The wonders of the Dropbox

If you are a big company working with many freelancers, many of them located very far away, it is normal to try finding a way to quantify the amount of work spent for you. The culture of work is challenged dramatically by the latest work trends but, as usual, the mind patterns did not change over night. 

As I am working as a freelancer for over five years, I was faced more than once with the suspicions of my otherwise nice bosses regarding the way in which I do spent my time. Especially in the case of people not familiar with what exactly does it mean to be a freelancer and somehow envious of your freedom of spending an impressive amount of time home zapping websites and drinking your coffee all day long and having free hot homemade lunch. What for a freelancer this is the golden mine of freedom: the possibility of organizing your time up to your needs, without spending hours commuting and killing time in the company of nice or not so nice colleagues.

Anyway, regardless of how much you will write and say about how wonderful is to be a freelancer, you will always be the target of various suspicions. But in the world of 2.0., there are a lot of tools that will help your reluctant employer to quantify your work. 

Take, for instance, the Dropbox. It is a system that allows employers to share docs, organize and edit information. Either you are in Sydney or Buenos Aires, you will add there your work objectives, your plans and even your financial documents. There are versions available for phone and if you can install it in a matter of minutes on your desktop.

There are three available variants: Free - you can use 2GB, Pro - $9.99/month and a capacity that goes till 500 GB and Business - highly recommended for teams, with a lot of safety features, permanent phone support and unlimited deletion recovery. 

If you want to find out more about it and to get updated with news, you must follow their blog, updated regularly.

Now, your virtual boss will be more happy and you can impress him/her with your speed and the amount of reports produced daily. (Each document uploaded has a date and the mention of the last update).

Good luck Dropboxing!

Tell your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free

I am a passionate reader of books about time management, but even more passionate to practice various recipes - personal or borrowed - of how to efficiently use my time. In the middle of writing a new book - about communications and customers service a project I have in mind for at least 5 months, but wasn't a pro manager of my writing time - I decided to have a look in my Kindle for useful resources.

Amy Lynn Andrews' book: Tell your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free helped me to better organize the coming weeks of writing when I need to juggle with the housework obligations, a very challenging new job where I need to be very active and an impressive amount of social obligations. Add to this some other equally important spiritual requirements and you have an impressive mosaique of a hectic life. 

My lessons learned from the book:

- planning, planning and planning

- The confirmation of my old feeling I live with since early childhood: 'Any significant change in our lives will require patience and sacrifice'.

- When you have your priorities set, you can enjoy the freedom of organizing the daily and weekly blocks of time in a flexible way. For instance, if today the domestic chores can be finished in 10 minutes, you dedicate the rest of the time assigned for such activities for writing or volunteering. 

- We are always in control of our own time, and we should make the right choices for a balanced time schedule. But in order to achieve this, we should establish what our roles are - wife, mother, businesswoman, consultant, teacher, writer etc. - what are our main objectives in each case and what are our daily tasks. 

- Write down your objectives and set up the Excel/Google doc with your set-up activities: both the negotiable and non-negotiable ones. 

The conclusion: you have a dream? Work for it punctiliously, hard, with a bit of sacrifice but at the end of your journey, most likely it will turn into reality. 

How to organize your blogging life

Let's think about the following nightmare scenario:

Happy mother, with a high academic profile, with a busy happy family life, and a lot of social networking, and a lot of passion for writing, reading - as many domains as possible, and many blogs to manage on a daily basis. Please add to the list a new job and some extra business projects I need to continue at least for a couple of months. I also love to cook and to blog about my recipes. I need to attend conferences, improve two foreign languages and other 'must to' at least twice the day.

Sounds crazy, I know, but I use to sleep maximum 5 hours the day and I am perfectly healthy. However, when it comes to my small blogging empire, I suffer a lot for neglecting the regular contributions. As one day - and many years later -  I hope I will be professional enough to focus exclusively on managing my blogging portfolio, I need to prepare the official launch of my free life. But how?

The easiest way to plan is to dedicate at least one hour the day updating two of the blogs and another 30 minutes later the day to keep the track of the social media from the domains close to those blogs. It is important that I create thus a certain regularity of the posts, instead of the current pace when I use to dedicate a couple of days in a row to updating one or two of the blogs and not returning for the next 2 weeks. On the other hand, as blogging is the only activity without deadlines, it was healthier for a while to refrain from being too intensive, as I need to draw the separation line between 'freedom' and 'financial slavery'.

I will try to keep this program at least for two weeks from now and evaluate if it is feasible or not. I decided - 100% randomly - to dedicate the Mondays and Tuesdays to this blog, so hope to be back then!

Geek recommendations of the week

Ready to improve your knowledege and tools about web design and Internet. Here are my recommendations of the week:

For simple and efficient JavaScript applications, you should choose qooxdoo.

If you are looking for a webhosting solution, you can give a chance to 1und1.de. If you are not in Germany, you shouldn't have regrets, as the service is also available in: Canada, USA, Poland, Austria, France, UK, Italy, Spain and Romania.   

Looking for a reliable, free and downloadable web analytics software: give a chance to Piwik, available in more than 40 languages.

Worried that you spend too much time on your computer? If you want the analytics, you should try to figure out professionally about the time, by using an efficient time management tool: Rescuetime. For both individuals and businesses it is considered highly accurate. Here you have an evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of this system, compared with another similar tool, Time Doctor, mostly recommended for big companies.

Always in a hurry and you do not have time to watch some interesting videos? Save them for later on, with the help of the Watchlater application.

Coordinating a project is not easy, but with the help of Trello, you can significantly improve your record. 

Love the summer vacation but you would be interested to get some more money from your online activity. Try Shareifyoulike, a free platform that pays you for sharing content. 

Worried about the fate of your website? With Backupify.com, you are care free as you can backup all the information you worked to have online for such a long time.

If you are a graphic artist and creative professional, you are keen to share online your experience and eventually to expand your porfolio of customers. With carbonmade.com, you can do it in a professional way, but setting up and sharing your porftolio online. 

Geek recommendations

I tried lately to read more about interesting tools that could help you have a happy professional online life.

Here are a couple of news I am glad to share with my readers:

Socialfixer.com is a tool that will help you manage your Facebook activity. It is a free browser extension that will help you improve the visibility of the feeds. 


PagePress App is about Facebook too: if you have a Wordpress blog, it helps you to automatically update your content on your Facebook Fan Page. 


Are you worried that your team is not working too hard for finishing the project in time? Maybe you are right, maybe not. If you want to have the real picture of the situation, you should use the advantages offered by your virtual project manager - Happytodos. You can not only prioritize your tasks but also see who is working on what.  


Good luck!

Saving time on Twitter

A couple of tips via The Mashable, to think about during the w/e.

Lesson of the day: How to use 5 minutes for your best

Very good early morning article, via Harvard Business Review.

Meditations on Scrum and Agile

Image via Wikipedia

I am not an expert on SCRUM and I assume that I will never be, but I am extremely interested in this new way of managing projects as a part of a revolutionary mindset that I associate with our hi-tech-world. I had the occasion to work in various environments covering various domains, exclusively in the area of PR and communications. But this Department is not an isolated domain and most part of the time you are more exposed than the others to the advantages and disadvantages of the organizational culture and working style of your company. The opportunities opened by SCRUM are, in my opinion, the increase of the level of efficiency, a better time management, a better evaluation of your aims and tools to reach your targets, as an increased efficiency of human resources management. Both the classical and the new way of project and knowledge management are producing results. What the new way of thinking and putting things in perspective is extremely important in delivering fast and within the best organizational matrix. I will have always keep my ears and eyes and mind open to new paradigms and ideas, be case I am convinced on the need to improve my skills and knowledge and, by than, be able to produce and induce change in the world.

Related articles

• Is Agile Methodology Right For Your Company? (prweb.com)
• Agile Product Management with Scrum (i-programmer.info)