Web Worker Daily

One of the best things about being a freelancer is that I can schedule my time in a way that works best for me; however, this flexibility can be a double-edged sword. While I have quite a bit of freedom to work on projects whenever it is most convenient, I find that in order to maintain my sanity, I need to carefully schedule my time to maximize productivity and make sure that I complete tasks on time.

We all have different ways of working based on our body clocks and personal preferences. I get my best work done between 7am and 2pm. I usually try to get up between 6am and 7am, and head right to the computer to catch up on East Coast client email and take care of any urgent items before hitting the shower and starting my day. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I’ve always found frustrating about Google is its inability to perform a search and then filter based on date/time written. Last night I was trying to find out what happened to Axxo (a famous BitTorrent figure), who’s currently missing, and was having a horrible time with it. A few months ago, Axxo had also disappeared, only to reappear a short time later, so when I was searching for “What happened to Axxo,” Google kept finding articles about his previous disappearance instead of his current one. Turns out Google can filter results by time, as I found out while looking for more Axxo information. Here’s how to enable time-based filtering: Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve looked at a couple of utilities designed to help teams spread across timezones stay on track, including the FoxClocks addon to Firefox and the EasyTZ site. A new approach, Permatime, offers a new way to check what time it is everywhere – and to represent it in easy-to-read URLs to boot.

When you first visit the Permatime site, you’ll be asked to pick your own timezone – you can type in something like “PST” or “Central” or “Belgrade” and a dropdown list will help you choose. Then, you’ll see your current time in your local timezone. That’s not much – but if you then add “London” and “Moscow” you’ll see the time in all three zones. The site remembers you timezones across visits, too, so if you have a spread-out team you can set it up once and then just go there for current times whenever you want.

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