ididwork

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 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 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.

You can now edit the date on your entries. This is great if you’ve missed a day and want to backdate an entry to that particular day.

To edit the date, click on the “edit” link on any of the log or analyze work lists. You’ll be taken to an edit dialogue, where you can modify the date, entry name, and tags. Click on the calendar and choose the new date, and click update.

Sorry about the downtime just now. We had to take the system down for about 2 hours today as we fixed a bug that prevented some users from logging in. We normally push updates in the wee hours of the night, but this seemed to warrant immediate action.

If you’re still experiencing login problems, please shoot me an email at remanc[at]ididwork.com or send me a twitter (remanc), and we’ll get that resolved as fast as possible.

We just pushed a quick release for some small things that were (admittedly) annoying.

1. Update your name - now you can do it - just go to https://ididwork.com/settings/name
2. Remove account - this one’s pretty important for all of you who accidentally signed up for the wrong account (team instead of individual, or vice versa). This is a quick workaround while we make those two accounts merge better (should be coming out within a couple days, ie the ability to add entries as a manager)
3. Export time spent - Now that you have the ability to add time spent (see previous post), you want to be able to have it show up in your export. Does it now.
4. Enter to save entry - Click “Add” or hit enter to submit a task