What a great thread. I love reading how people work in the business. There is so little information on project billing and workflow and practices out there (opportunity knocking?).
Anyway I got to thinking about remotely hosted applications such as Gmail and the like after reading this article:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080324.wrgoogle24/BNStory/Technology/home
After a catastrophic hard disk failure I went to an extreme with remote apps, from GMail to Basecamp (don’t really use it now) to Freshbooks for billing (I’ll keep this one) and Amazon S3 for remote backups. I do local backups daily with a dos batch script I wrote that backs up to my local USB drive and it gets updated to S3 via JungleDisk.
Now I am considering moving it all. Gmail will hurt the most. I absolutely hate desktop email clients of all kinds. OE, Tbird, the lot are slow and antiquated. Web mail chews in other forms especially those apps that run on cPanel servers like Squirrel, or Horde. They are slow and painfully full of useless crap. pine was better.
S3 is encrypted but who knows what the Patriot Act black hats are doing with it.
On the workflow front. I came from a healthcare management consultancy where process was important. In fact if you get the process down in writing in the form of checklists and forms (electronic are fine) that you don’t think about it after a while and it becomes second nature. I mostly work alone yet I have been using paper job/task sheets since year one. I grab one, complete the work needing doing and put it in my inbasket.
I also read Tim Ferriss’ book the Four Hour Work Week and even though I was on the GTD track I realized that 90% of the stuff going into my inbasket was stuff I would never really do. Selective ignorance became my new method. So what I was managing was rapidly reduced. I went extreme on this as I ended up disconnecting with some valuable information streams, some motivations and most of all I forgot the motivating effect some blog authors had on me.
I tend to be impulsive and unfocused. Actually, working as a web designer these last few years is the longest I have ever been at any one thing.
I found Michael Gerber’s Emyth Revisited to be transforming when I read it regarding workflows. If you build your workflows as if someone else is going to do it for you. The system will do the work and people can aspire to improve the system instead of always reinventing it at every new post.
Hope I will be 100% soon so I will be thinking clearly enough for this to all come together.
Cheers all,
Jay
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MODX Staff
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