There’s a really easy trick you can use to become up to 4 times as productive in your work, freeing up time for things that really matter. It’s not magic, but something based on real life observations.

If you follow blogger Dave Navarro (@rockyourday) on twitter, you’ll realize he starts off most days by tweeting:

“What would you work on if you only had 2 hours available today? Ok, go do that first.”

It might sound simple, and while I usually receive his tweet at the end of the day due to different time zones, his message is profound.

Namely, there’s a strange law in the universe that makes everything take up as much time as it can get.

For example, if you have an 8 hour workday to write one blog post, how long will it take you to write it? You guessed it, it will take 8 hours.

You’ll know that there’s plenty of time available. Thus you’ll take it slow. You’ll check e-mail every now and then, chat with friends, write, have lunch, write a bit more, look for pictures for the post and just generally waste the time away.

You’ll get your job done, but will you feel good at the end of the day? Can you go home knowing you had a productive workday? Probably not.

If, on the other hand, you give yourself a deadline of only two hours to finish this task, it is more than likely that you will succeed. Your brain will be running on high energy, you will shut off all distractions and give two undivided and highly focused hours to the task. It will get done.

How do you imagine feeling after that? What would being this efficient allow you to do? What would you do with the extra 6 hours you just magically won?

The choice is rather limitless. You can work on other things that really matter to you. You can work on the next important thing and also kick its ass. If you feel like it, you can even take a longer lunch break or go to the beach. It’s up to you and the possibilities available for you.

The concept of setting a deadline can even be taken further. Suppose you have many different things you need to do in one day. Combined you can’t possibly finish all of them in time. What to do?

No worries, just write all of them down and set a deadline in minutes for each one of them. Be sure to schedule a few 5 minute breaks here and there. Grab an egg timer or an online stopwatch and get cracking!

Chances are, by the end of the day, you will have gotten more stuff done than you could have ever imagined.

What do you think? Have you ever tried this approach? Has it worked for you? Could it work? Post your comments below!

The Eisenhower Matrix is one of the simplest tools that can quickly make you a lot better at managing your time. As TimeGT has always had support for organizing your tasks according to this system, let’s take a closer look and see why it’s important to understand this method.

Although this method was made popular by Stephen Covey in his book “First Things First”, the concept is originally credited to US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, pictured right.

Whenever confronted with something that needed to be done, he would ask himself two questions. First, is the task important? Second, is it urgent?

Based on this, the task would end up in one of four categories:

1. Urgent and Important – for example the kitchen catching fire, a deadline to submit tax reports, a baby crying
   
   
2. Not Urgent and Important – doing exercises, long term planning, working on a project
   
   
3. Urgent and Not Important – various interruptions, facebook updates (not that Eisenhower used Facebook at his time), dealing with annoying people
   
   
4. Not Urgent and Not Important – activities that just waste time, procrastination, checking the latest lolcats, the wikipedia time-sucking hole, etc
   
   

The Four Quadrants

These categories are commonly visualised as the quadrants shown on the right.

The order in which you fulfill the tasks is important. As you only have a limited amount of time every day and can’t possibly do everything, it is important to prioritize the tasks you must do.

Obviously the first priority goes to the tasks that are Important and Urgent. That’s clear. However what is not so obvious is that tasks labelled Important and Not Urgent get the next priority.

Eisenhower himself is quoted as saying:

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”

He couldn’t have been more right.

Without the matrix in sight, people often forget this and tend to rush to deal with all the Urgent and Not Important tasks at hand, pushing the important, but not urgent ones somewhere into the far future.

This is when you know you should be working on a project, but instead end up checking Facebook, reading that really really urgent e-mail from a friend with a hilarious youtube video or chatting about plans for the weekend on Skype.

Thus, your second priority should be to spend time on important tasks that are not urgent and only then on urgent tasks that are not important.

The tasks in the 4th quadrant, Not Urgent and Not Important should be dropped. If there is no rush for doing them and they don’t matter anyway, why even bother?

How this helps?

When consciously filtering all incoming distractions based on their importance, you end up doing less of the not important ones and thus become more productive in your work.

The Important and Not Urgent quadrant is where you want to spend most of you time. It’s a peaceful place to work on things that are important and to have enough time to finish them.

Achieving this is not so hard. First, only do tasks that are important. Second, plan ahead. If you look ahead and take control of the way you spend your time, you can finish all your tasks before they become urgent.

This way you will become more focused and more productive in all the things you do!

Final words

TimeGT supports the Eisenhower method by giving you the possibility to mark all your tasks as either important and/or urgent, thus automatically sorting the list for you so you always know what to do next.

What’s your experience with the Eisenhower Matrix? Do you user it? Has it helped you in your life?

Summer is here! With it came hot days, warm nights, barbecue parties and, thanks to our air-conditioned office, a new release of TimeGT, cleverly labelled as 1.2.0! Wondering what’s new? Read on!

Automatic updates

From now on, you can easily upgrade to a newer version of TimeGT. Once an update is available, look for the “upgrade now” button. Click it and a new release will be on its way!

Firewall-friendly ports

Many have complained that due to our innovative use of port numbers, you couldn’t access the TimeGT server from various work environments. This has now been fixed with all secure traffic flowing over the standard SSL port of 443.

Fixed GCal issues

Issues reported over Google Calendar synchronization have now been fixed. Please try it out!

Start offline

Trying to save bandwidth or just to stay away from the internet? Now you can! Upon request, TimeGT can now start without connecting to the internet. However the first login after installation still needs to be done online as TimeGT needs to download the cryptography keys used to keep your data safe.

Add the task to a specific project

When typing in a new task, write the project for the task, a colon (“:”) and then the task title. Now press CTRL+Enter. This will make the task appear under the specified project, not in the current view.

For example typing “shopping:buy milk” and pressing CTRL+Enter will add the task “buy milk” under the project “Shopping”.

This is especially useful when using the small popup that appears after clicking the TimeGT system tray icon.

Interesting blog posts

From now on, this blog will become alive! Approximately every week we will update it with a new post about time, task or energy management, book reviews, tips and tricks to become more productive and so on. Stay tuned!

How to get TimeGT 1.2.0

It’s easy! Just click the download link from the top and enjoy!

NOTE: it is recommended you uninstall the previous version if you’re doing an upgrade.

We just released version 1.1.2. We fixed the issues with Google Calendar Connector and improved the Sync server scalability.

We found some compatibility issues with the Google Calendar integration so please try to avoid using it until we come up with an improved version.

Also our sync server is under some quite heavy load so excuse us if it’s somewhat sluggish. We’ll work hard making sure it scales better soon.

Hey dear TimeGT community!

As some of you know, last few days have been a roller-coaster here. After TimeGT website and app itself got hit by users coming from so many different reviews (thank you Lifehacker and MakeUseOf!) things started to go out of hand a bit.

In general everything was fine — handling ~10 new user sign ups per minute (thousands of sign ups total) was alright — but — we didn’t anticipate this volume and weakest link for failure turned out to be Google Apps SMTP e-mail gateway.

Standard edition has 500 outgoing mails per day limit and we reached that limit way too soon

As a result, Paypal tried to contact our site to activate trials but as our system was unable to send out the greeting e-mail things got unprocessed.

Issues with the trial activation should be solved now, my sincere apologies to those who suffered — our payment processing is now back to normal and trial activation e-mails should have gone out today. More performance improvements are on it’s way but things should be still very smooth even now.

We have fixed the limit issue and getting more people on board should not be a problem anymore!

Thanks for the patience! If your trial is still not active — please contact us at dev at timegt dot com!

regs,
Ahti

We just released version 1.1.1. This release fixes an issue where starting a cleanly installed TimeGT instance took a long time to get working.

After a bit of silence we are back with good news. Version 1.1.0 is out Today and we added a great new feature to TimeGT. All Hedgehog package users can now sync their tasks with Google Calendar. It’s perfect time for keeping track of Your New Year’s resolutions.

New Features!

TimeGT syncs all of your tasks that have either Start or Due date (or both) assigned to them with Google Calendar. Also it fetches all nonrepeating tasks that you have already made there. Enable the feature only on those computers you wan’t to connect to Google.

Improvements

• Implemented preferences
  
• Added remember me functionality.
  
• Improved entering tasks. Insert button is now used for task insertion only. Projects and tags can be added with popup menu or toolbar button.
• Inserting new tasks with filters is much smoother. Newly inserted tasks stay for a time and let some changes applied to them and they don’t just “disappear” only because they don’t suit current filtering. Configure an appropriate “grace period” in the Preferences.

Bugfixes.

• Made Start and Due dates focus more visible.
• Drag and Drop no longer causes hanging in Linux.
• TimeGT now works with systems where systray has been disabled.

So Happy Christmas and enjoy your Life even more with a little help from TimeGT!

We are so excited about getting the first TimeGT reviews! Thanks!!

• Killer Startups: TimeGT.com – Organize Yourself & Get Tasks Done
• Arctic Startup: TimeGT Is All About Getting Things Done

Today we released TimeGT version 1.0.4. There are two new features and some other improvements I’d like to tell you about.

New Features

• Expand Project Tree for Selected Task.
  Enabling this feature will expand project tree so your currently selected tasks project will become visible.
  
• New tasks that end with ! are automatically marked as Important and tasks ending with !! are marked Urgent and Important.

Improvements

• Fixed systrays erratic behaviors.
• Increased projects, tasks and tags font size.
• Fixed an encoding issue where some characters where shown as ?? or squares.