Mon 13 Apr 2009
And so, I’m into my second full week out of IGDA. The most noticeable difference is that my email traffic is massively down. It’s like I actually have time to go to the bathroom without the fear that 100 new emails will stuff my inbox!
In reality, there’s not been much change from a purely mechnical point of view. During my ~9 year tenure with IGDA, I always worked from my home office, without much in the way of traditional office support structures, etc. So, being freelance and working from home isn’t much different in that regard.
Though, was fun setting up my own web site (using WordPress), rebuilding/coordinating my new email accounts (centralizing on Gmail), finding a new calendering system (Google Calendar), rebuilding my time tracking tool, etc, etc. Still need to find a good contact/prospecting management and tracking tool.
Interestingly, I’ve made a conscious decision to be as web/cloud driven as possible. Meaning, I pretty much work out of a browser window all day (ie, meaning, I’m fully mobile).
Anyway, happy to take any recommedations or pointers to good tools, apps, books, web sites, etc, for freelance consultants :)
April 13th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Darius uses Highrise for business contact management:
http://highrisehq.com/
And has been very happy with it.
April 13th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
I’ll second Highrise. That’s what I’ve been using since last week. Highrise is a step up from Excel and free for two users.
Since you’re consulting, you might want to make use of the “deals” and “cases” features more extensively, which will warrant a paid account.
37signals also has other virtual-office tools.
April 17th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
37signals seems pretty cool. I’m going to investigate it more thoroughly.
I’m mostly happy with the Google suite of tools (except that they don’t seem to perform well in Chrome). When I have to send docs to clients I’ll still use MS Office as it’s still the defacto standard.
I would like to find better integration between google apps and my win smartphone… But I may just have to bite the bullet and go android or iPhone.
May 8th, 2009 at 9:23 am
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