ididwork

We’ve just pushed a new Dash tab to the manager account that will help you get a quick snapshot of what your team’s been up to.

The first section is your employees’ latest entries. This lets you see the latest entries of each member of your team, as well as when each entry was posted and the kudos it has received.

The second section is a chart that shows the number of kudos each of your team members have received over the current review period.

Let us know what you think, and whether you’d like to see other information in the dash. Email us at the usual feedback[at]ididwork.com or leave a comment. Thanks!

Your employee reviews on ididwork were a 5-point quantitative score and an optional comment. We’ve now added the option to use a new review process where you can:

• Assign a quantitative score
• Answer the question “What has this employee being doing well?”
• Answer the question “Where can this employee improve?”

This new method helps guide the review process. It’s important to let your employees know what they’ve done well. This boosts their morale and serves as guidance for what you consider good work. It’s also important to let employees know what they can improve on, and to be very timely with this feedback so they can act on it immediately.

You’ll be asked if you’d like to switch to this new system during your next review. You can change your preference any time in your account settings.

What do you think?
We’re curious about whether you’d like to define your own review questions. Are our predefined review questions okay, or would you like the ability to fully customize them and write your own? Leave us a comment or send your thoughts to feedback[at]ididwork.com!

ididwork launched as a free service for employees and managers. ididwork will always be free for employees, and it will always be free for any manager that signed up before today. You’ve been a tremendous help in giving us suggestions while we’ve developed the product since launching - we’re very thankful for your feedback.

Starting today we’ll be implementing payment plans for new managers that sign up. The plans are based only on the number of employees that you manage. Each plan comes with every ididwork feature, and they each come with a 30-day free trial. The plans are monthly and start at $5/month for small teams. The full pricing chart is available here.

Always feel free to let us know if you find something lacking in the product. The product has evolved through many of the great suggestions that you’ve given us. We can be reached at feedback[at]ididwork.com and we personally respond to every email.

We also wanted to apologize for the recent lack of big updates. A particularly unfriendly strain of the flu got us and kept us immobile for some time. We’ve stocked up on Vitamin C though, and unless we somehow manage to catch another terrible cold, we won’t go this long without a big update again.

We’ve released a new feature on the Feed tab that lets you tell your teammates that you appreciate their work. We feel that getting complimented at the office is very encouraging - it helps let you know that people noticed the positive impact of your work.

Next to each teammate’s entry you have the option to give kudos. Kudos are a quick way to thank a teammate, let them know their work helped you, or let them know they did a great job:

When you click a Kudos your teammate will be notified in their feed:

I feel good whenever I see that!

It would be great to hear your thoughts on this. Leave us a comment, or shoot us an email at feedback[at]ididwork.com

Riding along the tail of the last feature update, we’ve added support for UTF-8 encoding. For our international users, this allows you to now make entries in your native language.

Big thanks to Dan from Anyvite.com!

We’ve just released time zone support for our international users (and if you’re picky about it, US users that are outside of Pacific Standard Time). To choose your timezone, go to the Timezone menu item in the settings section (https://ididwork.com/settings/timezone):

Just choose your timezone from the select list and click ‘Save Changes’ to enable.

What will be affected by changing the timezone?

All dates throughout the site will be localized to your timezone. Also, manager report and reminder emails will be sent relative to your timezone, vs the global midnight PST that we were using previously.

We’ve made some changes to the feed tab that many of you requested:

1. See your entries in the feed
Your entries now show up alongside your teammates’ entries. This makes it easier to track what’s being accomplished on the team and how your work fits in.

2. Filter the feed by user
Your teammates’ names are now links, and if you click one of them you’ll be able to see just that teammate’s work feed. This is helpful if you have a large team but want to quickly see what a few specific people have been working on.

We’ve just updated the export functionality to provide a much more powerful, flexible way to generate a pdf or excel download of your log entries. The link is now called “Get weekly report”, and it can be found in the submenu on the log page:

The emphasis has shifted from “export”, which implies a way to backup your data, to “Get weekly report”. Many of you have given us feedback letting us know you use export regularly to print out status reports of your weekly activites (to bring to weekly status meetings), so we wanted to make it as easy as possible. Clicking the link brings you to the report page:

Just click download and you’ll get a pdf of your previous week’s work. You can choose to export to either pdf or an excel spreadsheet, and you can customize the time range if you’d like to get a more comprehensive report.

The hidden power of this page is revealed when you click “Advanced Options”:

Here you can customize exactly what you want to show up in your generated report. As you can see, there are several ways to mix and mash the data:

1. Sort entries by - sort by either date or tag
2. Show an entry’s - here you can toggle whether to show an entry’s tags and time spent. When you choose “Time Spent”, you can further customize the time format. By choosing “1.5″, the time is shown as a the number of hours without formatting, which makes it easier to plug that data into a chart in excel
3. Get all tags - the default is to export all work entries for all tags. If you’d like to choose the work entries associated from only some of your tags, you can click “No, only certain tags”. A list of your tags will pop up, and you can choose which ones you’d like to generate a report for

Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments, or shoot us an email at feedback[at]ididwork.com.

One of the things we strive for at ididwork is to make it as simple and fast as possible for you to log your work entries. Ideally, you wouldn’t even have to log into our site. We’re taking the first step towards that goal today with the launch of our new feature - integration with AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, and Gtalk to log your entries.

When you log in, the first change you’ll notice is a “Use IM” link in the top bar:

When you click it, you’ll be taken to a page in the settings where you can enable your IM screenname:

Enter your screen name, and choose which IM service you’re using from the dropdown menu. When you click “Save Changes”, you’ll be taken to a page that will show you which IM screen name to message:

In this case, for my gtalk account, I would message “[email protected]”.

That’s it! You can now add that screenname to your buddy list and start messaging in your work entries.

You’ll also notice some helpful tips on how to add tags, time, and todo tokens to your entry. We’ve updated the syntax a bit - in an earlier iteration of ididwork the syntax was to enclose all special tokens with brackets. We’ve now changed it to a simple rule - put a “#” mark in front of any tag. For example, regarding this blog post, I would submit something like this:

“#blog #:30 Finished the new blog post about IM integration”

#blog is the tag, and #:30 means I spent 30 minutes writing it. If I wanted to add it as a todo item, I would have just added “#todo” to the entry as well.

Why’d we change the syntax? We’ve found through several usability tests that in most cases, it’s a bit faster and easier to type the ‘#’ symbol.

This is just the beginning. We’ll be adding many more ways to enter or transfer data into the system, and better ways of getting it out. If you have any ideas regarding either of these (email, firefox plugins, desktop widget, etc), feel free to leave a comment or email us at feedback[at]ididwork.com.

Updated UI

We’ve made a couple changes to the UI to make things a bit cleaner and easier to understand:

1. The old ‘Comments’ tab is now called ‘Reviews’
   We thought that ‘Reviews’ described this tab better than ‘Comments’
2. The ‘Analyze’ tab has been moved to a submenu on the log page
   We wanted to group all the ‘Log’ related functions onto one page, and give more exposure to export

And here’s the new look:

New Analysis Graphs

We’ve also made a big change to the kinds of analysis graphs that are now generated. There’s much more emphasis on tags, and you now have the ability to compare tags based on the amount of time you’ve spent.

Here’s an example graph that shows a tag breakdown based on the number of entries:

And here’s that same data using the “time spent” option:

By looking at both the number of entries and the time spent, you can get a clearer picture of where you’re doing work. For example, I can see here that I do a lot of UI tasks, but they take very little time.

We’ve also added a graph to the individual tag pages, which can be accessed by either clicking the name of the tag in your work list, or by clicking the tag bars on the Analyze page:

Here you can get a detailed look into how much time you’ve spent on a given tag, broken down by week.

Let us know what you think! Feel free to leave a comment, or email us at the usual feedback[at]ididwork.com.