Consolidating your calendars # Productivity Tip

I was going crazy with the different calendars and the email accounts that i had to manage. Worst still, most of these calendars were dealing with international clients, so I was getting lost if time zone conversions and was scheduling double meetings at the same time.

Ok, let me start from the beginning. I have 5 active email addresses. I have a personal email, an email for my company, and three email accounts under my clients domain names. All these emails are Google Apps emails (not all of them were influenced by me, but nevertheless a wise choice). And all of them have calendars associated with them.

And the three clients are in three different time zones! So when I have meetings, or get meeting invites, I had to go through my other calendars to see whether I had a conflicting appointment with another client. And it became worse when I had to schedule meetings or when clients told me to setup meetings and mention their local time.

So I decided to create a master calendar with subscriptions to all my other calendars. I chose my personal calendar as the master calendar due to the fact that it is not shared with others and even if it does get shared, it will be with my family. Thus I do not run the risk of exposing my work with one client to another.

Such a consolidation on GCal was pretty easy. I added my other emails under “Add Another Calendar” –> “Add a coworkers calendar”. Then GCal triggered an email requesting permission and all I had to do was clicking on a link and saving the sharing setting on the invitees email. Voila, the tasks were appearing on the master calendar. And better still they were all color coded in different colors for each calendar!

Then my worry was that I had setup Push Sync for my personal calendar to my iPhone. So I was not sure whether the events would get pushed back through that somehow. But the events that got pushed to the iPhone from my personal calendar were only the events that were created on it.

Next I wanted to setup my iPhone also to have a consolidated view. This was darn easy again. All I had to do was to add the calendars as CalDAV accounts. TO do that go to: Settings –> Mail, Contacts, Calendars –> Add Account –> Other –> Add CalDAV account. Out google.com as server, your email (with domain) as user name and your password and a meaningful name for description. And voila!

Just one thing about iPhone CalDAV. All the CalDAV calendars show up color coded in blue and my primary calendar (sync’d as an Exchange server) in red. Now if I can color code different calendars, it would be perfect!

I just love the ability to see my whole life in one view, both on the computer (on the cloud) and on my phone.

Oh there is one more thing I wish for. That is a similar way to consolidate the tasks onto one Gmail Task List!

Ode to Bell Broadband

I am writing this to record how impressed I am with the service I received so far from Lanka Bell.

I paid for the connection at their WTC branch on Tuesday. They came and fixed it yesterday. I was not at site when they came but they have done a pretty neat job.

All I had to do today was to come in and hook my computer. I was on the net. Ran a few quick speed tests, got a 1.6 Mbps upload speed 0.21 Mbps upload speed with a US server. This is on a 2Mbps/512Kpbs line. Pretty good for my needs. At least it is the fastest connection that I have had in a long time.

There were some reasons why I decided to go with Lanka Bell for the broadband connection. Ironically, more than their strengths, it is the weaknesses of other providers that prompted me to go with Bell.

Initially I was going ot get a SLT platinum connection with a new phone line and a broadband connection. But it is widely accepted that SLT is the slowest service. So I gave up that idea. But later if I chose to go for a back up/redundant connection, I will take that route.

I have had a pretty bad experience with Dialog BB. First time I got a connection for them, I had to write to the CEO to get the team to come over and fix the connection. Then a lot of people whom I worked with in the past, who had Dialog BB connections had a lot of issues in c0onnecting to VPN’s. Sadly, Dialog technical support has not been able to resolve it for all of them. There was nothing wrong with the VPN. I connected to it through another ISP. And finally, their connection charges are way higher.

When I come to think of it, for any redundancy, you should get a Bell BB and a SLT/Dialog BB. Most of Sri Lankan BB connections connect outside through the SEA-ME-WE cable. Bell BB connects through the new cable (I forget its name) and they are the only ones who use it in SL. So for real redundancy, you should have connections connecting through the SEA-ME-WE and Bell.

So, it has been a good start with the Bell Broadband. Now I earnestly hope that it will stay the same.

Technorati Tags: Broadband,Connection,Lanka Bell Broadband

Why is it so hard to find good people

 

They say unemployment is on the rise. I say otherwise. It is that there are no jobs. There are plenty of well paying jobs. The problem is finding the people for these jobs.

If the unemployment figure is talking about mediocre, inflexible, 9 to 5’ers who need to be baby sat, then I’d say let them be unemployed. Cos there is no value that they add, so who wants to hire them anyway.

I am talking about the talented, focused, mature, sharp, responsible, flexible people who are interested in the results and not necessarily the effort, show me one of those who are unemployed, I will give them a job NOW!

For the past two weeks I am searching for people. People to join me in my business. I know that freelancing is viewed with skepticism in Sri Lanka, hence I was willing to offer a salaried position. While the company is new, just a few months old, I have an investor who is prepared to bank roll the employees. The pay is above market rates, because I realize that start-ups need to offer more to attract talent. We even offered a profit share.

The response we got was mediocre. Most of the people who responded were interested in benefits that far out weighs their value. And the their work, was pretty shoddy at its best. They had never heard the term god is in the details. They missed out quite a lot. They wait to be told what to do, have they heard of a thing called initiative?

Startups are hip in the US. People flock around startups because those are places where you are given the chance to leave your mark. But it seems that our people don’t want anything like that. They’re pretty happy to play second fiddle.

Coming back to my topic, if you are talented, skilled, has the right attitude, there is no dearth of opportunities. Those who seem to be unemployed are those who cant take charge of their destiny. Frankly, they don’t deserve to be employed.

Technorati Tags: Hiring,Employment,Talent,Developers

Career Progression for a Freelancer

I have been reading some articles about career progression for a freelancer. There are several definitions and several milestones that one can define as reference points when you are freelancing. I just thought of recording my point of view. Also, I hope this post will serve as a milestone plan for my freelancing career.

First thing we need to do is to determine our goal of freelancing. Different people get into freelancing at different stages in their careers for different reasons. Some people get into freelancing after their retirement to keep them selves occupied. Some get into freelancing to earn an additional income, but it is never their main career. Some get into freelancing as a stop gap, in between jobs or during a recession. Personally, for me, it is an alternative to working at a 9 to 5 job. I walked out of a well paying job to carve my own destiny and to be fully in charge of it.

Freelancing for me is also the path to financial freedom. I could not fathom achieving financial freedom by being someone’s employee. By being an employee, I would have managed to create financial freedom for the owners of the company I would have worked for. But not for my self as an employee. I did not trust leaving my destiny in someone else’s mercy by depending on the salary increments and bonuses decided by another.

So for me freelancing is the means to achieve my own financial freedom. How can I get there by being a freelancer. One may argue, that freelancing is the riskiest path to achieve my goal, but least I am in control 100%.

In my definition, these are the milestones that I can define as progression for me as a freelancer:

Matching my regular job salary

This was my first goal. Since I happened to step out at a time when the world economy was spiraling into a recession and more are more white collar workers were getting into freelancing as a means of surviving the lay offs, it was pretty cut throat to land a gig at a decent rate. I had buyers telling me that the only reason they would not hire me is due to my rate being higher than similar providers in India. I was competing with kids just out of college as well as people with years of experience, all of whom were willing to work for mere pennies.

I was determined to work for a rate that I was happy with. I managed to land a few jobs at that rate, which was a very competitive rate given what I was bringing into the table, but the challenge was sustaining the work. It seems that it is easier for novice freelancers to land short projects and testing the waters type of projects. Landing a sufficiently large project is another matter all together.

I did not have enough work for the first two months to earn the salary I was earning in my regular job, but I managed to do enough work in the third month, that matched my salary.

Raising my rates:

This is a natural progression. This means that you are getting established as a freelancer and that you no longer need to work at minimum rates. This also means that you have built your reputation and relationships with your clients and that you have proven your worth to them. So now you are in a position to ask for more for the same tasks.

Of course, sometimes you cannot just raise your rates without bringing more value to your work or your clients. Sometimes it maybe that you are now shouldering more responsibility in the projects and hence have moved up the value chain.

There are two ways you can get a raise. First is to negotiate a raise with your current clients. This is a more of a fine line that you need to tread. You need to be able to do this without affecting the relationship that you have with the client. Maybe the client is paying you what he considers the absolute maximum he thinks appropriate. Then in that case if the client turns down your request you should be able to continue without being rejected or if you absolutely need the raise, need to look for work elsewhere at a higher rate. The client may even start to look for a replacement after you have asked for a raise as they might feel that the fact they turned you down will affect your work done for them.

The second path is to look for new projects at a higher rate, maybe with new clients. Or you can talk to your client to see if they are willing to hire you for new projects at a higher rate. You should set this expectation with your clients, if you work on an ongoing basis for a client and find a way to move up the value chain. If a client has always hired you at a particular rate, and if they have built their business around the fact that they can get this work done at that rate, they may not like their costs going up and may look for ways to keep the costs the same or to lower them. I think the main thing in trying to get a raise as a freelancer is to make sure the process does not cut you off from what you are getting now. In case if your request does not work out, you should still be able to earn what you are currently earning.

I think a safer approach maybe to look for new projects at a higher rate and then if you do manage to land new projects at higher rate then you should try to increase the portion of those high value projects and gradually decrease the low paying projects. That is a no brainer heh?

Build an affiliate team:

To get to this point the client has to start seeing your value as absolutely necessary and should be in a place to trust your management skills as well. In this case, you can take up more than you as an individual can do, and hire a team of affiliates under you. That way, you are essentially increasing your capacity of your output and now growing to become a team (or a mini company). The thing to be careful is to make sure the affiliates that you hire can provide the same quality that the client is expecting from you. So you may have to spend your time in managing and vetting their work. In return you will earn a profit from the payout you get for your affiliates.

You can do this without the overheads that traditional companies incur when hiring employees by turning to fellow freelancers. I have written about this in my previous posts as well.

Become a fully fledged company:

I think this is the ultimate step for a freelancer. Being the head of your own company. But if you ran away from corporate world because you despised it, then this may not be for you.

But I think the trick is to maintain the same agility and edge that you offered as a freelancer also through your company. You should be careful not to have bloated overheads and lose the competitiveness you offered as a freelancer or an affiliate.

I have a dream about the kind of company that I want to build someday, a company based on the hacking business model, a company that is fully virtual. That will be a post of its own.

Technorati Tags: Freelancing,Entrepreneurship,Going Solo,Progress,Moving up