• Links Round Up for 10/3/10

    It’s October! My favorite month, and not just because it’s my birthday this month. Baseball postseason, Football in full swing, the weather is cool, and the leaves are changing. What more can you want? But enough of that. Here are the things that caught my eye during the last week of September.

    Some closing notes: Dexter Season 5 premiered last week: Here’s the full episode from Showtime’s official YouTube page. As far are music goes, I picked up Brandon Flowers’ (of The Killers) new album, Flamingo. It’s pretty good (note: really good. very personal).

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    My Interview at FreelanceFuse

    Sam McArdle over at FreelanceFuse was nice enough to interview me about being a freelancer- primarily how I started the business and manage my web development projects. I really enjoyed doing the interview (even if he is a Redsox fan!) and appreciate his interest in my business and freelancing in general.

    From his site:

    The FreelanceFuse mission is to create a resource for readers (and listeners) to understand where successful freelancers come from, where they are right now and where they are going in the future. The idea is to provide stories that are so powerful they inspire up and coming freelancers to quit procrastinating and start doing.

    This is a mission I can get behind 100%. So head on over and check out my interview, along with the others there!

    My Interview | FreelanceFuse Home

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    Using Google Voice for Business

    google voice logoAs a freelancer, I don’t have an office, or employees, or all the extra stuff that one might have as a business. I work from home, with my laptop, my cell phone, and if I need to offload some work, I have a group of subcontractors I can call. This of course makes it harder to separate personal and professional life, especially if I’m giving people my cell phone number as a means of contact. That has changed with Google Voice.

    Read More “Using Google Voice for Business”

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    The 7 Day Work Week

    It used to be the case that Sunday truly was a day of rest. Shops closed, people went to church, had an early dinner, and called it a day. Then stores started to stay open on Sundays. The hours got longer. Now some places are open 24 hours, 5 days a week. Some 24/7. It used to be the case that once you left the office for the day, you were done working. How could you work? All your stuff was at the office. How would anyone reach you? Now we have cell phones, IM, email on our phones; we are reachable all the time. “Open” 24/7. And that’s what people expect now. Our culture is moving towards a 24/7 work mentality to be more productive, and make more money. That needs to change.

    It’s more coincidence than anything that I started to  have these thoughts before, but on the same day that, I started reading The Four Hour Work Week. I’m just into it, and this post is not a book review, but Ferriss does talk early on about some of the stuff that spurred these thoughts. I wrote a while back about not responding to email right away. It’s not to be rude, but to set a precedent and draw some boundaries. If people think you are always available, they will expect you to be on call all the time. This isn’t healthy for you or them. And it’s not just with email.

    I’ve had clients call me at midnight because they ‘needed’ to talk to me. I get calls on the weekend, and people who want to schedule meetings on Sundays. And it’s not that I’m lazy that I don’t want to do that; people can’t work all the time. It’s not physically or mentally healthy. So how do we solve this problem?

    Don’t be afraid to draw those boundaries. Tell your clients or co-workers that you’re only available during business hours. Don’t answer business email on the weekend. Take the weekends for yourself. I took the 4th of July weekend completely off. From Friday to Sunday I did no work- I even put up an email auto-response. It was the first time in a long time I did that because I have the same mentality others do- I work a lot. Usually I take the weekends for side projects or small rush jobs I want to get out of the way. But it’s that mentality that causes a lot of people to burn out hard and fast.

    Maybe it’s that we are in front of a computer anyway, or we think, “Well I’m not doing anything now,” that we take that call or work on that project. But we don’t have to produce all the time. It’s ok to do nothing. Having a lazy day is perfectly acceptable, and in some cases, needed. So far I like The Four Hour Work Week because Ferriss talks about how to be more productive in less time, and how to take time for yourself. I’ll post more about it as I read it, but remember this: Working 24/7 is NOT a good mentality. I think we should remember the days when Sunday really was a day of rest.

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    My Thoughts on Less Accounting

    At the beginning of the year I wanted to find all-inclusive, online accounting software. That is, something that kept track of invoicing, other income, and expenses. As much as I loved Zoho Invoices, I needed expense tracking. So after doing some research, I settled on Less Accounting. Here are my thoughts.

    Pros:

    • You can import contacts from Highrise, GMail, or Basecamp
    • It has expense tracking
    • You can upload receipts to go along with each expense
    • It’s relatively cheap
    • The dashboard is pretty nice (though total income and expenses would be nice)
    • The reports features are nice

    Cons:

    • Recurring invoices do not auto send – why even have recurring invoices if I still need to go in and send it myself?
    • Recurring invoices weren’t working at all for 3 weeks after I first started using it
    • Email messages do no format- All of my emails when sending invoices have been on one line no matter how I format it
    • No “Mark Invoice as paid.” I actually have to go in, add a payment, reenter all the invoice information and then associate an invoice with the payment
    • Import Highrise contacts also wasn’t working for a while after I first started using it. I reported both this and the invoices twice
    • In order for my recurring expenses to have a name, they must be associated with a contact, so all my recurring invoices say “No Contact” instead of the reference name, like “Monthly Subscription to X”
    • I had to fix one of my recurring expenses to actually get it to show up, and my other ones still aren’t because I need to fix them, which isn’t very intuitive. If I set the 7th of each month as a recurring expense, it should show up on the 7th (or maybe even a few days before)
    • An “Include Paypal link,” while not detrimental, would be nice. Zoho Invoices had it and I used that quite a bit

    All-in-all I’m not to impressed by Less Accounting, despite all  the rage about it, and the fact that they sponsor a site called, “We All Hate Quickbooks.” The design is nice as are some of the features, but they took some liberties on user experience (or poorly designed their databases), leading to some pretty big grievances.

    Did I miss something? Am I doing something wrong? Comments are open.