As much as I love Priacta’s Total, Relaxed Organization and their TROG Bar utility, I hate how much memory Outlook takes up. I decided to do some hunting for a replacement Personal Information Manager that meets the TRO requirements and has a much smaller memory footprint. After giving Essential PIM Pro and WinPIM a try, I settled on WinPIM. Here’s why.
But first, the bad news
For years I have hosted my own email in one way or another, sometimes in my own office, on a shared hosting server, or on a dedicated hosted server. My main requirements were to have IMAP and web access so I could easily keep all email in one place and access it from anywhere. After trying Lotus Notes, Scalix, hMailServer, and a number of other open source options for Windows and Linux, I finally gave up after discovering Google Apps.
With Google Apps, I get all the power of Gmail as if it is my my own domain email server. Even though it’s Gmail, everything I send is from solodevelopersuccess.com. The free standard version includes 25 accounts with 8gb of storage each as well as Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Chat and Google Sites. I can even set Google Sites to be my primary web site, however it’s quite limited so I’m sticking with using a shared server account from A2 Hosting.
The ABCpdf component from WebSuperGoo enables easy creation and manipulation of PDF files from any .NET language. I recently had an urgent project come up that made ABCpdf a perfect fit.
One of our clients request that the reports they used to receive by mail be sent electronically instead. This client had hundreds of locations and we had been hand collating four reports for each location and stuffing each collation into an envelope. Now I had to quickly find a way to do this programatically instead. I didn’t have time to re-write my report module to produce a set of reports for each location, I had to figure out how to create this collation by processing each PDF individually.
Even though I was doing well using the GTD Add In for Outlook, I was still feeling overwhelmed by all the tasks I had created. I just couldn’t seem to keep them filtered in a way that let me see only what was truly important, right now. While researching ways to handle this, I stumbled upon Priacta’s website and their Total, Relaxed Organization (TRO) training. The more I read, the more I liked what I saw, and took the plunge by purchasing their online training course. Over the next month, I implemented their system and completed their 21 day follow up exercises. TRO has one significant advantage — it can be put t use from day one by teaching not only principles, but specific step by step actions to take to quickly organize your workspace, put things off immediately and start being productive.
Using the GTD Add-In for Microsoft Outlook enables me to manage my projects quickly and easily, keeping everything in a single trusted system. But when it comes to managing Actions and avoiding being overwhelmed by too many tasks, there are some tweaks that need to be added.
Using pure GTD, only a single Next Action is recorded for a given project. With Outlook, it’s often easier to go ahead and enter all of the Actions required to move the project forward, especially when it comes to development projects. So, how do I keep my Next Actions list as short as possible, showing only the single Next Action for each project? The answer lies in utilizing the Status field. By default, any task created in Outlook has a status of “Not Started” but by setting the status to “In Progress” for only the Next Action, we can create a filtered list that is clean and more in line with GTD.
If you’re a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), then you know the top critical success factor is to have a trusted system for everything. Over the years, I’ve tried just about every combination of system you can imagine, from paper to pda to computer to online. Nothing ever had all the features necessary to make it my single trusted system. I finally settled on Outlook using the GTD Outlook Add-In from NetCentrics.
One troublesome aspect of my life as a solo developer involves record keeping. I have to be able to easily capture the time I’m spending on client work with enough detail to properly justify an invoice or time sheet. In order to keep everything together, I use Outlook’s Journal feature to create time records for later invoicing or reporting. However, getting this information into a usable report format is not something Outlook does easily. In order to get the reports I need, I had to create a macro that accepts certain criteria and creates a new Journal item containing the report I need as the body of the item. I can then copy/paste this information into Invoice detail lines or a status report email.
Have you ever thrown together a development project to try something out, and then allowed it to grow into a “real” application instead of starting over and doing it right? I recently made that mistake, which almost became a really big mistake when I did something I shouldn’t have in a hurry. If it wasn’t for using version control, I’d still be fixing my problem instead of writing about it.
I recently needed to develop a web service desktop client application for my employer that would communicate with one of their clients to retreive orders, match them up with data in our database and pass the result back.
Since I had never created a desktop application that communicates with a web service, I cobbled together a VB.NET application just to see how it all works. Due to pressure to get it done, I continued with the “test” application and turned it into a released version for the users. But, since it was put together quickly and was supposed to be short-lived, I didn’t follow my normal naming conventions for the objects in the application. I did, however, take the time to check the project in to it’s own subversion repository. Boy, am I glad I did.
I have always used my own personal computer for all of my development work, both as an employee and as a contract developer. This would make for one crowded laptop containing multiple development tools, project files, databases, etc. Invariably there would come a day when I would have to migrate to a new computer or upgraded hard drive, reinstall everything due to crash, or lose hours fixing some broken aspect of my development environment. I have lost days of billable time in the past trying to get everything back up and running so I could get back to work. I had to find a better way. I needed to separate my personal usage, employer work, and client work in order to minimize risk and maintain my sanity.
Solo Developer Success is a blog of my personal journey as an employee and application developer who works in a solitary environment. My goal is to share my experiences in hopes that they may be helpful to others working in the same situation. I also want to encourage contributions either through comments or guest posts describing your experiences, lessons learned, and successes as a solo developer.
Since I am new to blogging and WordPress please bear with me as this site takes shape.
