Time is a subject that features regularly on ToW (tick, tock, tick, tock); maybe it’s a fact of getting older that it seems to speed up, or it could just be that the IT industry has for so long sold the vision of increasing productivity, that we start to believe it too.

If we become more effective in some ways, decreasing the time it takes to accomplish mundane stuff, will we spend the regained hours doing more stuff, or just fritter it away meaninglessly? Discuss, ad inifinitum.

Quick Time

One thing you could do when deciding what to do with all the spare hours the world of Yammer, Slack, Outlook, Skype etc has delivered, is to go right now and uninstall QuickTime from your PC. After 20 years of providing the Windows version, Apple has decided (to quote El Reg) to take QT for a long drive down a country road. The US Dept of Homeland Security advises immediate removal of QuickTime, since it contains zero-day vulnerabilities which Apple will not fix, ever. Whilst thinking about security, wonder about the effectiveness of the Thousands Standing Around at US airports, or consider if you really need to change your passwords after all.

Find Time

A few months ago, a Microsoft Garage project released FindTime, an addin to Outlook and Office365 which allows a meeting organiser to send a request out to a group of people, to vote for when the best time to hold the meeting is. The best part is, the recipients don’t need to be using Office365, don’t even need to be in the same company – so you could ask your customers to join in the negotiation for when the best time to meet would be.