Free Time sheets and elegant shampoo container design

Simple time sheet

After going through, testing a variety of time sheet options, from Toggl (rubbish) & TSheets, through to a Google Sheets add on with a calendar, through to exporting from Google Calendar, processing and importing to Google sheets, then trying add ins for Google Sheets and Calendar for a process between the two programmes.

I was just doing a little project and thought about the last post I wrote,  A free expenses tool Google sheets, forms & Gmail. That worked quite well, it was accessible remotely on my phone, either by a pinned form on my home screen, or by sending an email which has the form in the email.

So I thought, why can’t I just use that process for my project time sheets? The setup process is pretty easy, the information is formatted in a simple spreadsheet, great for a daily list of my activities on the project that I always fill out.  So I decided to set it up and it worked fine.

I’ve made the background different so I do not mistake the Expenses one with the Time sheet (there will be an issue with trying to put the wrong data in the form too!)

I’ve only made the first 2 items, Project & Date mandatory, maybe Comments should be too, as this will describe the activity on the project. I can either put in Start/end times ( a variation of this if all day is to have a lunch time to subtract for overall work- maybe I’ll add this to the form) or just put in the number of hours on a project on a specific day. Simple, and I’ll see if I need to add more columns to the form later.

The next thing I need to do is to get the Text Expander to quickly fill out for repetitive tasks for job descriptions.

Overall, this is all I need to manage my times, a simpler but transportable solution. I can easily bulk update if I’ve jotted times down on paper as I can just go to the spreadsheet and add those in.

So after trying lots of different tools I come to this. The nice thing is it can be expanded for others to use as well.So if there are a few of you working on a project, its easy to put a name field into the form.

That is something I like about Forms too, they are easy to edit.

I want to mention that every week morning I get a reminder from TSheets to clock in (and another at 5pm to clock out). I thought this was a useful feature at first, as I’m not using it at the moment, I should disable it. But this is easy to set-up with a simple Google calendar reminder at the end of each day.

Simple shampoo/conditioner design solution

I recall my frustration  of trying to read the labels on shampoo conditioner bottles in a hotel shower. As I’m getting older I need my glasses, not something you usually wear in a shower. So tiny text on bottles was of no use, the bottles themselves were similar in shape. I thought it was poor design as a large number of people wearing glasses would use hotels. So I thought the product design was pretty rubbish.

It is a trivial thing but as a designer it is something that annoys.

My usual shampoo/conditioner is Dove. The Shampoo bottle has the cap on the top (narrow shaped so cannot be put upside down) and a large base, whilst the conditioner has a large cap and is designed to be upside down, hence drains most of the conditioner at end (apart from having wide shoulders at outlet, and being the most viscous (viscosity = resistance to flow) it does not drain to outlet).

So you differentiate by different designs of bottles. But draining the last of the shampoo requires that you find some way of propping the bottle upside down near the end of the shampoo.

The L’Oreal containers I was using this morning, had a different design, it was subtle, I’d been using it for a couple of days, then I saw it. The labels were different ways up!!!

If the labels are the same way up, then Shampoo has solid base and cap to top, whilst the conditioner has the cap on the bottom. At the end of the shampoo you invert the bottle and the label is inverted, so you can still differentiate between the two bottles.

Now, for all of them, I still cannot read the text on the bottles but the different shapes of the bottles signal the different content.

There also seems to be a convention that the Shampoo has a solid base and cap on top. This is a bit like taps at a sink, with the cold on the left tap and hot on the right (an assumption of right handedness since the first tap a right-hander will reach for is the Right handed tap(cold), thereby minimising risk of scalding at an unfamiliar sink)

I may change Shampoo/conditioners from Dove to L’Oreal as they have done something elegant. I just hope the shampoo and conditioner are good!