Welcome back to Self Employed Mum. Thanks for visiting!
Recently I read this excellent post, ‘You are not a bad person and you’re not doing it wrong’ by Naomi Dunford of Ittybiz, a very straight talking blogger that helps small business owners market their business more effectively.
It’s about how so many small business owners feel overwhelmed by the sheer level of communication and ‘relationships’ caused by email, Facebook (notifications, messages, groups, pages, fans), Twitter (replies, followers, DM’s, and tweeting), LinkedIn, blog comments (commenting on blogs, replying to your own), Ning (notifications and replies), phonecalls, etc and the self imposed expectation and pressure that results.
I’ve made no secret of how stressful I find email – Every time I shrink my inbox by deleting and replying, more appears like a frickin’ mushroom cloud!
Each time these are replied to, they open up the possibility of further replies, and create more ‘relationships’.
Every day brings a new influx of relationships.
In between all of these relationships, you’ve got a child (or a few) who also need you, your home, partner, and other things in life, never mind actually running your business.
I loved when Naomi said “Web 2.0 is like a goddamn pyramid scheme. Limitless growth. Limitless connection. Limitless access, relationships, “friendlies”? It can’t happen.”
As women and mothers and business owners, we put a huge amount of pressure on ourselves. We’re ambitious, we’re competitive, and we often demand a level of perfection and ‘output’ from ourselves that we don’t expect from others. I think when they ’sort you out’ after childbirth, some of us get guilt and a hyperactive battery put inside us because so many of us are in overdrive.
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I have so many things to think about, I’m driving myself batty trying to remember what I saw when, and why I want to remember them. Writing blogs on a variety of subjects, coolhunting, noting ideas for stuff to get for the house (we’re about to go into a major phase of redecorating), and a mind a whirl with ideas, it’s surprising my head hasn’t popped off.
Thankfully I have notebooks but I’ve found something online, visual and far more organised – Evernote, a web based software that lets you save your ideas in web clips, snap shots, snippets of texts, documents (premium version), voice notes, emails and more. Evernote captures everything and automatically organises it plus you can tag and also create notebooks. It even makes printed and hand-written text inside images searchable – basically, it helps you ‘remember everything’.
Wasting no time, I quickly downloaded the free iPhone app, the Mac application, installed the Firefox add-on, and followed @myEN on Twitter, which basically once they DM you the link, you can set it up so that you can tweet stuff to it that you want to capture and save for later. Mega useful, you can do stuff like snapping photos of business cards/brochures at trade shows so you can remember who’s who and even store contacts, snap stuff like receipts, travel tickets or even the whiteboard at a meeting (v cool), keep an organised notebook of stuff you like, clip pages directly from your browser, empty out those thoughts and ideas rambling around in your head and make a todo list, and even share notebooks with everyone or just with specific people (premium feature).
I’ve always got emails that have a snippet of something that I want to reference at a later date – snatched and put in a notebook. It’s free for up 40mb of storage space per month although you can’t do stuff like uploading docs or sharing your notebooks with individuals instead of with ‘everyone’. If you want the extra bells and whistles which boosts up 500mb, it’s $5/mth or $45 for the year.
Loving it, loving it. Be gone mush brain!
Is this the ultimate in office relaxation?
The USB Aromatherapy Oil Burner delights your nose and clears your mind with just one drop.
Simply add one drop of the included aromatherapy oil onto the little X on the USB stick (see above). Step two, pop the stick into a USB drive (horizontal drives preferred to prevent drips – boo – not good for my Office Mac).
No software needed or drivers to install, as the USB Aromatherapy Oil Burner just needs to get warm. And then the lavendery smells can spread around your office and put you in a better mood.
Size: about 2.5″ long (includes mini bottle of Lavender scented oil – though can be used with any fragrance oil)
$5.99 from Think Geek. Worldwide shipping available.
Are you one of those peeps who spend a lot of time looking for colors to use online?
Do you ever look at a site and think – “ooh! that looks lovely? I wonder what those colors are?”
Then let me introduce to one of my favorite online tools, Colorzilla.
ColorZilla is a plug-in extension for Mozilla Firefox browser and the Mozilla Suite.
Although it’s aimed at web developers and graphic designers with color related tasks, like choosing website colors, it’s a very handy tool which I use more than I thought I ever would.
Once you have installed Colorzilla you are able to get an instant reading of the colors any website is using with just a quick click of the mouse. There’s also a built-in palette browser which lets you choose colors from pre-defined color sets and you can save the colors in custom palettes available online.
To give you just one example, I’m working on a website for a client at the moment – it’s a second site but needs to have the same look and feel as the original. Getting a list of the colors from the original site would be a tedious job, involving contacting her previous designers, noting them all down, checking for typos etc.. Using Colorzilla I was able to grab the colors from the site immediately and give the new techies an online link to the color palette – problem solved in nano-seconds!
Download Colorzilla and have a more colorful life online…
photo credit: Jimmy_Joe
I, like a lot of self employed mums am obsessed with snatching back time, harnessing, and managing it, so when Tabitha from Mimimyne tweeted me about web based time management, productivity, and project management software, RescueTime, I was immediately curious. In a nutshell, it tracks websites and applications that you’re actively using and shows you via graphs what you’re basically doing with your time. If you imagine a piece of software that basically gives you a smack on the bum and says ’stop fricking kidding yourself’, this is it.
Aside from tracking websites and applications, it also tracks document usage on pro packages, and creates an interesting picture of what you’re doing with your computer time. It has various levels of usage and is suited to both individuals and businesses with employees that you may want to ‘monitor’ (bit Big Brother stylee though innit?) and personally I think it’s useful for providing really useful data to help you bring about real change. You can pause tracking or ‘edit’ the data by removing stuff you don’t want in it, plus you can track offline time by adding in meeting and phonecall times.
The charts shown give some insight into last week although it’s not that accurate as I forgot to click something on my Mac for full access plus I was also away for a chunk of the week….
Why will you want to use it?
There’s what we believe we spend our time doing and what we actually spend our time doing – this is a great tool for making you get real.
If you’ve tried various ways to figure out where your time is going and given up, RescueTime does it with no effort and will probably mention stuff you haven’t even thought of.
Have that imaginary colleague interject and tell you that your time is up on a particular application or website by setting up alerts.
That same imaginary colleague can also be the killjoy you need and block out distracting stuff so that you can focus on what you need to do.
RescueTime has its own idea of what it determines as productive, neutral, or distracting, but this can be tweaked to suit. My business is web driven and with a few of the sites driven by coolhunting, some sites that I use will come up as distracting when I really was working not shopping etc.. Some may consider the idea of having so much insight into your activities as depressing – be warned, it’s an initial shock to the system when you see where your time is going.
It can cost as little as $5.30 (14 day trial available) to use Solo Pro but there’s a free option (you can’t block out or set rules, plus it only stores 3 months worth of data), Solo Lite, which is ideal if you want to get initial insight to rescue your time. And of course, there are business packages available which are particularly useful when you’re working with teams of people.
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