Solo Developer Success

It’s been over a year since I last posted and there have been a number of changes in how I’m managing life as a solo developer. Since my last post I have continued to struggle with finding a system of task and project management that helps me stay on top of everything I need to accomplish, yet not stifle my ability to take action by causing me to feel incredibly overwhelmed.

I have tried a number of different systems and methodologies.  I loved TRO and the Outlook Add-In along with Franklin Covey’s Outlook Add-In, but I really don’t have a laptop with the horsepower necessary to run Outlook along with my development environment. In addition, I have an Android phone now and there isn’t really a nice way of syncing Outlook with the Android. I have also tried other applications such as Remember The Milk, My Life Organized, Project Pier, Redmine, and Trac to name a few.  It seemed that everything I tried had one of two drawbacks:

1. The wasn’t an easy way to manage actions by project making it easier to feel overwhelmed looking at a huge outline or task list
2. There was too much work required to manage tasks, tickets, or issues.  This resulted in my spending more time managing the system and not enough time completing tasks.

All through this journey over the last year, I kept coming across a website called Action Method (www.actionmethod.com) by Behance.  I had taken their online application for a test drive a long time ago but didn’t really think it was something that would be useful for my situation.  However, I recently revisited their site and was pleasantly surprised by the enhancements they had made to their Action Method Online application. I was also excited to see they had an Android application, driving me to investigate further.

Before I was willing to just jump in and try migrating to another system, I decided to read the book Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky, the founder of Behance.  The Action Method has been touted as a method for helping creative professionals make ideas happen.  As a programmer who can’t draw his way out of a paper bag, I never really considered what I do as falling into the same category of creativity as a graphics designer, writer, or advertising executive.  Now, those people are creative!   Read the rest of this entry »

To give you an idea of how well the handwriting recognition works with the IO2 pen, here is an example including the image and the OCR’d text, unedited.  As you can see, it’s not perfect, but when it comes to writing while away from the keyboard, it definitely beats having to type the entire post from handwritten notes. Read the rest of this entry »

No matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to switch 100% to a computer-based PIM system.

I always end up writing on paper if for no other reason than convenience. In many cases, am writing down information that I later have to enter into the computer.  It might be billable time details, an upcoming appointment, or a list of next actions for a current development project. I’ve been thinking for some time about trying a digital pen, but they are just too expensive for me to justify. Read the rest of this entry »

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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