Date	Time	Project	Draft #	Text	Notes
Monday, February 21, 2011	11:25 AM	Increase Your Productivity	final	You can increase your personal productivity with a good project, activity and expense tracking system. By knowing how much time you spend on non-productive tasks, you can learn to keep these at a minimum and spend more time on productive activities. By using a system such as the one described here, you can easily keep track of all your hours and expenses. This will also make invoicing your clients and preparing tax records, much quicker and more accurate. |  | Activity & Expense Tracker helps self-employed individuals, or small businesses, to keep track of time and expenses spent on any number of projects. Writers, programmers or any consultant can easily record the amount of time they spend on specific activities and make notes on tasks and expenses. They can then quickly generate invoices and reports that can be printed or exported to word processing or spreadsheet programs. |   | Some of the features of this program are: Multiple Timers - you can quickly switch between projects by pausing and restarting timers for each activity; Quick Check - get an instant report on the number of hours spent on a project or activity; Customize background and button colors, as well as the highlight color; Generate reports and invoices for projects, activities and expenses, with customizable headers and footers. |   | Activity & Expense Tracker works well for small businesses or work groups too. Each person keeps track of their own time and expenses, exports the data and sends it to an administrator, who imports them all, and then generates invoices and time and expense reports. |   | Students, teachers, athletes and hobbyists can use Activity & Expense Tracker to keep track of time spent on their projects too. Volunteers will find the program useful for keeping track of time and expenses for tax purposes. |   | Users can try out the software free for 30 days, before registering it for only $35. Activity & Expense Tracker runs on most computers including, Windows 95/98/2000/NT, Macintosh and many UNIX operating systems. |  | John Hedley comments, "As a former administrator of a 500+ seat enterprise project tracking system, I've found most of the single seat user shareware systems to be sorely lacking in coherency or practicality. This is a first rate, user friendly system." |  | 	this is the final draft of an article I wrote last year
Monday, February 21, 2011	12:50 PM	Getting Organized 		Getting Organized in the New Year |  | Are you ready for the New Year? Have you given any thought to your new years resolutions? Would you like to make more money? Have more free time for vacations or enjoying friends and family? Getting organized can help free up that spare time and make you more productive. |  | Making lists can be an effective tool for getting better organized. Begin by listing everything you normally do. Then add to the list all the things you wish you had time for. Make sure that most of the following items are on your list: eating, sleeping, exercise, time with friends and family, inspiration, etc. |  | Prioritising your list is the next step. Realize that without the proper amount of food and sleep, that you will probably not have the energy to accomplish as much as you would like to. Taking time to exercise will also invrease the amount of energy you have and the mental clarity that you need to be at your maximum efficiency. |  | Next create a schedule for a typical week. For the next month or so, keep track of every minute of your day. Keep a journal of how much time you spend on your daily activities. Try to stick to your schedule, but even if you can't, make a note of how you are spending your time. At the end of each week, look over your journal and try to determine things you do that take up your time that may be less important than other things on your list. |  | Over the next month or so, make adjustments to your schedule, trying to include more important activities. The discipline of keeping a journal of your activities may be just what you need to get into a routine of doing things that increase your energy and productivity. |  | Do you spend a lot of time worring about your finances? Keeping track of your expenses may be a good next step. By tracking your expenses you can then prioritize the things you're spending money on. Then you can decide which things you can live without and not worry so much. This will free up even more time and energy for more important tasks. |  | If you have your own business, keeping closer track of your time on various activities and billable hours and expenses may increase your profits because you will be able to identify where you can spend your time most effectively. |  | Just remember that better organization plus the discipline to do the things that produce the best results, will yield increased productivity and more time for recreation and happy times. |  | ------------------ | 	Here's a draft of another article I wrote late last year.
