Subscribe!New features: Shortcuts, Project colors and more!
The user count is still growing rapidly, and thanks to all the new feedback we’ve made some more fixes and introduced new features.We’ve also been mentioned on more and more blogs like the popular Dutch Lifehacking.nl blog, thanks for the great posts everybody! We’re working hard to keep up with the stream of mails, feedback and keep adding features to make Thymer even easier and more powerful for the release version.
This is what we added the last week:
Keyboard Shortcuts
We added support for keyboard shortcuts! Use the arrow up and down keys to select a task. Then press ‘e’ for edit, ‘f’ to finish (complete) a task, ‘g’ to “go” and start the timer, and finally ‘d’ to discuss. To go back to the input bar, press Esc. It’s also possible to switch projects by simply pressing Ctrl-left and Ctrl-right.
Project Colors
You can now assign a color to your projects! This helps you to get an overview of what needs to be done across different projects in a glimpse.
Smarter URLs
When you bookmark a Thymer page it will remember your project and tag filters!
Improved Sign up Form
This one is for the new users ;). We made some improvements to the sign up form. It will try to detect your city and country, so you won’t need to hunt for the right timezone anymore.
More date tags
Support for more date tags: @3rd, @26th, etc. Example: ‘Review document @26th’
Larger Teams
We got feedback from some larger teams that their team member list didn’t fit on the screen. That should be fixed now.
First day of the week
You can now let the calendar week start on Monday or Saturday. See settings page.
Display Name
You can now change how your user name is displayed from the settings dialog.
Alternative email address
Go to the Settings page to specify an alternative email address. Handy for those with a different email address on their cell phone.
We hope you enjoy the new features, expect many more soon!
New Features: Tags, Twitter/Email, Improvements (Plus: Past Days Summary)
First of all, just wanted to say last week has been such as rush! As most of you probably know by now, we got covered by Mashable (thanks for the great write up!). After that there were many many tweets, even more people signed up and we got a lot of emails and feedback. It’s an amazing feeling to get all this feedback, so a big thank you to everyone! It’s great to hear many of you liked Thymer, and we’re doing what we can to keep on improving it. It feels our little startup is really starting to take off!
Enough daydreaming, back to the working part! We have big plans for Thymer in the future, but we started out building some of the most requested features. So, here they are:
Filter by tags
Tags already worked, but they were just visual helpers. It is now possible to filter your task list by tags. The tag list can be found under the project bar and shows which tags can be filtered on within the project (or, when no project is selected, shows all tags). You can add as many tags as you want to any task. When you filter a project on a tag, that tag is automatically added to any new task you create. This means you can use tags to further sub-divide your projects. Or, if you are a fan of the GTD (Getting Things Done) system, you can use them to describe things like contexts. Tag filtering for reports will be added soon.
Add tasks and notifications through email
Released two days ago, see the previous post.
Twitter Integration
It is now possible to add tasks through Twitter. We realize this might not be for everyone, but there are quite a few users who really like twitter and their mobile phone :). You can send the tasks from your mobile phone, the web or any other twitter client. This feature is disabled by default, and can be enabled under ‘Settings’.
To add a task through twitter:
- Tweet your task to @stunf (either public or DM).
- Important: Start your tweet with nt (which stands for ‘new task’)
- Since @ is reserved in twitter, you can use ‘*’ or ‘+’ instead in your task description.
Example — From the Web (Public):
@stunf nt some new task +today +john
Example — From your Phone (Direct Message, if we follow you)
d stunf nt some new task +today +john
If you tweet your tasks in public, everybody knows what you have to do, so hopefully peer pressure will cause you to stop procrastinating and complete your task :)!
Some small improvements:
- When you create a new project, existing tasks with that tag are automatically added to the project.
- Hyperlinks in tasks are now clickable.
- You can now have spaces in project names. Spaces will show as dashes in project tags.
- Want to change the order of your projects or team members? Now you can! Check out the settings page!
- If you create a task like this: “Buy groceries — Tomatoes / Sprouts / Cheddar”, the part after the – will automatically be added as a comment. (Especially handy if you send tasks via email)
What’s Next
Other features that were requested a lot include support for printing and project tag coloring. This will be added sometime soon.
Next to these smaller improvements we are planning some other big features as we’re getting closer to the first full release of Thymer. One of this will be an API. Internally we are already working with Thymer linked to several other applications. We think this will be really useful and are looking forward to showing it when it’s done. There’s some more (including some new team features), but we’ll save that for later :)
New Invites
To everybody who’s currently on the waiting list: check your inbox, as we will start sending out new invites today.
As always, all feedback is welcome, and we’ll try to get back to you as soon as we can.
If you’re interested in the latest developments, make sure to subscribe to our blog or follow us on twitter (@stunf).
Enjoy the new features!
New email features!
After the sudden influx of users (we got over 1200 new users from Mashable alone) it was high time to write some more
features. So here goes:
1. Add tasks via email
When you want to add a task on the go it’s easy to just send an email from your phone.
- Go to settings, and check the box “Allow task creation via email”.
- Send an email to addtask@thymer.com (or simply task@thymer.com). You have to use the email address you set in your profile (otherwise we don’t know to which account to add the new task)
- A new task is created using the subject line from the email. That’s it.
You can still use tags. So if your subject line of the email is “@jeremy @server Upgrade web server @important @tomorrow” then Jeremy will know he has to upgrade the server, that it’s an urgent task, with a deadline tomorrow. Nifty!
2. Email notifications
But what if Jeremey doesn’t check Thymer every day? It would be even better if Thymer would also email Jeremy. So that’s what this feature is about: email notifications.
It’s really easy. You check the box “Email me at team activity” on the settings page and hit Apply. From then on you’ll be emailed by Thymer whenever a team member comments on a task, completes one or adds a new one.
That’s it. Thanks everybody for trying Thymer and all the detailed feedback!
Updates: Real-Time Feed, Fixes and More Invites
As you had to wait quite some weeks for a new post, we feel it’s time to announce some new features! We also made some additional improvements based on the feedback from our first private beta users. Again, thanks for the feedback everybody! So, let’s have a look at what’s new:
Persistent Timer
To track time for a task in Thymer, simply click the green ‘play’ button in front of a task. If you have used this feature before, you know that a timer is started, which you can use – next to manually entering a duration – to track the amount of time you spent on the task. This timer is now made persistent, meaning that if you select another project, browse to another page, or even completely log off, the timer will keep ticking. When you come back to the list with the task, the timer will re-appear.
Besides the timer and manually entering the amount of time spent, an additional option ‘Since previous entry’ has been added. Selecting this option will add the time between now and your last time tracking log entry to the new entry. For example, if your last log entry was made at 12:00, and it’s 13:45 at the time you click ‘Add to log’ with the ‘Since previous entry’ option selected, Thymer will assign 1.75 hours to the log entry.
Real-Time Activity Feed
One of the things we use Thymer for is to see what other team members are working on. In order to improve on this a bit, we decided to turn the previously static ‘Default’ report page into a lively Real-Time Activity Feed. When you see new comments and changes flying by as they happen, it makes it even easier to directly respond to any comments, collaborate and keep track of the progress that’s being made. Plus, it’s really motivating to see other people working ;). If you don’t feel keeping the browser open for this is very practical, you can subscribe to the RSS Feed instead (see the RSS icon on the Reports page). Note: the RSS Feed is password protected; to view the Feed, you either have to be currently logged-in, or provide your Thymer username and password to your RSS client.
Editing and Removing Log Entries
All the items shown by the Feed can now be edited and/or deleted. Deleting a Change (Time Tracking entry) or Completion from the Feed will undo the action. Removing a ‘Completed’ will thus mark the task as re-opened. Removing a Log Entry will lower the logged time spent on the task. Deleting a comment or new entry will simply hide this entry from the feed.
Log Entries and Comments in the Feed can also be edited now. Comments can also be viewed directly from the Feed, making it easier to follow a discussion.
General Comments
We often found the need for adding general comments (such as, “Sorry, won’t be able to do much today, I’m will be on the beach.”; or something like that). This is now possible by adding a new comment directly into the feed on the Reports page.
Updated Reports
Where the Activity Feed only shows recent changes (last 14 days) and is updated with very detailed information about current progress, the ‘Create Report’ feature can be used to create a custom report of changes and spent time for a certain person, project or during a certain time period. The ‘Default Report’ has now been changed into a very dynamic Feed, and the Reports are now much more static. They can be accessed by their own permanent URL, do no longer show any controls and load faster. The simpler design makes it more suitable for printing. In general, we got some more feedback related to making Thymer more printer-friendly; this is something we will further improve upon soon.
Updated Splash page
We updated our splash page at Thymer to reflect the latest changes.
More invites
During the past few weeks, more people signed up for the private beta. We will be sending out more invites, today.
We hope you enjoy the new features in Thymer as we are getting ready for the public beta and release.
Private Beta
In the past few weeks we’ve ironed out all the major issues in Thymer, and we’ve made a bunch of improvements based on the feedback we’ve received from the first private beta users.
Having ran all out of excuses we’re sending out invites to Thymer to all those who signed up on the splash page. Check your inbox — an invite might be waiting there for you already! We also noticed that a lot of people wanted to show Thymer to friends and colleagues, so this beta round we’re adding 3 extra Beta Keys to every invitation email, so you can give them away to others who want to give Thymer a try.
Haven’t signed up for the Beta yet? No problem — if you sign up today (but only today) we’ll send you an invite right away!
So what’s next?
We have a lot of ideas on how Thymer can still be improved, so new features are always on the way. We make new features available as soon as they’re finished, so you can expect several new features every week. If you subscribe to the blog you can follow the evolution of Thymer first hand — you’ll be the first to read about the changes and additions we make and why we designed them that way.
We’re also working on a subscription model for Thymer. We’ll be blogging about pricing for small teams and business accounts soon. Don’t worry, there will always be a free version too!
Enjoy your Beta account, and if you have any questions or comments, you know where to find us.
Weeks 2 & 3: More features and improvements
The last two weeks we have been busy improving and adding some additional features to Thymer, based on the initial feedback (thanks everyone!). Here’s an overview of the changes you’ll notice most:
Date formats (German, Swedish)
Some German and Swedish users pointed out they would like to see support for date formats used in these countries. As we want Thymer to work for people in many different countries, we started out by added some additional date formats. More to come.
Inline Discussions
It’s now possible to leave comments and discuss tasks without having to leave the page. An option to view the discussion on a separate page is also still there. As we also happen to often close a task after leaving a comment (like “I don’t think it needs to be improved any further”), we added an extra completed button which will post the comment and mark the task as done. Comments can also be edited now.
Double Click to Edit
Some of our users told us it would be useful to be able to edit a task by simply double clicking it. We added this feature too.
Fixes and other improvements
- We changed the way task lists are rendered now, so it should feel faster and snappier.
- Just after the first users signed up, Internet Explorer 8 was released, and apparently there were still some issues for IE8 users; those have been fixed as well.
- Times are now shown in a more readable format (like 15 minutes ago).
- When many active projects are created, they will all be visible, spanning multiple lines.
- Project names can now be edited, using the ‘Edit’ button shown at the bottom of a project’s task list.
For all those who signed up for a beta invite, watch your mailbox the next few days.
Have a nice weekend!
Week 1
It’s been a wild ride the last week. The reactions we got on Thymer have been absolutely great! We’re glad so many of you like it. Many of you came up with feature requests and suggestions on how to improve Thymer. We can’t fix or improve everything at once and obviously not every request can be built into Thymer. Some suggestions contradict each other while others are not a priority yet and maybe interesting for later versions. We will, however, consider all your suggestions, so let us know what you think – and we’ll see what we can do.
Our main focus will always be to remove any bugs, keep the User Interface clean, intuitive and overall responsive. As long as you and we are satisfied on these points, you can be sure many more feature ideas will be added.
Based on all your initial feedback so far, we’ve already resolved some of the most reported issues: editing tasks caused recurring user name tags; projects, dates and user names are now case insensitive on input, but your casing will be preserved; some issues with using unicode have been resolved. More improvements (fixes and features) are on the way, stay tuned.
We are also happy to announce that we will very soon send out many more invites, and we’ll have some more news next week.
Have a nice weekend everyone!
What are those flags ‘D’, ‘!’, ‘$’ and ‘w’ for?
We’ve received a tremendous amount of feedback in the last couple of days. Lots of questions, bug reports and feature requests. Thanks everybody! In the next couple of days we’re going to highlight a few features of Thymer that have raised some questions.
Today’s topic is about the buttons to the very right of every task that look like this 
, 
, 
, and 
. This post explains what the buttons do and what they’re good for.
The first thing I should mention is that the flags don’t actually do anything. If you click on a flag it lights up, and it stays lit until you click it again. That’s pretty much it. We think this is a really simple way to quickly add some more details to tasks, without having to click around a lot or fill in additional forms.
The flag discuss
The discuss flag can be used to indicate to other people in your team that the task should be discussed first. Suppose you see in the task list that Bob is going to design a web page, but you remember that you’ve built something similar a few months back, and you think some of the work can be reused. So you can add a comment to the task with a link to the previous work, and flag the so Bob knows that there’s something to discuss. Bob can then decide whether to look into it, to ignore it, or to discuss it with you. The point is that by simply clicking on the person responsible for the task knows there’s something to discuss and can react accordingly.
The flag important
The important flag should be pretty self-explanatory. If something is important you don’t want to forget it, and a red box draws your attention to it. Especially if you make the schedule for your week every Sunday night (or Monday morning[1]) you won’t miss anything with a big next to it.
The flag billable
The billable flag is to make it easy for people to keep track of their billable hours. You can create reports that only contain billable tasks, so you can be sure your grocery list won’t show up on the bill to your client.
The flag waiting for
The waiting-for flag is probably the most important flag: it tells you that you’re waiting for somebody else to take action. Because it’s really easy to lose track of what other people have (or should have) done the visual reminder is really helpful.
Perhaps you’re expecting a letter, an email or a phone call, or waiting for somebody else to finish another task. If you take a minute every week to make a schedule you’ll immediately notice when something is amiss. (The supplies still haven’t arrived? Better pick up the phone before we’re all out!)
Up next
In the next few days we’re going to highlight some more features of Thymer, talk about a few new features and more. So watch this space.
Thymer Updates
Thanks everybody who has already expressed their interest in the upcoming beta release Thymer. We’re happy to announce a lot of progress has been made. Based on some initial feedback, we added some new exciting features and polished the look & feel. We hope you’re going to like it, and we look forward to hearing from you during our private Beta, which will start really soon. If you’re interested, sign up at thymer.com.
Check out our new screencast and new screenshots:
New screenshots:
 Todos & Planning |
 Changelog & Reports |
 Time Tracking |
For more, check out www.thymer.com.
Next to preparing for the private Beta of Thymer, we have some more products in the pipeline. Stay tuned for some more announcements in the coming weeks.
Prioritizing and Planning: The Urgency Trap.
A big problem when it comes to task management and planning is assigning priorities.
Don’t you just love software that presents you with a lot of priority options when adding a new task? For example, you can set the priority to ‘Important’, ‘Medium’, ‘A little bit medium’, ‘Something less medium’, ‘Not so medium’. Sometimes these priority-levels are expressed as numbers, which is even “better”! Priority of this task? 7. No. Wait. It’s 6, yes that’s it. Or maybe 8.
Not very helpful.
To figure out the priority of a task, I look at two factors: Urgency and Importance. This is based on a well known concept in Time Management, Covey’s 4 Quadrants. In this concept, tasks are split up into four different categories:
1. Important and Urgent
2. Important and Not Urgent
3. Not Important and Urgent
4. Not Important and Not Urgent
A lot of people sort their Todo List by Urgency (i.e. due date). This is where it goes wrong. The key is that Urgency says nothing about Importance. An urgent task can be important, but it doesn’t have to be.
It’s pretty clear that tasks that are urgent and important should be done right away (Real Actual Work). So which task will you pick next if your tasks are sorted by due date? Tasks from category 3 – Nag Tasks, because they are also urgent. But didn’t category 3 say ‘Not Important’? It sure did. So why am I working on this? Simply because there’s some feeling of urgency to these tasks.
The Nag Tasks (3) are the worst kind of tasks. They usually don’t help your long term goals and interrupt you from important things. There’s just too much of this stuff: writing useless emails or documents, or pointless assignments. To make it worse, after working an entire day on category 3 tasks, you feel like you did a lot of work but didn’t really achieve anything. It didn’t help you get closer to your goals.
So, after working on Real Actual Work-tasks, you should start on tasks in category 2 (”Zen Work”). This forces you to eliminate (or delegate) as much as possible of category 3 tasks, or postpone them until you’ve done enough work in category 2. Many category 2 tasks have to do with achieving long term goals, whether it is brainstorming about new ideas, building relationships, doing research or simply relax to become more productive.
The ordering of tasks in Thymer allows for a mix of using deadlines and the importance you assign to a task. Adding deadlines to tasks will automatically sort them if you want, but they can simply be dragged into a new planning that better reflects the importance. A special flag is available to mark certain tasks as extra ‘important’.
Here’s an example of a todo list, in which some todos have deadlines, some have not. Some deadlines will be missed, as the tasks are not really important.
