Remote Working Part 3 – The ‘kit’ list
self management more….
Before I show you my arsenal of great web tools that almost certainly assist you to work remotely, I must write about one more pearl of wisdom concerning self discipline and specifically to do with maintaining your focus and powers of concentration
I’ve observed and confirmed a consistent trait in contacts who work on the Internet and I’ve been in contact with for quite a long time and I call this habit the 50 minute effect. I spotted these friends who focus and work for 50 mins. and then make themselves take a complete ten minute rest and are a significant order of magnitude more productive and produce a considerably higher quality of work than colleagues who don’t have structured working practises.
OK as promised here is my list of favourite remote working tools:
Electronic Mail
Google Mail has a price tag of zero. For my money the search & label (similar to folders) functions have no equal. The downside is it can be a bit slow on older machines
Phone calls
Skype used to drive me crazy as the service performance was unacceptable, but three cheers for the designers at Skype now as they have considerably refined the quality of the service. For meagre amount of money a month ! am able to call and conference in any telephone and Skype user on Earth. The current version of Skype has a mass of very practical features and there are now plenty of of practical add ons.
Organising Content
Evernote has secured over a million users in a very short space of time – it lets you to store, organise and annotate any species of digital media on the web. Just go check it out…it’s free.
Invoicing, Time and Expenses capture, Accounting and CRM
You surely know that my desire to work remotely was originally sparked off by Quickbooks Online, a small business accounting software web application. But it is easily beaten hands down by the free edition of salesorder.com – a lead to cash system that’s as easy to use as a pc mouse I looked at NetSuite whose pricing (and people) scared me off. My choice here is salesorder.com – Go check it out.