Time Management
Attending school at The Art Institute was one of those life altering decisions that has in many ways led me to exactly where I am now. After the two years of training at school and being ready to thrust head first into my career path of web design (not to mention being broke and entrenched in a decent amount of debt), I went into my field and had a lot to learn about building websites and work relationships at my first job. After a short six months in my field and in the aftermath of a globally effected post 9-11 United States, I was laid off and went on to find my second job here in Southern Oregon. After three years of working with clients, coworkers of the most creative types, and several different tools of the trade I’m finding myself growing in ways I would’ve never imagined. New challenges arrive daily and that keeps me comfy knowing that I’m learning something new every day. Recently at work I’ve had the opportunity to work on multiple projects with multiple people and doing multiple things on a daily basis. Having learned from past mistakes I’ve come to the evergrowing realization that time management is and will remain an important component to my success as a web designer, a creative worker, and as a person. I’m taking this opportunity to share some of my thoughts on the subject, some of the tools I use for time management, and some insight into my future plans of developing my time management skills.
Time management is the most important aspect of being successful in work, play and life. The longer I’ve been in my career the more time I’ve spent planning to do things. This saves time for doing things.
“We never have the time to fully plan out a project, but we always seem to make time to redo the project 8-10 times until we get it right.”
-Earl Goode, former President, GTE Directories
My Dad told me this when I was talking to him about some of my time management issues in my personal and professional life. Learning to dole out your time in the most effective way is as much art as it is science, like most things in life. I enjoy being busy at work so I tend to take on whatever comes my way and look at it as a new challenge to get things done efficiently and effectively for my clients and myself. I’ve been taking advantage of a couple of free web tools that have helped me immensly over the past couple of years.
37 signals produces a suite of web tools that are available for free or at a reasonable price that are meant to help you with time management. TaDa Lists, Back Pack, and Base Camp are the three tools that I’m familiar with.
TaDa Lists were my first experience with this company in 2004. They are basically web-based to do lists that helped me keep things that I needed to do in a place that was accessible to me in most situations. To do lists, as most of us know, not only help us remember what we need to do, but they more importantly offer us a way to chunk things down into managable tasks so that we can complete larger tasks without getting overwhelmed by them. Another advantage for me was that there was no paper involved. For somebody that works for what was historically a printing company I’m pretty notorious for not being able to deal with paper trails. I loved the fact that I could create separate lists, update them easily, and just check them off when I was done with them. TaDa Lists took my time management skills to the next level almost single handedly.
Last year I discovered Back Pack. Back Pack is like a super-sized TaDa Lists application. The basic idea behind Back Pack is still using to do lists as a tool to effectively increase your time management skills. In addition to to-do lists you can create separate pages that can house lists, images, notes, and other useful chunks of information. One of my favorite features of Back Pack is the capability to set up reminder emails for myself. This has been helpful for reminding myself when I need to update client websites. To be honest at first I was not impressed with the usability of Back Pack. there were serious browser issues the first couple of months but 37 Signals listened to feedback and fixed all of the problems and it’s been smooth sailing for quite a while now.
TaDa List and Back Pack spawned from the Base Camp application. Written for use as a project management tool for creative professionals, Base Camp gained popularity for it’s strict adherene to Web Standards, it’s usable interface, and inexpensive pricing sturcture. I believe that TaDa Lists and Back Pack spawned from the need for the company to allow people to use aspects of Base Camp for personal and individual work use. I’m a big fan of Back Pack and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to 37 Signals for making this product available to the web community for free.
January 28th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
ta da!!