We’ve recently launched Time Doctor Tasks which is the task management version of Time Doctor. This version is for individuals that need to manage their tasks into groups and want to organize and prioritize their tasks.

This is a version that we have been working on for quite some time and now we’re excited to launch it as a live product.

This is what it looks like:

How can TD Tasks help to make me more productive?

This is the version that I personally use to manage my tasks. I have a bunch of different tasks organized into folders. I use generally the GTD (Getting things done) method of organizing tasks.

First you notice there are three main folders for your tasks:

Today’s priorities
Medium priority
Low priority

The purpose of organizing tasks into these folders is that it forces you to properly prioritize your tasks. Productive people are productive NOT because they get everything accomplished every day. In fact if you are getting every single task accomplished every day that’s probably a sign that you are un-productive with your work. Why? Because productivity is all about prioritizing and making sure that you only work on the very important top priority tasks.

Time Doctor Tasks helps you to do this because you will allocate your tasks into these three different folders.

Why do I need to organize my tasks into folders?

If you only have a few tasks (less than 10) then it’s probably not important to organize them and in fact you can use only Time Doctor, you don’t need Time Doctor Tasks. If you have a bunch of different tasks, it’s critical to organize them into folders for different contexts, priorities. Some folders that I have are:

Waiting – these are tasks where you are waiting on action from another person. There is nothing you can do right now to move the task forward. All you can do is wait and follow up with this person. You don’t want these tasks in your normal task list as you want to make sure that your “Today’s priorities” list is full of tasks that you are able to work on right now. Where you are clear on the action you need to take in order to move the item forward.

On hold – there are other tasks where you cannot take action right now because of various reasons. I place these tasks in an “on hold” folder.

Meetings – if you hold a specific weekly meeting with a certain team you can place a list of items to discuss in a folder for that meeting.

Personal – non-work related tasks you might not want to mix them with your tasks for work.

I’ll be covering more about how to use Time Doctor in some future blogs posts. Please send us your questions if you have any and to download the latest version of Time Doctor Tasks please go to the download page.

The Jira integration is a little complex to set up so this blog post is there to help explain how to get started with the integration.

Note that the integration works with the hosted SaaS version of Jira. The APIs do not work for the self hosted version.

Firstly the owner of your company on Time Doctor needs to set up the integration on Time Doctor. You can do that under:
Settings > Company Settings > Integrations

This page looks something like this:

As your username and password you need to enter any Jira account that has access to all projects. Usually this is the owner or admin of the Jira account.

The second stage to the Jira integration is for each individual person to activate their Jira integration. This can be done on Time Doctor under:

Settings > Integration settings

Simply enter your Jira user name and click on the tick. Every user in your company will need to do this in their Time Doctor login.

After activated your Jira tasks will automatically be downloaded into your Time Doctor account. You will need to make sure you have the latest version of Time Doctor which you can get here: http://www.timedoctor.com/download.html

You will see the Jira tasks appear something like this:

Note that you need to click on the left and right arrows to see the list of Jira tasks. Also you can click on the right to open the task in Jira. You click on the tasks to start timing them. You cannot add Jira tasks from Time Doctor, and I think it won’t really ever make sense to do this as if you are using Jira you will need to use the full capabilities of Jira when you are adding tasks.

Note that we have not yet implemented sending time tracked to Jira. We are working on this feature at the moment and I realise that this is probably one of the most important features of the integration. Yes we’re working on it!