Jose da Silva

4 Tips for getting your productivity back

2009-07-17T20:46:39+00:00

Do you ever felt that you are doing less work than you used to do a few time ago? I felt like this, when i got back from a vacations period!

So i self-imposed some rules, to get back on track.

1. Start early

Is less probable to have interruptions on the beginning of the day than later. People usually gets into work and reads the news, checks their Facebook profiles, and a huge amount of other personal tasks, so is more likely that on the first hours of your working day you get no, or few, interruptions from your co-workers.

2. Put first things first

Always start your day with the most important task for the day, is more likely that your more productive time of day is when you start working, and you have less distractions or interruptions.

3. Put your headphones on

If you have your headphones set, people will only interrupt you if the subject is really important or urgent, otherwise they will send you an email, allowing you to prioritize response times.

4. Turn your email client your ally

By transforming your email client into your best friend you will be able to spend less time reading your emails.
Create filters based on priority, usually received emails from some persons, or some company departments, are more likely to need a quick answer than others. Create filters to help you spending the time where you need to during the day.
Filters like "Critical - NOW", "Urgent - 4 Hours", "Normal - Today", "Low - This week", will help you to only look into what really maters each time.

What do you do in order to keep you levels of productivity high ?

Once a freelancer always a freelancer

2008-07-11T08:42:58+00:00

Most of freelancers, have gone from a full time job, to a freelancer way of living.

What makes a freelancer ?

The blood that runs under his vain, you born a freelancer, you don't choose to be a freelancer, it's on your spirit. You even could foolish yourself, and convincing yourself that a full time job is the right for you, but you know that you'll never be happy doing a full time job, because you are a freelancer!

What could make a freelancer get a full time job ?

Responsibilities

- When you get responsibilities, and start to get worried about family and fixed bills, there is a tendency to start getting questions. With a full time job seems easier to have commodity, on the financial field. But this means that you don't have control of you life, and way of living.

Empty clients pipeline

- When the clients/project pipeline gets empty, means that you got no income, that is one of the biggest freelancer worries about, but you know what, you should always aim for maintenance clients that get's you a steady income.

Surely there are more reasons to get a full-time job, for me , this two are the dark shadow of any freelancer, and the devil's temptation!

Laura Spencer, gives her point of view at FreelanceFolder.com, and i completely agree with her.

The principal point, that every freelance should think, is that none of
the areas will be easy, a full time job isn't more safe than a
freelance spirit, it's a mater of organization and approach to the
freelance way of living.

My personal experience

I have been a freelancer for some years, than i became drunk with a project and a moved to a full time position, after that full time position another great project was offered to me, and i got drunk again, with another full time position, and the story goes on an on. But everything on life is temporal, just keep the blood running and you'll get back again.

This is the danger i am talking about, if you want/need to be a frelance, don't get drunk with projects.

MyPictr - Social Profiles Pictures made easy

2008-06-21T08:57:46+00:00

Just discovered MyPictr.com,
and after a small and quick try out, that was what i needed, fast and
quick photo crop. I loved the simplicity and the easiness of the system. I needed to create a picture for my Technorati Profile, and after a quick search, i found out MyPictr.com!

What i needed to make my perfect sized picture:

Easy enough for me, and allowed me to create, with the same picture, several formats and sizes for my other social comunities!

Weekend Readings (June 20th-21st 2008)

2008-06-20T18:28:20+00:00

Save a list of links during this last week, in order to read them over the weekend. Plans to deeply read and implement Phing on our actual project, so i believe that from the 4 topics bellow the Phing one will consume most of my weekend, although i am curious about the other ones too!

PHP Development best practices

2008-06-20T12:18:45+00:00

Matthew Weier O'Phinney presentations at DPC2008 are now available on Matthew's blog,
in one of his presentations Matthew makes an approach to PHP Best Practices, on a daily basis, using PHP as example.

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Topics like:

Testing
Coding Standards
Design patterns
Code Documentation
- My Code
- Application Code

Source Control

Probably doesn't add alot to whom is doing software for living, and is an active member of language communities! although is allways great to review the topics and discover that some of the important topics are being loosed with time.