March 31, 2009

Monthly review: March 2009

March 31, 2009 - Categories: monthly

<stretch> What a great month! I learned so much. =)

From last month:

We’ve made a lot of progress at work on a new release of our website, which will be deployed today. Along the way, I learned a lot about Drupal, and I shared our lessons learned at DrupalCon 2009 in DC.

I shared some tips and thoughts on public speaking and virtual conferences, which are becoming more popular at work:

Other geeky things: I shared my library reminder script. Gabriel Mansour’s ported it to Ruby, which is probably much more readable. I learned how to make directed graphs with Graphviz, too.

I also started delegating lots of tasks to virtual assistants, and that’s been interesting too. Here are some of my thoughts:

and I’ve documented some of my processes:

I’ve also shared two of the posts I asked my virtual assistants to put together for me:

(… and my blog has the #1 spot for the search “managing virtual assistants” on Google! Nifty.)

These experiments in delegation have prompted me to think about my own goals and see what else I can ask people to work on.

I’ve also been able to turn that energy to other people’s goals. I brainstormed ways I could help my parents’ business, even over a distance. I helped my parents learn more about ebooks and market research on the Net. I also created a Google Adwords campaign for my parents’ company. I like how I can do split testing on the ads, and Google will optimize the delivery over time. So far, 20 people have clicked through.

Thanks to the wake-up calls and to some schedule shuffling, I’ve been waking up early to write. It’s a great time to share what I’m thinking about or what I’m learning about life.

I finally got the next LifeCampTO sorted out: LifeCampTO: April 5 (Sun), 10:30am – 1:00pm, LinuxCaffe, too!

Weekly reviews:

Week ending March 29, 2009
Week ending March 22, 2009
Week ending March 15, 2009
Week ending March 8, 2009

March had Ada Lovelace Day and Pi Day. =) Whee!

Plans for April 2009

Planning projects for April: making remote presentations that rock, managing virtual assistants

March 31, 2009 - Categories: va

There are two interesting projects I’d like to get going for April. One will be a guide on making remote presentations that rock, and another will be a guide on managing virtual assistants. I would like to put together blog posts and perhaps a nicely-formatted e-book. For the presentation project, I’m also planning to run a couple of seminars at work, and maybe even offer one-on-one coaching too.

What do those projects look like?

Making remote presentations that rock

Possible topics:

Coaching opportunities:

Possible tasks to delegate:

Managing virtual assistants

I’d like to focus on documenting lots of processes so that we can come up with something like a manual. =) Possible topics:

Each post will have the following structure:

Possible tasks to delegate:

More thoughts on calendar management

March 31, 2009 - Categories: kaizen

I have three days left on my free trial of Timebridge, so I need to make a decision. Do I upgrade to the USD 8.95 subscription, which includes web conferences using Dimdim and phone conferences (toll numbers), or do I ask Timesvr or my other virtual assistants to handle it and let them worry about the back-and-forth email, or do I simply publish my free/busy calendar information somewhere and let people schedule themselves?

In the last month, I used Timebridge to schedule five meetings, one of which was with multiple people. I rarely need to schedule things outside work, and I rarely schedule meetings with multiple people. So I probably won’t renew until I feel a compelling need to do so–when I or my assistant find multiple meetings difficult to keep track of, and when my calendar isn’t being kept up to date.

On the flip side, what would life look like if I got to the point where a service like this would be really, really helpful? Timebridge and other calendar management systems would rock if:

I think I’ll take that USD 8.95 per month and invest it in getting to that point. =) Every little bit counts.