Matthew Lang

Eric Davis' book on long term contracts, recommends making long term contracts the top tier of your services pyramid. "What's a service pyramid?", I hear you say. Well, basically your pyramid comprises of three tiers of products and services. Your affordable products and services for the masses are on the bottom tier, products and services for specific markets go in the middle tier with your premium service at the top tier. It got me thinking about the tiers in my pyramid of services and products. Do I have services and products in each one?

The Top Tier

Currently the only premium service I offer in the top tier is myself as a Ruby on Rails developer. This fits in with Eric's idea that only your long term contracts should reside in here and that's currently what I have in the top tier. I have a couple of long term contracts for providing myself as a development resource to teams using Ruby on Rails.

The Middle Tier

There's nothing in my middle tier, but that's okay. My top tier provides me with nearly all of my income at the moment, but I shouldn't leave this tier empty for too long. As a freelancer I can't be dependent on any one stream of income. Each product or service should be generating some income for me, but at least for the moment I have a good premium service that I can depend on until I get other products and services in place.

The Bottom Tier

At the moment, the only product or service that I have in my bottom tier is Journalong, my free journaling service for Dropbox. I don't have any other products or services here. There's definitely room for another product in here. Something simple and easy to manage. As for services I'm not too sure. I don't currently provide any short term affordable services that others would want. Well at least I haven't been asked.

There's definitely room here for more products and services.

What Next?

What I have taken away from this exercise is that I need to start thinking about other products and services in the middle and bottom tiers of my pyramid. The gaping hole in the middle of my pyramid requires a product or service or even both. It shouldn't cost more than any micro products and services in the bottom tier but should still be cheaper than my rate as a freelance developer.

As for the bottom tier, I am putting more time into Journalong with the goal of turning it around into a profitable micro-product. I've got a few ideas for other products and services in this bottom tier, but I need to be selective about those. There's only room for so much that I can do, and cramming too much into the bottom tier can take my focus away from the middle and top tiers. I will need to keep prioritising things over the next few months if I'm to have something in each tier of my pyramid.

During one of my capture sessions from my inbox, I came across this question in Eric Davis' newsletter from his book on long term contracting:

What's your end game?

It resonated with one of Stephen Covey's seven habits of highly effective people:

Begin with the end in mind

The idea is that in order to know what you want to do, you must first decide what your destination is going to be.

It got me thinking about what direction I am taking my freelancing business in and where I am going to end up. I certainly want to continue to be self-employed for the foreseeable future, but what exactly will I be doing in the future? More freelance work for clients? Consulting? Selling products? I'm not too sure.

I have had work experience with health organisations in the UK including some work in risk management for those organisations. I have prototyped a number of risk and decision management solutions in the past that did interest me. Could I apply this knowledge to building similar products now? Possibly.

Although maybe my destination lies more closer to home. Maybe I'll end up doing something outwith the world of web applications. One thing's for certain. If I'm to progress as self-employed for as long as I can, I need to work out what my end game is for my freelancing business.

Nice racing green also the bars are rather good as well.

via Pedal Consumption

When I first started freelancing, I thought I had the perfect job. Setting my own hours, working from home and no tiresome commute. These positives are what many people want from freelancing but there's a downside as well.

The downside

Working alone is hard for a number of reasons, but the main reason is that you are in fact alone. You're no longer part of a team, you're on your own trying to build a career with the resources you have available to you. It's not as dire as it sounds, but there's lots of little things you miss when you're working on your own.

The office banter is gone. I worked in a great team of developers a couple of years ago and I do miss the chatting before the stand up and pairing with other devs through the day. You can be the most connected person on Twitter, but it's no replacement for a face to face chat with people.

Then there's the resource part. Everything is on you, and I mean everything. No only do you have to deliver great work, but you also must communicate clearly with your clients, keep your skills up to date, market yourself and about a thousand other tasks that keeps your business running.

The upside

So you're working alone with big responsibilities on your shoulders, but there's an upside to working this way as well.

Having a balanced work life that doesn't eat into my time with my family is why I enjoy working from home so much. Not only do I no longer commute to and from work, but my hours are also dictated by the client work that I do. It's very rare now I work at night now. I fit all my client work in during the day, which leaves me time at night to do work on my own projects, get some reading done but best of all I actually get to spend time with my family.

The other big positive for me is I get work the way I want to work. I get to choose the hours I want to do. Having the flexibility to fit more in my day means that the weekend is left free for more important things like taking the kids to the park or getting myself out on the bike.

I also get to choose the the tools I want to use. It's very liberating to have this choice and not be confined to working with one tool or framework and be restricted by the equipment you can use. I've had my fair share of programming jobs in the past that wouldn't have been my first choice, but now I'm actually in a role where I'm enjoying what I am doing.

The verdict

I prefer this independent way of working. The positives really do outweigh the negatives for me. It's definitely not as easy or straight forward as I first thought it was going to be, but it is providing me with more opportunities to carve myself the career that I want.

Programmers have always got old code lying around. Forgotten applications, libraries, ideas and other files and folders. Remnants of days perhaps when ideas were rife and ambitions were high. I have those days as well. I have an idea for something, I mock up a quick test with some code and then most of the time decide that it's not simply worth my time investing in it further. What remains behind is a filing system littered with dead folders and files.

Today I started cleaning up those dead end projects.

I deleted old applications that I'm not hosting anymore, deleted ideas for applications and products that I know are not going to work and also deleted a few repositories from Github account. I cleared out a few forked repositories that I had high ambitions of working on but haven't contributed to them.

From there I then started to remove a few applications from my MacBook Pro. I only deleted a few applications, but better to remove them than to have them sitting idly doing nothing. More deadwood gone.

Then I moved onto the online tools and services I subscribe to and removed a couple of them also. A few more dollars back in my pocket each month and that great feeling of removing yourself from a service or subscription that might distract you with an email each week, but you quickly delete it.

Just like clearing your desk or work environment of deadwood files, folders and other junk on your desk, it's also important to remove the digital deadwood as well. Start with your laptop or tablet and remove the applications you don't use, the old folders and files that are no longer relevant. Once your immediate work environment is clear, move on to your work environment in the cloud and trim those services that you don't use anymore.

Keeping a clean digital environment is just as important as keeping your physical work environment clear. You might just end up saving yourself some money or even getting some space back on your laptop. Even better, you might just have rid yourself of a few unwanted notifications each month.

At any one time there are usually three devices sitting on my desk. A laptop, a phone and a tablet. They all have different apps running on them but some of the apps they use are for the same service. So for App.net I have an app running on my laptop, but a different app running on my phone and tablet.

Here's the problem. I haven't really paid too much attention to configuring notifications for each of the apps so sometimes I end up getting multiple notifications going off on the different devices for the same event. For example, in App.net when I get a new follower, I get an email notification in my phone as well as a notification from Felix, and also a notification on Felix on my tablet. Just little bit overkill if you ask me.

So here's my question to all of you. What's your strategy for dealing with notifications on multiple devices?

I sit in front of my laptop for most of the day, so ideally most of my notifications should come through there, but then what notifications should I enable for my phone? Are there any type of apps that you recommend I should completely silence?

If you've got any thoughts on this then please reply back to my original post on App.net or drop me an email here. I'd be really interested to hear your views on this.

... with our guide, Kurt Harden.

via PedalConsumption

My wife mentioned the other day that she was thinking about her New Year's resolution for 2014. I said to her, "Did you keep last year's resolution?". "No", was the reply. In fact she freely admitted to never keeping resolutions.

"What's stopping you from starting now?", was my next question. It got her thinking and she's decided to start making plans now to implement some positive changes to her health and fitness.

Why do we feel the need to wait for a milestone to pass before we start something? New Year's resolutions are never kept. I never kept mine. In fact, it was only a few of years ago when I abandoned the whole idea of starting and keeping a New Year's resolution. I do keep a theme for the year that I can group goals under, but that's all it is. A theme for the year.

Don't wait.

Start now.

Write down what you want to achieve next year now and start making a list of next actions towards making those achievements. Do it now.

What's the point in waiting for a holiday or birthday to roll by before you start taking action? Age is just a number and so is the year. There's nothing special about them that will make you achieve your goals.

Get the notepad and pen out and start that list now. Start working towards your goals now. Get the jumpstart on the year and start it knowing you've already achieved something before the this year is finished and that the next achievement is just around the corner and not 12 months away.

New Year's Day is just another day on the calendar. So is today. Don't wait for the end of the year. Start now.