Blog Heroes #5 - Patrick Rhone
Patrick Rhone. Writer, curator, Mac fan, thinker, family man and blog hero. Did I miss anything? It's hard to put Patrick into one box when his blog lets you know that he isn't just good at one thing. He's great at many things.
Patrick's blog first came to my attention when I first started using Twitter. I was simply looking for other people to follow who were interesting. His recommendation came up and I have followed his blog ever since.
Patrick's blog has a mixed bag of topics. Personal thoughts, productivity insights, technology usage and of course writing. The thing about Patrick is that despite his love of technology and its advantages, he still writes about tools like pens, notebooks and index cards and how he uses them. I see it as the perfect balance between man and machine. His blog is a reminder that there's more to getting things done than just buying the next killer app.
Patrick's blog has been daily reading for me for over five years and will continue to be so in the future.
The Sticker Business Model
Path, the social network that limits you to just 150 people, just pushed a new update to their app that offers a premium model with complete access to their shop. At the moment their shop comprises of only stickers for use in messages with your family and friends and filters for the pictures you send. The option to upgrade to premium gives you access to all these items in the Path shop for an annual cost of $14.99.
While I applaude Path's decision to finally offer a premium model, it's not the premium model that I envisioned. I don't want stickers, filters or anything like that. I'm looking for the ability to share my posts to other networks like App.net and to others by email. I also want to export the data in my Path so that I have complete access to all the moments I have accrued since I started using Path. There's a lot of good memories in there.
These are the features I would pay for, not stickers and filters. I'm all for supporting the products and services I use, but the product must offer something in terms of real value to me besides it's core functionality. Full access to a sticker book and some Instagram-style filters isn't going to make me upgrade to their premium model.
Perhaps those extra features I described will be available in the future but the for the moment, I'll be staying away from the sticker premium model that Path are offering.
I just had a very unproductive day trying to implement a search addon for a customer. From first thing in the morning to early evening I have spent trying to get a simple search library to work. It's days like this that I end up getting frustrated and annoyed with my lack of progress. A wasted day if you will.
The truth is that no all days are going to be straight-forward or marked with progress. The trick is to learn from your unproductive day and adjust your plan for the following day.
Tomorrow I'll be approaching the problem from a different angle and reviewing my steps one at a time until I can be absolutely sure what the problem and see where I am going wrong. That's my plan.
What's your plan for following up on an unproductive day?
Reviewing and adjusting your workflow is good practice as a freelancer if you want to minimise the time you spend on admin duties. Even the smallest changes can make a big difference.
Take my time sheet for example. The actual inputting of entries into my time sheet can take me a few minutes to do at a time. Doing this multiple times a day can lead to lost time. Sometimes I even just take a notes of what I have worked on through the day and then take 10 minutes at the end of the day to fill in my time sheet.
I started looking for an alternative method of inputting into my time sheet last week. I needed a timer that I could start and stop and record the entry in my time sheet quickly. I tried a number of apps, but I eventually found a suitable app that sits in the background and works with FreeAgent.
Slips is a menu bar app that allows you to quickly record entries for your time sheet in FreeAgent (my preferred invoicing tool). Now when I say quickly I do mean quickly. I find it much easier and quicker now to update my time sheet from this app than finding my way through my browser and it's many open tabs. Of course there's the added benefit of me not getting sidetracked by something open in my browser.
Micro changes such as this might only get me back a few minutes a day but adding those minutes up over the year and could be a significant amount of time that I am getting back.
My iPad Setup
I wrote last week about finding purpose for my iPad, a tool that I feel was underused. Over the weekend I managed to sort out the various apps that I needed and re-arranged my screens so that the apps I use on a day to day basis are on my home screen and other apps are just a slide away.
In a departure from my iPhone, I have foregone the use of folders for grouping applications. I did this for two reasons. There's more screen space on the iPad and I don't need to use as many apps as I do on my iPhone.
Another change I made that is different from my iPhone setup is the number of apps on my home screen. I almost filled the screen with apps. Om my phone I just use the top two rows for apps on my home screen, but I don't mind having so many apps on my iPad's home screen,so I just fill the screen with the apps I need and pick a pleasing wallpaper.
One of the key decisions in picking apps for my iPad was whether to use the same apps on my iPhone for my iPad. The devices run on the same platform, but the bigger screen on the iPad means that I can afford to pick apps that offer more in terms of functionality, even if it does come at the cost of some screen estate. So I ditched PlainText for Editorial and of course there is no Reeder support on the iPad yet, so I have opted to use Mr Reader to read my RSS feeds.
So there we have it, my iPad setup. Simpler than I thought it was going to be, but it did require a different approach if I wanted to get the most from using it. And if you're questioning whether it will work for me or not, I'm writing this on my iPad in a cafe. That's got to count as a good start.
Fixie Friday - Pink & Black Leader KAGERO
Finding Purpose for my iPad
A while ago I wrote about my iPhone setup. I wanted to follow it up with a post on my iPad setup, but so far I've yet to find purpose for my iPad. I do most of my work at my desk on a laptop and I use my phone when I am out and about. So where does my iPad fit in?
What I initially wanted to do was to only have apps on my iPad that allow me to write. I mostly use it for reading and writing, but I haven't had much of a chance to do either of these in the last month.
Now I think that I want my iPad to do everything that I can do on my laptop. I'd much rather be working on my iPad than my laptop if was away from the house. Some tasks are a lot easier to do than others though. Reading and writing are easy to do on the iPad, but tasks like programming are not so straight forward.
Over the weekend I'll be tackling this and making sure that I can do most of what I want do from my iPad by installing any apps that I need. I'll let you know how I get on next week.
Doing More with Less
A little reminder from Michael Wade that even with ten minutes, you can do a lot.
But for small tasks - the "next actions" that David Allen writes about - 10 minutes can be a nice chunk of time. Each minute is valuable. Those portions eventually accumulate and result in the completion of the project.
— The Power of Ten Minutes by Execupundit
A Web Developer's Playground
I’m ashamed to admit it, but I don’t have enough of my code for others to see. I’m not talking about finished websites and applications for clients. I’m talking about ideas, prototypes, and other stuff—things I have just hacked into or built for fun. I can’t remember adding or updating any projects on my GitHub account for a long time.
Being a web developer means all my work, or at least the bulk is visible on the web. This isn’t always going to be the case, though. Most of the work I do is for the back end of websites—the wiring and plumbing side of it—the parts you don’t see. That’s no excuse, though, for the lack of code I have published.
The web is my playground. I should use it and publish more of my ideas in code form. Writing code and fixing problems is how I earn money. Perhaps showing problems that are being fixed with my code is a better way to market myself.