ididwork

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.