Good Ideas…

Are great for inspiration, but absolutely worthless for getting to the end goal. Good ideas translate into success through good execution.

Good Execution…

The result of good planning and completing a succession of bite sized, tangible goals.

Perhaps this post sums it up best.

How hard is it for the self reliant, self employed to make an educated decision about when a piece of work can realistically be completed?

Let me say from personal experience its hard. But it doesn’t have to be – you just need a reliable web service that keeps your schedule a mouse click away.

Studiotime, our time management software for the self employed, has just received a major improvement to assist in managing time more efficiently.

This ties directly in with the new estimates feature on to-do items.

In a nutshell, you can now make an informed decision about when you will complete a task based on how much other work you have allocated for that day. A simple colour coding scheme shows completely free days in green, half booked days in orange, and fully booked days in red.

Really great insights here from the 37 Signals founder Jason Fried.

“Inspirations are like fresh fruit, like milk – they have an expiration date – they don’t last very long”

If you want to do something, you have to do it now, because the motivation will inevitably fade.

The other comments I really enjoyed from this video are about  building your audience. Most businesses are terrified to reveal their inner workings through fear of giving their secrets away to the competition.

Yet this theory is flawed – compare it to famous chefs, who give away their recipes and business secrets on TV and in books. They are telling everyone (competition included) exactly how they are successful and providing the recipe to reproduce that success.

Are they worried about the competition? No – because they have established an audience who trust them, who buys their merchandise and who will come back for more.

In the internet era replicating their success is as easy as writing a blog – the overheads are virtually nill, and the customer comes to you!

A few years ago I started using Quicken to manage my business and personal accounting.

At the time it was a great tool to manage my tiny cashflow  – I was a poor student, and delivering pizzas  for $8.50 an hour plus tips a few nights a week. I had to be ultra careful with my spending because my non-discretionary expenses must’ve been in the magnitude of 95% of my income. I had a credit card with a limit of about $1,000 and a bank account to my name.

Back then, the thing that peeved me off was the amount of manual labour involved in keeping the various account transactions up to date. Certainly I made it harder for myself by tracking even petty cash, but the banks had virtually no support for automated synchronization. Once I graduated from my course and started earning enough not to worry about financial implosion, I gladly laid my Quicken data to rest.

Fast forward 4 years and i’m starting to think in terms of buying a house, new car, and even live and work abroad.

So I had a look at a nifty web service called Buxfer. I was quickly impressed at the simple, application-like interface, and even more impressed at the promised synchronization with my actual banking data. Within minutes I had an account up and running. Not surprisingly, none of my Australian financial institutions were listed in the supported banks, but then I discovered a Firefox addon that supposedly would retrieve my data in a semi-automated way.

Cool! Or so I thought. But alas, as it turns out, the addon is not capable of logging in and retrieving any of my banking data. And its not really surprising, given the mine field of javascript and security precautions the banking sites have… Read more