Business Tools of Chaos and Madness
Life here has become increasingly, and more economically, hectic over the last few months and this has led to my having to seriously reconsider the traditional ad-hoc methods I’ve been using in my day to day business process. Those included a randomly scribbled in spiral ring pad, a semi-committed password / client detail book that rarely gets updated in favour of random spiral ring pad scribbles, and a folderless email system where I just let Outlook auto archive stuff to somewhere I’ve never got around to finding. Not very pretty you can imagine.
Add to that the challenge that I’m doing my project software engineering units this year at university to finish my Bachelor of Computing. Ouch!
So I’ve had to wake up to myself a bit and invest the time and a few cents in some tools. First I subscribed to Basecamp for project management (from 37 Signals) and moved a lot of that stuff out of email. The challenge there is getting others to consistently upload the files and post to the project rather than email directly, but that’s the beginning. For me its made a major difference. I also have Campfire for chats if necessary.
I’m using Tempo to keep track of my timesheets because its simple and straightforward and I like the experience. I’ve mentioned one minor irk and received an email from Stephen the next day that said they’d done some programming changes overnight to fix the issue. That is a major marketing green tick. I gladly recommend them on. And if only three minor improvements were made to reports (sub_totals, hours displayed in hours / minutes, and the ability to email a PDF directly from the report itself) I’d say it had everything I would need as a freelancer. As it is its well on the way to being one of my favourite applications. I like that Stephen has a name and took the time to contact me. Great marketing.
For invoicing I’m using Blinksale and find that a great application to get invoices out there. Its one of the sexiest applications for the unsexiest side of doing business, too.
I’m also reviewing my work practices in little steps. Through work this last week I’ve had to read a lot about David Allen’s Getting Things Done action management method. Basically you need to get all that stuff you’re holding in your head and put it into a trusted system where you can find it again. It goes on from there. But in baby steps I need to install some level of personal task management regime if I’m going to make it through the year. Just as an example I’d say I lost 2 to 3 hours today (unbillable hours) to mismanaged time. Particularly around not being aware what my next actions were going to be. So I need to de-junk my head and work from there. Over on 43 Folders they have a compilation of 8 small interviews with David Allen (1 hour and 26 minutes) as a podcast. You might find it worth your while.
I’d like to be able to say in three months that I’m on top of those three unproductive unbillable hours. We all need our tools of chaos and madness.
