Overview of Work Time Studio

If we were to list all the features in Work Time Studio, it would be a very long list indeed. Instead, some features will be listed below which highlight the general use of Work Time Studio. To learn about some of the features in more detail please see the Project and Task Management Features, Time Management Features, Reporting Features, and the Studio Bar Features.

Time Management

Work Time Studio provides many features to help you organize and manage your time and increase your productivity. Our software achieves this goal by first allowing you to break up your projects and tasks into WorkItems, which can be easily organized, managed, and maintained. Work Time Studio can then track and monitor the time you spend on your WorkItems. The time you spend on your WorkItems is broken down into WorkItem intervals. Intervals may be started, stopped, locked, unlocked, paused, and resumed. These operations can be performed manually or automatically. When you clock your WorkItems, Work Time Studio stores all the time related data to a database, which is then used to generate various reports. The reports can be used for many other purposes as well, like billing, project allocation, productivity reports, payroll, and more.

Event Reminders

Need a little help remembering meetings, due dates, deadlines, or even lunch time? Let Work Time Studio remind you! With WorkItem events, you have a variety of reminder options. You can specify the reminder to have a specific lead time, that is, to be triggered at a certain duration before the event if you'd like. You can choose to be reminded with either a reminder popup or the reminders manager. You can even specify where on your monitor the reminder popup will appear, and how long it will be displayed until it closes automatically. You can also snooze the reminder, so that it will remind you again at a later time.

Manage Your Interval History

While using Work Time Studio, many WorkItem intervals will be created, which are stored in your database. Editing and maintaining these intervals is very easy with the Activity Calendar. Whether you have a few dozen or a few hundred thousand intervals, the Activity Calendar will allow you to quickly find and view those intervals that you're interested in. The Activity Calendar provides multiple view modes, including day view mode, week view mode, and month view mode. The Activity Calendar also provides many ways to filter the intervals which are displayed on the calendar, so you can view only those intervals that you're interested in.

Keep Track of Your Time

Work Time Studio provides multiple ways you can keep an eye on the time you're spending on your projects and specific tasks. Work Time Studio provides information on the current WorkItem at all times on the status bar and on the Studio Bar. This information includes the name and clocked state of the current WorkItem, and also the current interval time, total WorkItem time, and the collective WorkItem time. These values are displayed in real-time to the exact second. The Activity Tree also displays the current WorkItem's actual time in real time, so you can monitor your producivity closely.

Estimate Your Time Accurately

When you break a large sized project or job into smaller and smaller chunks, which we call WorkItems, you can more accurately estimate the time it will take to finish the project or job. Work Time Studio enforces this Divide and Conquer practice, and also encourages you to enter estimated times for all your leaf WorkItems. Doing this allows all branch WorkItems to automatically calculate the total estimated times of their descendents, giving you a detailed account of the estimated time for all the different levels and branches of your WorkItem Hierarchy. Work Time Studio then uses this information to accurately track your progress, and display your progress at each level of the hierarchy.

Manage Your Projects, and Tasks

Work Time Studio allows you to manage your activities with its Activity Tree. The Activity Tree provides everything you need to effectivly manage and organize not only your tasks, but also your work notes and ideas. You can also control Work Time Studio's clocking mechanism on any items in your WorkItem hierarchy. In no time, you'll have your projects broken down and organized in a way which will give you a clear picture of what needs done and how you will go about it.

Create and Manage Your WorkItem Hierarchy

Work Time Studio helps you to manage your activities by using the principal of Divide and Conquer. The philosophy of this principal states that work should be broken down into smaller and smaller manageable 'chunks', which can then be tackled individually. In Work Time Studio, we call these chunks WorkItems. The principal of Divide and Conquer is used to enter and organize WorkItems into a hierarchical structure which we call your WorkItem hierarchy. Your WorkItem hierarchy begins with very general WorkItems, and breaks the general WorkItems down by adding smaller child and descendant WorkItems.

Prioritize Your Time

Prioritizing your time is one of the main goals of Work Time Studio. With Work Time Studio's Prioritizer, you can determine the best task to work on at any given moment, no matter what your time restrictions are. The Prioritizer allows you to prioritize your WorkItems by using a combination of their properties, including priority, estimated time, difficulty level, and due date, allowing you to find the perfect WorkItem to tackle at any given time.

Schedule Your Time

Work Time Studio provides ways to help you schedule your time. It achieves this goal with the use of WorkItem Events. You can use WorkItem events to schedule important single occurance and recurring events. The events will display on your Activity Calendar as a reminder for you. You can also set a reminder to occur for the event, in which case Work Time Studio will remind you when or before the event takes place. Creating events is as easy as dragging a WorkItem from the WorkItem Selection Tree onto the Activity Calendar.

Organize Your Projects using Drag & Drop, and Cut, Copy & Paste

In Work Time Studio, you can use Drag and Drop, as well as Cut, Copy, and Paste operations to help you organize your WorkItems quickly and easily in the Activity Tree, where WorkItems form a tree like hierarchy of your tasks. It takes only a matter of seconds to arrange your Workload into a well organized and categorized WorkItem hierarchy.

The Studio Bar

The Studio Bar is a compact, dockable window interface to Work Time Studio, which is docked to the top or bottom of your monitor. Studio Bar mode is a mode of operation when software is diplayed as a Studio Bar, as shown above. When the software is in Studio Bar mode, it's interface uses very little desktop space. If you place the Studio Bar into auto hide mode, the Studio Bar will take up no desktop space at all. All of the features that Work Time Studio has to offer are available from the Studio Bar, so you can access them quickly while keeping productive.

Generate Interval and Allocation Reports

Work Time Studio's report generation capabilities allow you to generate a wide variety of reports. Some reports show you exactly what your spending your time on, and others reveal how your time is being allocated. The reports can be detailed or they can be grouped and summarized showing the general areas in which you're spending your time. Reports in Work Time Studio are interactive. Clicking on a data point on a report displays information of the data point. You can also print and print preview your generated reports, as well as save them to be viewed on a website, network, or anyplace you need them. All you need is a browser to view your saved reports.

Group Multiple WorkItems In Your Reports

Work Time Studio provides a way for you to group your data, so you can generate reports which summarize data for a WorkItem branch or multiple branches. A WorkItem Branch is a WorkItem which contains child and descendant WorkItems, and often represents a project. Sometimes, you are not concerned with the individual WorkItems within a branch, but the branch as a whole. Many times, you want to compare different WorkItem branches against each other. An example would be if you wanted to compare the time you spent on different projects. Although you might not have clocked your time to the project WorkItems directly, you did clock your time to many of the descendant WorkItems in those projects, and grouping your data will reflect this.

Filter the Data in Your Reports

Generated reports contain report data, which includes data from WorkItems and WorkItem intervals. The data which is displayed on the reports is specified, or filtered by the use of the report filter option toolbars. These toolbars allow you filter the data, so the report displays only the data that you want. The report data can be filtered by the WorkItem type, WorkItem status, and interval type. You can also specify the exact date or date range of the data you want to appear on the report. A Display Mode Toolbar is also provided, which allows you to hand select WorkItems which you want to appear on the report.

Save Your Reports to Templates

Because there are so many ways you can customize your reports, Work Time Studio provides a way for you to save your custom report settings to a report template, which you can then execute later at any time. Report templates store the report type, chart type, chart properties, report filters, and applied markup and styles of a specific report. You can create a report template for any report you generate. User created report templates are known as custom report templates. Work Time Studio also creates a default report template for each report type/chart type combination available. These default report templates are used when you generate a report from the Report and Chart Type Toolbar. You can also save your custom report settings to the default report template for that particular report, which gives you the ability to customize the way each of the different reports will look by default when generated.

Activity Calender - Your Event Manager

The Activity Calendar is a good place to manage your schedules and events. You can create any number of events for your WorkItems. Create events for your estimated start dates and times, estimated end dates and times, meetings, deadlines, or just about any purpose at all. You can even create events to remind you of birthdays and anniversaries. You can easily make an event recurring, to make it occur daily, weekly, yearly, and more. Add, edit, and delete events right from the Activity Calendar is a snap.