Do you wish you had more hours in your day? If your schedule is busy, you need to find ways to be more time efficient. With TimeTo™, you'll discover more time in your day for both work and play, you'll get more things done, and you'll drop less balls.
TimeTo™ offers a lot. However, since you're busy, you likely want to start saving time right away, and learn the more advanced features later on. Here are two ways to get some quick return on time investment:
- do some things in TimeTo™ that can save as much time for you today as they will take to learn how to do
- consider how you would move from your present system to TimeTo™ (by learning at least how to have TimeTo™ do what your old system does for you) and how long such a switch would take (so you can plan when is best to do it, and reduce the awkward in-between time as much as possible)
Thing One: Choosing Light Mode or Pro Mode
When you first start to use TimeTo™, you will
be in Light mode. The other mode is Pro
Mode. You
can switch back and forth between Light Mode and
Pro Mode with one click, anytime you like
and as often as you like. Light Mode allows
you to get familiar with TimeTo™ basics or
offers you a simpler view when you are in a hurry.
Pro Mode offers more controls and features, and is
where the true advantages of TimeTo™ over other
to do list management systems flourish. To change
to Pro Mode at any time, choose Pro Mode from the
Settings menu. To change back to Light Mode at any
time, choose Light Mode from the Settings menu.
Thing Two: Learn About Schedules and Views
In TimeTo™, a schedule is
a collection of items.
Each TimeTo™ user typically has one schedule,
and that schedule contains many items. Items can
be appointments, tasks, or memos. Unlike most time
management software which separates these three things
into separate lists, TimeTo™ integrates all
three into your schedule (because that is how real
life is).
TimeTo™ includes
many views,
allowing you to view your schedule (or parts of your
schedule) in different ways at different times.
Please switch to Pro Mode if
you haven’t
already, as you'll learn about more features that
way. Now familiarize yourself with the different
views by looking at your schedule in each of
the four kinds of views available from the View menu:
(You can change views anytime by choosing the view
you'd like from the View menu, by pressing keyboard
shortcuts, or by clicking icons on the button bar.)
Day View is the view you will likely use most often to view your schedule. Press Ctrl+S (for "schedule") to switch to Day View. You will see everything scheduled for today, and you can navigate to any other day you like (the five icons at the left end of the icon bar are an easy way to navigate to today, or a day or week in either direction. Even faster are the hotkeys: Home is today, LeftArrow is yesterday, RightArrow is tomorrow,...).
Use the My Multiple Day View (Ctrl+W) to see more than one day at once. You can view an entire week of days at once, and drag and drop items from one day to another. Later, you can learn to customize what days appear and how they are arranged on your screen.
Use the Month View (Ctrl+M) to see an entire month at once. You can customize Month View to only show Set Start Time Items (since seeing all your items on the Month View can be uncomfortably crowded, you can opt to just see your appointments and other items that have a fixed start time by customizing your Month View in Other Settings from the Settings menu).
Use the Alphabetical View (Ctrl+A) to see all your undone items in alphabetical order of the title of each item. Unlike the above views, the Alphabetical View shows all the items in your schedule at once.
In Pro Mode, you will also discover the Priority View (Ctrl+R), where you can view all your items in priority order, and easily drag and drop them to change their priority order.
If you’d like to begin to learn how to customize what your views look like, take extra time to explore these other features:
In Pro Mode, you will also find the Filters command, which allows to limit what appears in any of the views (for instance by keyword or by project).
Thing Three: Try Using
Filters to Stay Focused or Find What You Need
At any time you are viewing your TimeTo™ schedule in Pro Mode, you can turn on Filters by pressing Shift+F (or choose the Filters command from the View menu). You can then filter your schedule to temporarily only show items that have attributes you select in the Filters window. Choosing to filter does not change your stored information in any way: rather, it's an effective way to find what you are looking for, or avoid being distracted by items that are not important to you right now. You can change your view (for example, from Day View to Month View) and the filtering will persist: the filtering stays until you close the Filters window. You can filter based on many things (such as keywords, projects, job numbers) and you can filter on as many criteria as you'd like at once. As well, TimeTo™ will remember your most recent filters arrangement for the next time you choose Filters. Filters affect printouts and exports too.
Thing Four: Using "triggers" to launch files, programs and Web addresses from items
From any schedule view, you can launch a Web page mentioned in the title of an item by pressing F11. Or, you can launch any file name or program or URL mentioned at the end of the title of an item by pressing F5. You can also add powerful phrases to item titles called triggers. For instance, if you add the phrase "st@rt" before the file name, program or URL and then give the item a Set Start Time, TimeTo™ will automatically launch it when that time comes. Since you can do this with recurring items, this means you can automatically launch a page, program, or file at a given time every day or week. For instance, if you like to check the news at www.cnn.com every day at 8am, create an item with a Set Start Time of 8am, make it's title "Check CNN st@rt www.cnn.com", and set it to recur every day. Click here to read more about st@rt and other TimeTo™ triggers.
Thing Five: Using Color to Know What's Due Today and What Isn't, and more
On Day Views and multiple day views, TimeTo™ shows items in one color if they are due on the viewed day (either because they have a Set Date of today or because they have a Deadline of today) and another color if not. You can choose these colors in Colors Settings (from the Settings menu). Colors Settings offer a few other special customizable choices of coloring that you may wish to explore. If you'd like to use color even further as an indicator, design up to eight Labels with special meanings. Right click an item to choose a Label. Use Labels Settings (either from the Settings menu, or conveniently also at the bottom of the Labels menu just mentioned) to change the name and the color scheme of your Labels.
Here's advice on how to migrate from other systems to TimeTo™. Like moving into a new house, the first thing you'll want to do, in as little downtime as possible, is establish yourself with TimeTo™ to the point where you can at least do what you could do in your old system. After that, you can take your time learning how to use TimeTo™ to take you to efficiencies and outcomes you may have never thought possible.
Consider what kind of system you are using now: paper or electronic...
If You Are Using a Paper System
Starting with the things that are due today, use the New Item command (or press Insert) to create one item in TimeTo™ for each item on your list. If the item must be done on a certain day, set the Set Date to that day. Otherwise, if the item has a due date, click the Flexible Date radio button and specify a Deadline for the item.
If you are using a "third generation" to do list (a list of things to do, with priorities such as an "A-B" system where A is something due today and B is everything else, and each item is ranked in order of importance, e.g., A3 gets done before A5), then you may also set the Priority criteria (Pro mode only) in the Item dialog for the item to reflect its relative importance. However get used to the idea that TimeTo™ is going to be helping calculate urgency and importance for you, based on other things you'll tell TimeTo™ about the item. So, for instance, you will no longer have to rank an item as an A (due today) or a B (not due today), because TimeTo™ will determine whether it is due today or not based up the deadline information you have already provided for your items.
If You Are Already Using a Software System
Manual approach: Follow the instructions above for paper lists, taking advantage of the fact that you can cut and paste the descriptions of your appointments and task in your existing list into the title area for each TimeTo™ item.
Export/Import approach: if your existing software has the ability to export information (such as Microsoft Word or any product that can create the kind of export file that Microsoft Word exports), then you can possibly save a lot of time by using TimeTo's Import Items command to add your existing information to any information you have already put into TimeTo™. Click here if you'd like to learn about the Import Items command.
Above & Beyond: If you are using any version of Above & Beyond software, you can automatically migrate your information and settings (including all logs and history) to TimeTo™. For full instructions refer to the help topic TimeTo™ for Above & Beyond users.
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