you save in legal costs.

Whether you’re looking for some guidance when it comes to the legal specifics of your home-based business or you want some help to fight that nasty DUI charge, the Internet is there to help you.

LawPivot

Easily the biggest name in crowdsourcing your legal advice is LawPivot. You are able to post your confidential legal questions to the site and it will then identify some of the key content in your question. From there, the site uses an algorithm to match your area of interest with a lawyer from the LawPivot community, sending along your question to these qualified experts.

LawPivot

When that process is complete, you effectively receive multiple answers to your question from multiple lawyers. How you choose to proceed from that point is completely up to you, but it means that you were able to receive legal advice from actual lawyers and not coffee shop owner John Smith.

The management team at LawPivot consists of two lawyers and a software engineer. Jay Mandal was the lead mergers and acquisitions lawyer for Apple, while fellow LawPivot co-founder Nitin Gupta was an intellectual property litigation lawyer at Townsend & Townsend & Crew.

Since LawPivot is still in its early stages, it only offers a free trial to California companies and allows California lawyers to join its stable of experts. They plan on expanding to other states (and hopefully other countries) in the future, so you can sign up in the meantime to stay in the loop.

Quora

Founded in June 2009 and launched in private beta in December 2009, Quora sets out to be the best and most reliable question-and-answer website on the Internet. This might sound a lot like Answers.com and other Q&A sites, but this “online knowledge market” appears to be better at culling together the same questions so they don’t get asked multiple times in multiple ways.

Quora

Available to the public since June 2010, Quora is not at all specific to legal advice, but it can prove to be a very useful resource for people who seek to crowdsource this kind of information. It also acts as a social network of sorts, since you are able to “follow” certain people. You can also “follow” topics and these show up in your “feed” accordingly. Your feed is initially populated based on information in your Twitter or Facebook profile feeds.

Quora certainly looks and feels more powerful than other question and answer sites. If you’re looking for legal advice, just follow the legal topics.

Other Legal Advice Options

Fortunately or unfortunately, there isn’t a heck of a lot when it comes to crowdsourcing your legal advice online. I suppose this makes sense, since lawyers would likely prefer it if you came to them and paid for their services instead. Make all the lawyer jokes you want, but I guess they need to make a living too.

That said, there are some alternatives to LawPivot and Quora emerging on the web too. If you’re over in the UK, for instance, you might look into Bootlaw. They offer “free information on legal issues facing emerging technology, Internet and digital businesses.” They also host monthly events in their London office, covering business questions and their legal ramifications. And yes, that’s free too.

Do you get what you pay for? Perhaps, but having some free and crowdsourced resources can certainly help to supplement your existing legal counsel even if it may not be sufficient to replace it completely.

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(Photo: sturti / iStockphoto)

When it comes to managing your career, you likely have a lot of information to deal with. All the information on your professional training may be in one file, completely separate from the information on your references. Just locating everything you need can add an hour to any career management task or project you work on — a time sink that’s repeated with each new one you embark on (e.g., filling out an online job application or career profile, completing federal background investigation forms, etc.). The problem is that you just may not have an easy way of managing such a wide variety of raw information.

The Career Vault is a tool that can help you bring all of that information together. It provides you with a place to store a variety of information about your career, from the standard resume fodder to your plans and strategy for your future. Once you’ve added your information, keeping it up-to-date is relatively easy. It’s just a matter of adding what you’ve been up to lately: setting aside a few minutes to update the Career Vault every month or two can cut hours from the time it takes you to create new career marketing materials or bring an adviser up to speed on your background. As a communications medium, Career Vault makes it easier to outsource career-related tasks and projects to virtual assistants and career management service providers.

To make using the Career Vault as simple as possible to use, it’s divided into a series of tabs. Each tab focuses on a specific area of your career: it provides you with fields to fill in with your own career information. The tabs include the following:

Strategy and Marketing: This section helps you track your goals, personal brand, and other details related to your future career plans.

Strategy and Marketing

Contact Information: In addition to helping you put together basic contact information, this section provides a place to set out details like your availability.

Contact Info

Biodata: As some jobs require you to provide statistics like your height and weight, you can record them in the biodata section.

Biodata

Experience: While resumes only give you space for a broad description of your experience, many other career marketing materials require an in-depth description. The experience section provides you a place to create such a description. (Note: there’s room to the right to include more detailed descriptions for the company, industry, LoB, sub LoB, and group, if need be.)

Experience

Target Job: This section will help you bring together a picture of your target job, setting down the answers to questions like your desired salary.

Target Job

Education: The education section is actually the first of several sections covering training and your other educational opportunities. This section specifically covers the information about your formal education and degrees obtained.

Education

Affiliations: Your memberships and affiliations are an important part of your career information and constitute a section of their own.

Affiliations

Honors and Awards: In this section, you can record awards from an academic, professional, or other setting.

Honors and Awards

Coursework: The coursework section offers you a change to set out the specific courses you’ve taken that are relevant to your career.

Coursework

Professional Training: The professional training that you’ve received in your career has its own section.

Professional Training

Conferences: With the conferences section, you can create a comprehensive list of conferences and seminars you’ve attended.

Conferences

Skills: In this section, you can describe specific job skills as well as your personal strengths.

Skills

Knowledge: If you have specialized knowledge within your industry, you can record it in the knowledge section.

Knowledge

Talents: The talents section is not necessarily limited to your career. You can also use it to record those things that you are passionate about and have a talent for.

Talents

Capabilities: Your capabilities, or areas of specialty, can be a combination of skills, knowledge, and talent.

Capabilities

Languages: You can record any languages you speak beyond your native tongue in the languages section, along with your proficiency.

Languages

Certifications: The certification section can be used to record your professional licenses and certifications.

Certifications

Grants: If you’ve conducted academic or professional research, you can note the grants you’ve received in this section.

Grants

Publications: Any publications that you’ve created or contributed to belong in the publications section.

Publications

Presentations: If you’ve prepared and delivered any formal presentations, list them in the presentations section.

Presentations

Media Appearances: If you’ve made any media appearances — such as TV, radio, print, podcast, or online video — list them here.

Media Appearances

Testimonials: The testimonial section is for commendations of any kind, from your job performance reviews to LinkedIn “recommendations.”

Testimonials

References: Adding individuals to the references section who are willing to vouch for you can create a list you can use in a variety of career management projects.

References

Addresses: In order to ensure that you have all the addresses you reference throughout the Career Vault, you can create a list of them in the addresses section.

Addresses

Misc.: The misc. section provide a home for such information as military records, security clearances, and personal interests.

Misc.

Help Improve Career Vault

The original impetus behind Career Vault was coming up with a communication medium to make it easier to outsource career-related tasks and projects to virtual assistants and career management service providers. But it obviously serves as a useful tool for simply managing and keeping your career information up-to-date, as articulated above.

A good amount of work was put into creating the initial version of Career Vault, and hopefully that’s reflected in its utility. But more can be done to improve it in its current format. And that’s where you come in. Please, openly and freely share your feedback and thoughts on what you do and don’t like and how you think Career Vault could be improved. To get your motors running, here are some ideas that I have:

• Ideal job description
• Benefits requirements
• Job search keywords
• Metatags or descriptors

Career Vault as a Web-based Application?

Now, if it appears that there’s a lot interest in Career Vault based on your feedback and uptake, then at some point I’ll turn it into a web-based application. But before I do that, I’d like to hear your answers to the following questions:

1. Would you use Career Vault to store and manage your holistic career information?
2. Would you see a web-based version of Career Vault as a solution to the problem of managing your disparate career information, or merely as a contributor to the problem — “yet one more site to enter and maintain my information?” (It’s supposed to be the solution.)
3. Would the site have to be integrated with popular tools like Monster, LinkedIn, and VisualCV to be most useful to you, or would you be delighted to have it serve as your own personal standalone career lockbox where you and you alone held the keys?

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Thursday Bram contributed to this post.

(Photo: claudiodivizia / iStockphoto)

When you’re looking to outsource a writing project to a freelancer, it isn’t just a matter of posting a classified ad and browsing through a stack of resumes. It takes consideration to find a writer who can take on your project, in terms of skill, knowledge, and style — but when you put forth the effort, you can find a writer who can complete a project you’ll be proud of.

The Creative Brief

The first step you can take towards finding the right freelancer for your project is developing a creative brief. A brief is a description of the project you have in mind: the format, the length, the due date. Any information that you can add to clearly describe what the project entails belongs in the brief, including topics you expect the writer to cover and special sources of information you want to use. You don’t need to include information about your budget in a creative brief, although most writers are going to want to talk price immediately after seeing your brief. It’s a good idea to put together your budget for a project at the same time you develop your creative brief.

You can also leave out descriptions of your ideal writer from your creative brief. While you may have a specific idea of how much experience a writer should have, the fact of the matter is that years of freelance experience is rarely a good indicator of skill. Your creative brief should focus on sharing the concept of what you want your final project to look like. If, for instance, you want a blogger who can help you write content for your site, your creative brief should reflect the length of posts you want, topics, the general approach or slant you want a writer to use, and any other information that can help you describe a project.

A creative brief serves more than one function. First and foremost, it can serve as an advertisement to help you find prospects. You can post your creative brief on craigslist.org, Freelance Writing Jobs, and thousands of other sites to solicit responses from prospective writers. You’ll want to add just a little bit of information to your brief, of course: requesting writing samples and mentioning a general budget can limit the number of responses somewhat. Equally important, though, is that a creative brief can help you speed up your hiring process. It gives you a chance to be very clear on what you want, so that you can find a writer who fits your needs — and get started on your project as soon as you find your writer.

The Right Writer

Depending on the kind of project you have in mind and the pay you’re offering, you can easily get thousands of responses to a listing for a freelance writer. Sorting through all those prospective writers can seem like an insurmountable task at first, but with a little tweaking of your advertisement and a little practice, you can find a freelance writer in no time.

When you’re looking for a writer, you specifically want to ask for samples of past work. While I mentioned that looking for a writer with a certain number of years of experience doesn’t make sense, you still want a writer with the skills to handle your project. There are some cases when you set the bar fairly low — for instance, if you have a low budget for a project, you’re unlikely to get a writer with a perfectly polished style. But you do want to know that a writer meets your needs for a project, no matter what they are. The easiest way to check that fact is to take a look at a writer’s samples. You’ll want to request samples similar to your project, preferably pieces written recently.

Sorting through samples can actually be done faster than you might think. After glancing over the second or third blog post, article or website, you can usually eliminate writers who don’t fit your project quickly. Narrowing down from there can be a bit harder: you may wind up with three or four different writers you’d like to work with. But availability, budget, and other factors can usually lead you to just one writer.

You may be tempted to ask writers for a sample written specifically for your project, such as a sample description or a blog post. While a few writers may be willing to provide you with such a sample, many freelance writers will simply refuse. Asking for such samples can eliminate the best writers from your prospect pool: the reasons range from the number of dishonest individuals that have used such requests to get free content to the fact that many of the best writers simply don’t have time to put together something that may or may not actually be published.

The Deal

Once you have a particular writer in mind, you’ll want to set out the terms of your project. Many freelancers have set rates for their services; others are willing to put together a project estimate. The nature of your project can dictate which option is best for you. For instance, if you’re looking to have copy written for a website, a price for the full project may be more practical for you. But if you’re looking for a writer who can provide you with a blog post every week indefinitely, a per-post rate may be the best option. Take a look at the way your preferred writer operates and discuss which options will work best for both you.

In addition to setting a price, you’ll also want to establish how you’ll handle details like payment. Does the writer expect half of the fee for the project up-front? Does he or she expect payment to go through particular channels? Ask these questions to make sure that both you and your writer can focus on the project at hand. If your chosen freelancer has been in business for a while, he or she might have a contract for client projects. If so, take a look at it: if it clearly outlines the terms of your agreement and the project, having a contract in place can protect both you and the writer.

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Got time for life? (photo: AleksandrL / iStockphoto)

American society is open-ended — an endless number of things to do, be, see, have, and experience. This open endedness creates a sense of time starvation among us — always one more thing to do or accomplish — which, in turn, drives us to seek means and methods to maximize every living nanosecond or to complain endlessly about how other people, corporations, governments, and electronic devices waste our time. While the Zen in me tells me to savor time, live for the moment, and be thankful for my mere existence, I’m still American and personally believe that the key to a fulfilling life is ultimately through a combination of Zen-like thinking and the continuous pursuit of effective, efficient, and productive time use. It’s in principal support of the latter that makes time tracking an indispensable means for discovering more time for life. In this post, I offer several tips for tracking and analyzing your time, irrespective of the tool that you use. (Tools you can use include: BubbleTimer, RescueTime, Freckle, Emergent Task Timing, MindTools.com Activity Log, and ATUS Time-Diary Format.)

Recording your time use. Naturally, start each new day at 12:00 a.m. During wakeful hours, the most accurate way to keep track of your time use is to record what you’re doing every 15 minutes. But at that frequency you’ll just end up perceiving time tracking (64 times per day) as your new #1 daily time waster. The approach that strikes the right balance between accuracy and efficiency is to record your time either right before you go to bed or first thing in the morning, ensuring that whatever activities consumed your day are fresh on your mind.

It also doesn’t make sense to track your time 365 days out of the year, unless you want to reaffirm the law of diminishing returns. Set up a recurring basis such as two weeks every quarter.

Don’t distort the data. In reflecting on your previous day’s time use, be brutally honest with yourself. Don’t record what you “should” have been doing; record what you actually did. Avoid the tendency to record the socially acceptable use of your time — e.g., “worked 8 straight hours” when in reality you only worked 5 hours or “played with kids for 2 hours” when actually watched C-SPAN three-fourths the time. For personal activity data you don’t want anyone to ever see, come up with a secret activity code name such as “studied the Klingon language.”

Remember: garbage in, garbage out.

Test the elasticity of your time by crunching it. The primary purpose of tracking your time is so that you can analyze the data and discover better ways to employ your time. Within the context of your time diary, contemplate the following question:

“Suppose that early on during the time-diary day you discovered that something had come up suddenly. You could tend to it any part of the day or night, but somehow you simply had to find one hour to take care of it before you went to bed again. In a day like the one you had yesterday on (diary day), what things would you have given up to make room for that hour?”
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Repeat this question for a 3-hour activity that had to be done, and note what activity you would forgo. Take it further and compress your whole day just to 12 hours. What would you eliminate, reduce, automate, or outsource?

This simple, yet powerful time-crunching technique should reveal some non-essential activities that consume your most precious commodity — time. Sociologists use this clever technique to study people’s time-use perceptions, but you can use it to transform your time-use behavior.

Examining secondary activities. People tend to task-switch with high frequency over short periods of time or undertake multiple overlapping activities at once. (In other words: multi-task.) Given the realities of how people use their time, one important feature of most time-tracking tools is the ability to capture primary and secondary activities. Whether or not a combination of tasks or activities is synergistically productive or counterproductive is highly contextual and individualistic. Much of the current literature on managing your tasks for maximum productivity recommends doing one at a time (single-tasking). Use your time-tracking data to evaluate whether or not undertaking a secondary activity while doing the primary is enhancing or detracting from your productivity (see measuring time-use performance below).

Measuring activity-related satisfaction. The unfortunate reality is that we only have so many hours per day to live satisfactorily. So why then do people fill their days with activities that they actually moderately like, dislike or, worse, loathe? Take for example TV: Numerous social surveys show that TV-watching ranks as one of the least satisfactorily ways to spend free time, yet Americans continue to watch 2.6 hours of it per day. This is somewhat inexplicable to me. Perhaps people just haven’t raised their dissatisfaction with TV-watching to a conscious level, or simply failed to recognize that it represent society’s modern vice slowly killing their time for life.

Whatever the reason, you can use your time diary to measure the degree to which you like or dislike the activities occupying your time. To do this, simply assign a satisfaction/enjoyment rating using a Likert scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being Dislike and 10 being Like. You can use the results of your ratings to identify activities which you might want to consider eliminating, reducing, automating, or outsourcing (anything around or below 7) and those which you should sink more of your life into (anything above 7).

Measuring time-use performance. There are a number of ways to do this, each with varying degrees of complexity. You can gauge your productivity by defining personal output measures. For example, write three 500-word blog posts in 6 hours, or 2 hours per 500-word post. You can measure performance by defining outcome measures such as the three posts average 250 diggs and average 4.0/5.0 quality rating. You can also measure how efficiently you use your time by comparing yourself against others. For example, the average person writes four 500-word posts in 6 hours. The web app RescueTime makes such benchmark comparisons possible by aggregating time-use statistics from its user base through tags and generic activity categories.

All the above are great options. One measurement method that I’m beginning to use, however, is what I call utilizable time efficiency. The idea here is that after you subtract the hours you must spend on personal maintenance (sleeping, eating, and grooming) from 24 hours, you’re left with utilizable time. With your utilizable time, you can spend it in one of two ways: on value-added activities or non-value-added activities. The more time you spend on the former, the better you’re utilizing (or maximizing) your time. The opposite is true for the latter.

Here’s how to use this measurement:

1. For each activity in your time diary, indicate whether it was a value-added, non-value-added, or neutral (reserved for personal maintenance activities) use of your time.
2. Add up the time spent on neutral activities and subtract from 24 hours to get your utilizable time. Let’s assume 15 hours for illustration purposes.
3. Now add up your time spent on value-added vs. non-value-added activities. Let’s assume 10 hours and 5 hours, respectively.
4. Lastly, calculate your utilizable time efficiency: total time of value-added activities / total utilizable time. 10 / 15 = 67%.

Obviously, what this percentage tells you is that you spent about two-thirds of your utilizable time on activities that (you felt) added something to your life or aligned directly with your personal goals. The other way to think this: you wasted 33% of your life that day. On any given day, the target, although not wholly realistic, is 100%. How you get closer to 100% is in large part what this blog’s about.

There are other tips that I’d like to share relating to time-use goals, time pressures, psychological factors, activity coding, location coding, and improving utilizable time efficiency and correlating with happiness, but I think I’ve said enough for one post. Stay tuned, as some pretty cool stuff that can be measured, learned, and acted upon from time-tracking data.

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References/notes:
- [1] Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time