Starting with ByCycle
Here we describe some basic practices of working with ByCycle.
This information would be very useful if you want to improve your organisation and boost natural productivity.
General overview of ByCycle
ByCycle is an online application designed to provide the simplest and the most efficient routines for personal organisation, work planning and team collaboration.
It was crafted upon Excel forms and therefore ByCycle is a direct improvement of Excel.
ByCycle is built according to fundamental standards, which makes it simple to learn and easy for everyday use.
Record all activities
When starting work with ByCycle, we recommend to utilise one simple routine:
Record all 24 hours of daily activities, including sleeping and doing nothing.
In ByCycle Calendar, each time-slot functions as an Excel cell, making it extremely easy to add and update records.
It takes 2–3 minutes per day to record all activities.
Despite its simplicity, this practice brings enormous benefits.
You will start to value your attention and focus on actual events of your life.
ByCycle Calendar is a simple tool to record daily activities.
Use Time Report
Time Report gives us an objective picture of our lives and provides data for life-changing decisions.
This report is built upon calendar records and reflects all activities we write in our calendars.
To open Time Report just click on the time-clock in the right upper corner of the screen.
In the Time Report we can see which activities we performed and how much attention we paid to each particular activity.
It is a really useful form for raising personal motivation and overcoming chronic procrastination.
If we work in a team, the Time Report allows to supervise the workload of each particular team member and evaluate its actual contribution to the final results.
Time Report is a very convenient form to observe our actual life.
Work upon weekly plans
It is very difficult to maintain stable productivity and stay focused if we organise our work only upon daily to-do lists.
Daily plan is a primitive and therefore inefficient way of planning work and tracking progress.
A much better way to stay organszed is to utilise the practice of working upon weekly plans.
A weekly plan is 7 times more powerful tool than a daily to-do list.
Here is a 3-step instruction to utilise weekly plans.
First, we record all our ideas, plans and intentions as tasks in Task menu.
Second, we add tasks to our Calendar Weekly Plan, by updating their status as To Do.
Third, we drag&drop tasks from the Weekly Plan to calendar time-slot.
The Weekly Plan can be found in the Calendar menu to the left of the calendar field.
In this way, we can easily observe the current week, see the list of tasks we want to accomplish and plan our further actions.
Weekly plan is 7 times more powerful tool than a daily to-do list.
Use statuses in Weekly Plan
To simplify work with the Weekly Plan we introduced statuses for the Weekly Plan as well.
We mark the tasks we want to work on today with an orange star. Such tasks will always stay at the top of the list.
After we accomplish a task, we mark it with a purple star. Accomplished tasks stay at the bottom of the list.
In this way, we can easily see which tasks of the Weekly Plan are already done, which are waiting and which we are going to work on foremost.
Statuses in Weekly Plan help to keep focus on the high priority tasks.
Update status stars
Updating status stars is the simplest way to collaborate on a task.
1. When Leader creates a task, this task gets status Planned (white star).
2. After Hero decides to start working on a task, he sets its status as To Do (orange star). Tasks with status To Do appear in the Weekly Plan of the current week.
3. When Hero finishes his work on a task, he sets its status as Completed (green star).
4. Now it is the time for the Leader to evaluate the final result.
a. If Leader finds the result to be achieved as planned, Leader sets the status of task as Done (purple star).
Done tasks disappear from the Active list in the Task menu and can be found in the Done list.
b. If Leader thinks that the result is not achieved, he sets the status of the task as Planned or To Do, returning such task to Hero for further work.
It is worth mentioning that all actions are literally performed with one click.
Done filter contains all accomplished tasks.
This process continues until the planned result is achieved, and Leader sets the status of a task as Done (purple star).
Status-based collaboration is a very simple and effortless way for efficient teamwork.
In this way, we cut off lots of unnecessary discussions, effectively saving a considerable amount of our precious attention for the actual work.
Task file contains all important information about a task.
Hot keys
We have some hot-keys in ByCycle, to simplify and speedup the workflow. Here are some of them:
1. To activate a line for a fast edit in Task menu – use [Enter] button or hold [Alt]+click combination.
2. When in Calendar click on a task in Weekly Plan and then use [Shift]+[Enter] to add this task to the current time-slot.
3. To set or cancel the recurrence function for a task in Calendar – use hold [Alt]+click combination. Deleting a recurrent task will not cancel recurrence itself.
4. To choose several records in Calendar – hold [Shift] button and then click on the first and the last record in the range.
5. In Calendar you can drag&drop a record to copy&paste it onto a needed time-slot.
6. To move a record – hold [Alt] and then drag&drop.
7. To delete anything – use [Delete] button.
Use help-boxes “?“ to see hot-keys and instructions for a particular form.
ByCycle is a beautiful and simple tool for work planning and team collaboration.
Try ByCycle for free and see how it works for you.
Check our gallery for more pictures of ByCycle.
For any questions or comments, feel free to contact us here.