About six years ago, I began a transition from individual contributor to manager, a change that was rooted in a desire to increase my productivity beyond my individual capabilities. I had enjoyed being a member of a highly functional squad of senior software developers—coding (or designing) for seven hours a day (or more) and pausing for the occasional scrum-related ritual—and was given the opportunity to lead that team. This experience taught me that a team of developers working in concert with a good plan was collectively stronger than any individual, and I began to feel like the skill of facilitation was one I could wholeheartedly pursue as a second act in my career in the software industry.
Once your time is in Shoutbase, you can start getting some actionable data out of it. Shoutbase has an easy to use reporting UI. Team admins can also set up goals and monitor progress to ensure the team stays on target or within a budget.
With Shoutbase, you can easily prepare reports from your time records. What can you do with those reports? Pretty much anything—create and send a new invoice via email, bill for your services in another app (like QuickBooks), enter data into a spreadsheet, communicate the report to your company, etc. What if there was a way to do all of those things automatically and instantly without any tedious data entry? There is, and it’s called Zapier.
Choosing the right tools and knowing how to integrate them can improve your workflow. Zapier makes custom integrations easy. Here's how to boost your productivity using Shoutbase, Jira, and Zapier. Read More
I’m a growth-minded, efficiency enthusiast. What does that mean? I strive to learn and grow, usually with a focus on being more efficient with my time and energy. I’m not perfect, but I strive to continue on that path, iterating on my process, and improving each week. An important part of these iterations is collecting data about where I’m at now, so I can understand where I want to go.
Good things are better together. Peanut butter and jelly. Pizza and beer. Sam and Frodo. Coffee and another cup of coffee. Some combos just hum harmoniously together and become more than the sum of their parts. When I find new ways to combine tools to streamline my workflow and enhance my productivity, it’s time to celebrate.
That’s where Zapier comes in. Zapier is an online tool that integrates the web apps you already use and helps them work better together. Just one example of the way I use Zapier is my “Zap” for time tracking Jira issues with Shoutbase tags. What does that mean? Thanks to Zapier, every time I create a new issue in Jira, a new tag is automatically created in my Shoutbase account.
Tracking billable hours and invoicing—on top of completing the actual job—can be stressful, especially if you’re part of a small business where you’re wearing multiple hats. What if I told you there was a way to ease that burden, allowing you to spend less time working on non-billable tasks, such as entering data and tallying up completed work to prepare invoices? The magic words are “integration” and “automation.” By combining existing tools and allowing them to communicate and work together, you can automate certain tasks and get more done faster.
It’s a big day at Shoutbase: Release Day. As a Shoutbase user, you may not have noticed much of a change this morning. We pushed some minor tweaks and tuneups to the user interface, but the majority of the effort has been on the backend, laying the groundwork for cross-system integration. More on these integrations will be coming soon, so stay tuned! In the meantime, here’s what’s new:
Shoutbase works great on your mobile phone or tablet as well! The mobile web app can be added to your home screen, and after that, it works just like an app you’d install via the App Store. Here’s what you need to track time on the go:
Teams in Shoutbase enable multiple people to track time on shared projects via tags. They also enable team admins to get reports on team-wide activity or drill down to see all time for specific team members and tags.
The basic unit of Shoutbase is a time entry. A time entry has a starting date and time, an ending date and time, tags for categorization, and a description. Read More
Over the past year, Olio Apps has made a commitment to changing our company culture around working remotely. We’d seen other teams enjoy success by going fully or partially remote, but for us, working outside the office felt like an inconvenience. We wanted to change that, and we knew that we had the technology to make it a reality.
One of our goals is to build in public, involve our users, and demonstrate forward progress and momentum. This is a signal that savvy users look out for when choosing a software solution. Read More
Some people start out with the best intentions to track their time. The reasons could include billing for time or trying to improve some aspect of life, work, or general effectiveness. And sometimes, for whatever reason, they fall off the wagon and stop. Why? Read More
Shoutbase is a time tracking system built for speed and simplicity. It’s optimized for fast data entry that lets you record time quickly with little effort, so you can get back to what you’re doing with minimal disruption. Read More
A big goal without a system for getting there is unlikely to get done. The Four Disciplines of Execution (or 4DX for short) is a systematic methodology for achieving your big, hairy, audacious goals. Read More
It’s the first of five practices in Peter Drucker’s classic leadership and management book, The Effective Executive. Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.” Read More
