Carsonified

by Lisa Price

For anyone planning on attending next year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival, the event’s Panel Picker is now live!

We’ve submitted the following proposals:

• Getting Things Done Are you being crushed under a sea of unopened e-mail? Do you start one project only to be distracted by another? This panel will bring you tricks and tips from the masters, a look behind the scenes at the workflow of top studios, and inspire you to streamline your daily chores. Are you ready to become a GTD ninja?
• Fire your freelancer, now! Following on from the controversial post here on Carsonified, this panel will ask, as freelancers become more expensive and offshore employees become more of a real proposition, should you be thinking about firing your freelancer and out-sourcing your projects? We’ll talk to some people who have gone down the off-shore route and those who haven’t to find out where the future lies.
• Pedantic Semantics: Using Subtlety to Fight Lazy Web Design As designers, it’s in our nature to agonise over the details - perhaps even to an obsessive degree. But this level of perfectionism should be celebrated and embraced, especially when it comes to applying that ethos to our markup. Care about semantics! Care about code indentation! Care about class names! Only through perfectionism can we convert the non-believers who are content to mark up sites like MySpace.
• How to sell a web app The goal of many web app developers is to sell it or to be acquired but how does this happen? What are buyers looking for? What should you avoid when trying to sell? What should you actively promote? All this answered and more.

If you like the sound of these panels, please vote!

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/index/2/q:carson

I absolutely love sitting down with a pen and pad - no computer. Just my thoughts, a nice gel-tipped pen and a ‘Black n’ Red’ notebook.

When I’m brainstorming with pen and paper, it’s easy to get distracted when I remember things I need to do. So I’ve figured out a handy way to deal with that: I just stick a little chunk of sticky notes inside the front cover. Whenever I remember I’ve got to do something, I write it down on the sticky note and get right back to brainstorming. Bam!

Then I detatch the note and put it somewhere where I’ll see it later. Distraction averted.

I just finished Tim Ferris’ excellent book The 4-Hour Workweek and it’s already had a significant impact on my life: It’s given me more free time.

The best tip I picked up from the book was hiring a virtual personal assistant (PA). Everyone has those annoying things on their to-do list that have been there for months, which just aren’t getting done. They’re important but you just don’t have enough fricken time to finish them.

Enter a ‘Virtual PA’. If you’re running a small business like Gill and I, you can’t justify spending £18K-£30k on the luxury of a PA. However, with the advent of the global marketplace, you can get a quality PA who works remotely, at a very affordable price.

I signed up with Get Friday, a reputable service in India. I’ve been assigned a PA named Shinu and he’s been very professional and helpful with the two tasks I’ve given him so far. The rates start at $15/hour and if you use them enough (160 hours a month) you can get that down to $7/hour.

Tips for using Virtual PAs:

1. Make sure their English is excellent (let them know you’ll need to speak to them over the phone)
2. Clarify exactly what the task is - don’t assume anything
3. Give them a deadline
4. Tell them how long they should take

(By the way, I took the above photograph while I was at the pub tonight. I just picked up a new Casio Exilim Card camera, so expect to see some more photos in the future.)

The other day I was starting to feel overwhelmed by my massive todo list and my overflowing inbox. (Isn’t everyone?!) I’m sure you all have those moments - mild panic attack are fun!

Then it hit me - it’s because I was nicely organizing all my todos into categories, but I wasn’t prioritizing them at all. Everything was shouting at the same volume: NOW!

So I created a new category in Outlook 2007 called ‘Important’ and chose the color red (see above image). Now I can categorize all my emails (that need a response) and my todos with their category and whether or not they’re important.

This is one of the things I love about Outlook 2007 - the visual colors that go along with your categories. It’s very helpful to just scan my list of things to do today and do the Red ones first. Bam!

I switched to a Mac last year and I couldn’t be happier … except for one thing. Apple Mail and iCal just aren’t powerful enough for me.

As the Director of Carson Systems, most of my day comprises of emailing, coordinating things and checking to-dos. Ever since I’ve moved to a Mac, I’ve been frustated with the disconnected nature of Mail, Address Book and iCal.

Here’s what frustrates me about Mail/Address Book/iCal:

1. There’s only one flag in Mail. Life is complex and email doesn’t often fit into one category. I hate having to move mail into seperate folders as it’s a waste of time. I’d rather keep everything in my Inbox and categorize and flag it as necessary.
2. To-dos in iCal are a complete joke. The lack of categorization and easy reminders makes life hellish.
3. Address Book is pretty good, in general. But it doesn’t need to be a separate program.
4. Mail often freezes up on me as it’s not built for the huge amount of email I send and receive.

I’ve tried really hard to make Mail/iCal/Address Book work. But it’s just not good enough. I know that a lot of folks preach about how simple software is better. But you know what? If you’re a power-user, early adopter, it often isn’t.

Why I’m switching

Here are the features in Outlook 2007 that I’m switching for:

1. Categorization of emails, todos and calendar items is simple yet powerful. Instead of moving emails into folders, just categorize them appropriately (You can create custom categories and assign them colours).
   
2. You can choose from a set of flags (Today, Tomorrow, This Week, Next Week).
   
   The beauty of this is that as soon as you flag it, it automatically creates a to-do for you and sets a reminder. Bam!
3. The calendar in Outlook 2007 now supports the ical format, so you can subscribe to Google Calendar. We do this at Carson Systems to share the company calendar (annoyingly, however, you can’t update from Outlook - you have to go to Google Calendar).
4. You can assign to-dos to people. This is brilliant for delegating (which is how Directors spend most of their day!)

Latest version of Parallels makes it even easier

I just upgraded to the latest version of Parallels and it makes it even easier to use Outlook 2007. Here’s why:

The above image is a screengrab of my OSX Dock. Parallels actually seperates out each Windows program! Now I can go straight to Outlook, Excel, IE, etc with one click, like native OSX programs.

And running Parallels in ‘Coherence Mode’ means you don’t have to look at the rest of the (ugly) Windows XP/Vista OS.

Getting things done?

As probably most of you know, I’m a GTD freak and I love being efficient. I thought I had it nailed with my Omni Outliner to-do method, but I found it was starting to slow me down. The fact that Omni Outliner doesn’t support due-dates and reminders is a real problem. I found myself having to go into iCal and set reminders for the really important date sensetive stuff.

I’ll report back to you with how it’s working for me.

The annoying parts

Before you all go off and buy Parallels and Outlook 2007, let me tell you about what isn’t so great about it:

1. Key-mapping is a bit of a pain. For instance, you have to hit fn-backspace to delete things (MacBooks don’t have a Delete key).
2. You need to have a seperate backup solution for Outlook. We use Super Duper for OSX and it rocks. But now that all my super important data is in Outlook, I’ve got to figure out a seperate solution for it as well (any suggestions welcome!)
3. It’s expensive (XP + Outlook 2007)
4. You have to spend a day moving your data across, which is major pain-in-the-neck
5. If you’re in an airport and you buy a wifi pass (while in OSX), it won’t let you use it in Parallels, as it thinks it’s another computer. Argh!

However, even given those negative points, I’m very excited about the productivity gains I (and the company) are going to reap for switching.

Tips for migrating

If you’re going to follow my lead (which I recommend you think long and hard about first, here are some useful tips for moving over to Outlook 2007.

1. Use this tip for moving mail from Apple Mail to Outlook 2007. It’s a bit crazy, but it works. Some of the characters in email get screwed up, but overall it works fine.
2. Use this vCard converter tool to import your contacts into Outlook 2007. It’s well worth the $25. Outlook supports vCards (hooray!) but has problems importing more than one at a time (boo!). This tool helps you get over this problem.
3. Get your to-dos into CSV format and then import them into Outlook.

Please comment and let us know how you get on with this, if you decide to migrate.

If you find yourself typing the same thing over and over again when answering emails, I’ve got a real time-saving tip for you.

I’ve found an amazing tool called Text Expander and it absolutely rocks. Watch the video below to see how it can save you time on when answering emails.

This is especially great for those of you who do tech support for your web app and get asked the same fricken questions again and again.

RSS readers, view the video here.

I recently ran across Dave Seah’s Printable CEO and I love it. It gave me a great idea for my to-do list.

Instead of prioritizing my to-dos for the day, I give them a point value of ten, five or two. I do this during my 20-minute daily to-do review (where I move items from my “Week” list to my “Today” list).

• Ten points = Things that help me move towards my primary goals (for me and the company)
• Five points = Things that are important, but not vital
• Two points = Things that aren’t important, but need to be done

It’s strange, but I find myself getting excited about finishing an item and getting ten points for it. It’s like getting one of those “1-Up” mushrooms in Super Mario World.

If it was marked “High Priority”, instead of “10 Points”, there isn’t a reward for finishing it. It’s just another thing that needed to get done.

Try it and let me know if it works for you.