Create useful timelines with Timetoast [Hack Your Day]
If you like to organize your information, how about giving a timeline a try? I don’t think many of us use this for personal productivity, although it’s a great way to showcase information, and even share it if you want to. I haven’t actually done this myself, but after getting to know Timetoast, I might just get into this myself.
Why use timelines?
In short, timelines can put information into context (using a visual representation of time), therefore give you added information and increase your productivity. You can use it to show data that is in very close relation to time very effectively, giving you a visual aid when glancing over your data.
In addition, it is also a fun way of sharing information, you can document long trips, relationships, important stops in your life, historical data for students and so on and so forth.
Using Timetoast
Timetoast is a cinch to use, when you sign up you can start creating timelines right away. All it takes is clicking on the add event button, setting the date, adding and optional image and giving it a title and an optional longer description.
Your data will automatically be shown on the timeline in an easy to digest fashion, allowing you to edit and modify everything later. When viewing the timeline you can click on the events to bring up the longer description and a larger version of the photo attached.
Using Timetoast for productivity
To use Timetoast for productivity it is best if you can combine data from multiple sources into one timeline. A great example is blog statistical data for example. Every day you can visit Alexa, Google Analytics, Feedburner, Technorati and various other sites and record the rating they give you. You can enter them into the timeline and you will have a database of easily readable data from multiple sources.
You can modify this a bit and set a % change where you record the data. For example, you only add an event for Google Analytics when your visitor count increases by 10%. This is useful for recording and visualizing your growth patterns, if there’s a longer time between some of your increases, you may want to find the problem. This becomes increasingly complex and informative once you add all the other data.
Timetoast shortcomings
Timetoast was founded in 2007, so it is still relatively new and will probably undergo changes, but I will nevertheless share some things I missed in there. Timetoast would be a great way for me to share all my posts with my readers. Since I post to about 5 other sites, I could enter each post and put the timeline on my site. However, Timetoast can only narrow down to a day base, not an hourly or minute based timeframe, therefore I could only list posts for a day. I’d much rather have detail down to the minute, which would allow me much more control over everything I input.
Formating is another big issue for me. In my example I explained adding website statistics to the timeline. It would be great if you could format the even boxes, change there color, font etc because this would allow me to highlight some important points in my statistics. I could indicate in red when I first went under 100,000 in Alexa, and so on. You could also record data every day instead after every 10% increase and indicate every 10% increase with red, giving you full, but still clear data.
Point and click event adding would be nice using a double click for example, but this is just a minor point, adding an event with the add event button is still pretty easy.
All in all Timetoast is a great application if you’d like to create some simple timelines, if you have any ideas for using them with advanced productivity please let us know in the comments!
Original post here: Daniel
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