Jan
09

Hourglass for Jira

Over here in LunarLincoln land we’ve been working on a few things….client work, mentoring, getting Little Doors in the dang App Store (I’ll cover that more in another post). While all of this has been happening, we have a little internal project that’s been chugging along making some background profits.

Oh hey there…

What is Hourglass?

It’s a tool we built a year ago when an extremely popular time tracking plugin we used in Jira basically blew up for a few days. Those were busy and important days where we didn’t want to have to track time manually, so Wiley spent the weekend hacking together a little tool we could use ourselves in the meantime. Goodbye expensive plugin behemoth with a shaky support record – hello Hourglass – our own simple but scrappy time tracker.

We used it for a few weeks, made some improvements, and thought, “Why not share this with others?” Maybe there are other people out there who also just want something simple and straightforward. Start your clock, stop your clock, that’s it. So, we put it in the Atlassian Marketplace, threw up a website and that was it….for a while.

Then we started getting sales checks. Not massive amounts, but a little something nice from Atlassian each month. We decided to show our little time tracker  some love, so we made a few updates: new Atlassian UI, a dashboard and some more analytics.

To date, users of Hourglass have logged almost 3 million minutes of billable time. They’ve created 25,000 worklogs.  They are based in 50 countries and a surprising number of different industries.

Which brings us to the present day. While we are still on our epic search for the best business idea ever, we thought we’d make a short pitstop in Atlassian plugin-land and build a few more nuggets of code that don’t require long term marketing. A few more monthly sales checks wouldn’t be too bad too.  We’re pretty intimate with the ins and outs of Jira. We have some gripes that could use a plugin and there are probably some people out there with the very same complaints.  Do you have any Jira complaints? “It’s so annoying when….” ‘s ? Send them on over! (jennifer@lunarlincoln.com or twitter @lunarlincoln). It’s not the next Facebook, but it’ll certainly make your day to day a bit more pleasant – one tiny tool at a time.

Sep
23

Just get it done, dammit – To-Do Apps

We’re busy, you’re busy, everyone has shit to do. But the real question is – how DO you get all that stuff done? Magic? Mary Poppins finger snapping? I wish.

marypoppinssnap

For me, I am old-school. I love nothing more than making a list at the start of each day and checking things off on a pad of paper. Each little checkmark sends a tiny bit of dopamine coursing into my brain. (Sometimes I’m guilty of even half x’ing a box when I’m in progress on a task and want to congratulate myself on being “mostly” done). This works for me. It helps me sort and prioritize my day and gives me a historical list of things done and not done.

Others may want a more high-tech approach. Enter “To Do” apps. Everyone and everyone’s cousin has an idea for a good to do app. “It will revolutionize your world!”.

No. No it will not. It is just an app.


Screen Shot 2014-09-23 at 12.12.27 PM

But, there are a lot of them out there – you almost need to make a list in order to find one.

  1. Make list of what would be helpful
  2. Research top to-do lists
  3. Download 15 to-do apps
  4. Spend hours procrastinating by testing out apps in order to find “the ONE”
  5. Enter half your information in several apps
  6. Cry as your phone explodes with endless notifications
  7. Spend all your time dismissing notifications and not getting anything done.


As you can see – its a lot to think about. However, what will be most effective is an app that MOTIVATES you. Me? I’m motivated by getting to check boxes. But….
some may like it to be a competitive game (HabitRPG)
some may need threats (Carrot)
some may need a pretty app to look at their list in (Clear)
some may just want an app that consents to their procrastination (Procrastination)
some just want to use what everyone else is using (Wunderlist)

Ironically, Wiley has “writing a post about to do apps” on his to do list – I’m not sure all these fancy apps are helping him DO it though.

(Further disclosure Wiley has used the following in his search for “THE ONE” : Wunderlist, Things, Omnifocus, To-Doist, Checkmark, Clear, Carrot, Free-time, Lift, DOOO, 30/30, Nobze, EasyTask Manager – THIS IS ONLY ON IPHONE)

How does LunarLincoln, as a company, handle to-do lists? Drum-roll please: JIRA. JIRA is the grandfather of development to-do lists. It provides bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management functions and is where we spend ALL DAY LONG. It also keeps us on track, our clients on track, and sorts through the hundreds of storyboards we are constantly creating.  JIRA is the un-pc shortening of Godzilla – and is made by Atlassian.

We’ll cover more about JIRA and it’s sister program Confluence next week. For now I’ll leave you with Travis in a godzilla costume, showing how much he loves JIRA:

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