My rss feed now has 594 unread items. My podcasts have stopped downloading: I have neglected them so long. I try and keep the list of both of these that I check to a minimum, but it’s getting bad. So, when I have a spare moment, I check the following rss feeds (in this order):

Every week

Seth’s Blog
Not web design, but philosophy about how to think about things. I often find, when overworked, I need to reinforce messages to stop myself from doing poor work. I need to remind myself that the goal is to have my own business and my own startup. It’s hard to take the leap, and Seth’s short posts are perfect mindset builders.

Maybe once every 2 weeks

IT Freelancers and Contractors….making IT work
This blog is fairly unknown, but it’s consistently got good tips for people like me: people running their own IT businesses. Often, the tips are obvious, but he always finds very concise ways of putting things that make sense to me. The posts aren’t too long, so I don’t have to feel like I am invested for an hour.

Signal vs Noise
I love this blog, and they’re pretty good at making their point quickly, but sometimes I find their stuff a bit too varied, and reading one post doesn’t always give me the hit I need. When I’m in the mood for people who draw business inspiration from just about anything, they do a great job.

On Startups
It’s no secret that I long for the days when I can have my own business, focus on that, and minimise client work.  That day is not now, but hopefully in the near future.  Anyway, I really like On Startups.  The guy who writes seems really personable and honest.  And I always learn something.  Posts don’t happen too often, which means that I never feel like I’ve fallen too far behind.  Which I like.

Maybe once a month

Gary Vaynerchuck
I like Gary’s enthusiasm, and his zest for working.  Nothing guilts you into working harder than listening to one of Gary’s rants.

Smashing Magazine
I love SM, and have written for them, and I KNOW I’m going to learn something new, but when I’m uber busy, reading an article that takes minimum 30 minutes mean that it gets relegated to when I have that time to spend!

The blog of Tim Ferris
Anyone who’s met me recently will know that I’m on a health kick.  I drink wheatgrass.  I have a personal trainer.  So, I love reading about the obsessed Tim Ferris, and his ideas on moulding your body.  Good clean obsessive fun!

What about the rest?

I’ve decided to cut down on my client work going forward– less clients, more personal projects, more blogging, more activities and much more education.  I need to keep up my learning, and I have 30+ blogs that I don’t check that I know I should.  Until this crazy time ends though, I’ll stick to my skeleton service.

Something has to give when you’re uber busy, and you find out what is really important to you!

Safetygoat all business gear

But I’m almost an adult now, starting to think about weird things like curtains and pensions, and doing web design full time now has meant that safetygoat can no longer do it all. Thus, I have moved my business life away from safetygoat’s youthful exuberance to Capra, the new safetygoat, just wearing a tie and top hat.

“But, what’s wrong with safetygoat?”, you might be asking.

As I got more serious customers, I ran into two problems with this site. 1) Trying to explain what safetygoat means is not where you want to start a conversation with someone with whom getting their trust is so important and 2) I like to rant and rave and I want to have a personal space to write about all the stuff that’s pissing me off, or maybe silly things that I find hilarious. Not something that’s good for a business first impression.

On the web, you can’t really keep your different web identities totally separate, and I have no problem with snoopy clients coming to read my personal blog. But, creating different personas for yourself, depending on where you’re writing, can mean that you can be relevant, professional, fun and all those things that you are.

And, at the end of the day, being yourself, wholeheartedly is what safetygoat + capra are all about.

Highlights

1. Starting my own business

This year, I went full time freelance.  After a few weeks worrying about getting enough work, I spent the rest of the year worrying about how I was possibly going to finish all the work, and how to turn down work I didn’t have time for without losing good clients.  I have been completely blessed with amazing referrals, the opportunity to work with more talented people than I ever have before, and the opportunity to spend some time working on my own projects, which I feel have really good potential for growth and prosperity in 2011.

2.  Spent more time with family

Due to some unfortunate visa and family issues, I got to spend 1/4 of this year in Canada. Even though I went home for reasons I wish were different, I feel so blessed to get to spend time with my family, see one of my best friends just after her baby was born and get to celebrate my other best friend’s birthday in Montreal.

3. Moved to the country

I have moved out of London to a small town south of Guildford.  Originally nervous, I have now embraced my country living, especially the vegetable gardening and the incredibly friendly people. Hopefully 2011 will bring me further country joys… stay tuned!

Goals for 2011

- Make more money than last year
- Make money from one of my apps
- Develop my corporate website to a full blown agency
- Work on bigger projects
- Develop a more diligent bookkeeping and marketing schedule
- Go on more English adventures

So, basically, 2010 was a huge year of change for me, but 2011, I hope, will be my year of growth!  Happy new years everyone!

The facepainted crew: Don't we look fantastic?

My uncle is a friendly guy, and while I got my goat, Abbey got her butterfly and Bill got his tiger, he talked to the facepainter about her life, her business and more.

Janet doing her thing on Bill

She was originally going to be an interior decorator, she said, had started in fine arts and now she did face painting parties, children’s murals and painted storefronts.  From visiting her website, you can see that she’s grown her business really well into areas that make a lot of sense, and as soon as she gets the Lorem Ipsum off the homepage, has a very nice, clear design (I also don’t really like the use of *stars to indicate things are links* either, but you all know how picky I am!).

Her website. People love her and it's easy to see why

It is so nice to see such talented people using their skills in a way that pays the bills.  She seemed very happy, and there was a huge line to get their faces done.  They had free face painting at the place too, but when you see what someone can do for a few bucks, well, that’s why she can make a business out of it!

No visit to the farm though, would be complete without seeing a goat.  This little guy was soooo sweet, and would let you pet him, and pick him up if you wanted.  Dangerous to let me near the goats… I am in love!

My new best friend. I almost put him under my jacket and took him home!

Happy Halloween everyone!  Love, Safetygoat xxx

Deciding on the name, one month ago

Last Friday (the 15th October 2010) we launched a little web app called Watchy.  I’ve just checked my skype history, and the name and idea started on 15th September.  In exactly one month we built and launched a fully functioning website while working on other freelance projects.

This project was built by a webdesigner, Kat Neville (me), and a developer, Elliott Draper.  We built it because we wanted to, because we love working on things that get us fired up, and mostly because we’re nerds who would rather stay in and code rather than go out with friends.

So, while I have now done the ‘build a web app in 24hours’, a month is a reasonable amount of time to actually get your app built, tested and working how you like.

Why do some apps take months and potentially years to build?  Why do people overstep their deadlines?  Why do some apps never launch?  I want to give you some tips to make sure you complete your web app in a reasonable time.

Maintaining your momentum makes the difference between a project that excites you and one that gets pushed under the carpet.  So, here’s some tips for fast app creation.

Tip 1: Have some skills

Nothing makes an app development drag out faster than someone running it that doesn’t do any coding.  When you’re building fast, you need to be flexible in what features you put in and may have to redesign to make it work.  For example, I am a web designer, who does all the html and css.  It meant that while Elliott was making things work, I could go in after he was done to tidy up without much need to discuss anything.  If you don’t have any skills, you’re going to be sitting around twiddling your thumbs.

What skills should I have?

Choose only one area that is your responsibility, but allow some overlap.  The best team is a small one: one developer and one designer.  Both do the planning, both do the copywriting, both do the marketing collateral.

Be able to compromise, and find a hustler like Elliott

Tip 2: Pick a good team member

Again, a team of two is amazing.  The less relationships you need to manage the better. You will be working very closely with this person, so make sure you can talk to them, that you share working philosophies and you’re happy with the quality of work that they do.  Make sure that they have the stamina to push through and get things done too. Everyone is enthusiastic at the beginning.
Find out if they are good at the details, that they’re flexible to change and able to make compromises.

Finally, and most importantly, make sure they are shit-hot at what they do. There’s no point working with an amateur. Lucky for me, Elliott and I are ’skype colleagues’ (meaning I’ve worked with him on projects before), and since I hate calling people ‘rockstars’, I’ll call him the most competent, qualified, quick and talented developer I know (ninja, obviously).

Tip 3: Be willing to compromise

The reason to have a developer and a designer is that they approach things from different angles.  This is a good thing, and leads to a more complete, usable web app. Your team member and you will not always agree, so make sure you talk through things before you do them.  Let them win some, too.  Make sure you don’t get angry or defensive and back your opinions up with reasons.

Tip 4: Understand the difference between ‘want’ and ‘need’

Maybe something doesn’t work as well as you’d like.  Figure out what is a deal breaker. If things break without one feature, that needs to be fixed.  If a process is a little bit awkward, you could possibly wait until the next release.  At some point, you just have to say, “Go.”  For example, I wanted to do tooltips on the account settings page, as it’s not really clear what the labels want you to enter in.  But, it would have meant a re-jig of the forms.  So we’ve pushed it from our initial release to the next one.  It still works, and hopefully people will feel comfortable enough to contact me if they have any questions.  It doesn’t stop the app from being working.

Tip 5: Start with the bare bones of what you need to make it work

Nothing extends dev time longer than: “oooh it would be so cool if we did this!”  Often times it is more than enough work to get the core offering working and the userflow and experience to where you want it.  Every new feature adds a layer of complexity that you don’t need at the beginning.  The whole idea for our app was to give clients access to their hours.  We could have tried to build it for every accounting software, but we didn’t: we built it only for FreeAgent.  We could have built loads of client management tools, but we didn’t: we didn’t know how other people would be using it, so we’re waiting for that.

Tip 6: Give them something to get excited about

Sure, you’re keeping things simple, and focusing on the most useful components.  But, there’s something about people that melt when you show them something cool.  In this spirit, we built graphs and pie charts to display your data in a different way.  Not only is it really cool looking, but it makes our app feel more polished and useful.

Tip 7: Spend the time on pixels and speed

A sloppy design gives a bad impression, so make your design as close to perfect as you can.  If you’ve done a logo, make sure you’ve spent time on polishing: it’s the first impression of your company. While Watchy isn’t perfectly done design wise yet, I’ve still made an effort to make everything look clean and professional.  Please feel free to taunt me if you see anything out of place.

For developers, make sure your website is fast.  There’s nothing worse than a site that hangs.  With Watchy, we were having some serious speed issues as it grabbed the data from FreeAgent every time you refreshed.  It could hang for up to 20 seconds and was debilitating to the user experience.  Elliott took the time to get caching working so that it’s 1000 times faster now.

Tip 8: Set an ambitious deadline

Deadlines push people to act.  When you’re a freelancer, you’re always busy: if we’re not working on client work, we’re looking for new work.  So, how do you make time for these side projects?  After the logo was designed we put a holding page up with a deadline of 2 weeks: very ambitious.  We even had a public timer (with a watch themed site, you kinda have to) so that we would feel shame if we put it back.  We agreed that we could do a very basic version by then.  And we did.

Not everything worked though.  So, even though we felt a bit guilty about it, we pushed our launch week back by a week and spent the whole next week making sure things worked, adding subtle features that made navigating easier and more.

If we had not set that initial deadline, Watchy would not have come out last week.  It was because we were keen to move fast that it happened.  It takes a dedicated team and a lot of elbow grease to fit it around your other jobs, but make the effort to make your deadlines:  don’t push them back for no reason.  If things aren’t finished, take features out so you can get it out!

Week 1: Main design, logo done. Development environment set up, and stucture decided.  Landing page goes up.
Week 2: Design is refined as well as secondary pages designed.  Main pages rendered in html/css. Development should have enough in it so that front end code can go in.
Week 3: Most of the html/css and development should be finished. Refine app! Test to make sure user flow makes sense, people won’t get stuck. Decide what features you’re going to launch with and remove partially completed features (for example, we decided to launch without payments for our first week, as we felt getting the user flow was more important).
Week 4: Continue to refine, make sure emails work, invites work and cross browser testing looks good. Make sure it’s fast and looks good. Complete ‘about, terms, privacy’ copy

Tip 9: You can’t be everything to everyone

You can’t make an application work for everyone.  And the more things you try and support from the start, the less good the support will be for each of those things.  So choose a specific target market.  For us, we went ultra specific: we wanted to help freelancers and contractors who use FreeAgent. Moving forward we may pick some bigger agencies to target and we may integrate in with other accounting software.  They key is to find out 1) If the idea is good, 2) If you can make enough to at least cover your expenses and 3) you have the basics and userflow designed well.

Tip 10: Have a launch plan

Choose a time that you’re both going to be around with nothing urgent to do.  If something breaks, you want to be there.  If a person signs up, is frustrated and you’re not around, you could risk losing a customer.  Most people understand when stuff is new, that it won’t be perfect, especially if you acknowledge their frustration and let them know you are dealing with it.

Before you launch though, see if there’s any interest.  We had a landing page and managed to talk to FreeAgent on twitter before the launch.  It meant that we had 50 people to email on launch day, as well as got 30 new followers on twitter from legit people that wanted to help us test.  Sure, 30 is not a very big number on twitter, but in terms of quality, they were ace!  Friday, we averaged over 3 minutes per user on our site, set up emails for feedback and had a twitter account.  There’s loads more stuff we need to do, but the initial interest was amazing, and we’ve been so excited about it all day.

Tip 11: Building it is just the beginning

“If you build it they will come” is the most untrue thing on the internet.  So even though we built this app in a month, we will be spending the next few months improving it, marketing it, testing it and more.  Marketing it is not easy, and it’s this effort that means the difference between a profitable, successful app or just one of those ‘cool things’ you made but never went anywhere.

Wish us luck on building up Watchy!  We’re in ‘beta’ until next week, so it’s by invite only. If you’re a FreeAgent user, please follow @watchyapp on twitter and I will DM you an invite code!  (And please, let us know what you think! )

Everyone wants to be able to choose what they listen to, read, watch etc, right?  We can discover more depth to every story by being able to research and find different view.  But I think that, like in the consumer economy, too many choices paralyze us and cause us to never make any choices.

No choice is sometimes much better.

Let’s take me as an example.  I have started working from home.  I read blogs, people tell me things over twitter, but it turns out, I had no idea what was going on in the world.  It was 3 days before I found out about the volcano in Iceland.  So, how does someone who is connected to the internet, who reads a lot, miss out on what’s happening?  It’s because I was choosing things I wanted to read, and the breath of what I found interesting enough to click on was so narrow.  I would click on links about usability studies, or new ways to create web apps.  Real world, interesting things outside the scope of my narrow world have been forgotten, even though I really am interested in them.  I was out of touch;  this needed to be fixed.  How do we get the knowledge in?

Experiment stage 1

In order to remedy this, I have decided to try and read more news:  I would check the guardian.co.uk and bbc.co.uk every morning before work.  It didn’t work: I would remember some days, and I would still pick which articles I found interesting.  I was still not getting a very good breadth of knowledge.  I could choose to read things or not.  I had the choice, and I had better things to do.

Experiment stage 2

I then tuned the radio to bbc radio 4 in the kitchen (the talk radio show for the UK).  Because I work from home, I only listen to it when I’m preparing meals or washing the dishes.  Just today, I got to hear about:

1) A panel discussing the 1970 Miss World Contest, where Jennifer Hosten from Grenada won, where South Africa sent a white and black contestant, and where women’s rights protests occured.  I got to listen to the experience from Jennifer Hosten’s perspective (who actually went on to study Political Science in Ottawa, where I’m from!), and hear about Bob Hope getting heckled off the stage.

2)  Learned a bit about the Mitford Sisters, a group of 6 strong-willed sisters, 1 of whom was friends with Hitler, one of whom was a fascist supporter.  All this from the youngest of the sisters (who is now 90) at the beginning of the war.  You not only hear about the facts, you get to hear about their personal relationships.

About half the programs that I listen to on the radio now I would never have chosen for myself.  Because it is an old radio that’s hard to tune (especially out here in the country), even if I’m not originally interested, I stay put.

Media choice makes you stupid

Because you can often decide in seconds to flick away, we are learning very little about things that we know nothing about.  Why?  Because it’s hard work absorbing new information, and most of us in the web community spend our days trying to keep up with all the technology.  We feel full of new information already.  The problem is, it’s got no depth.  We end up incapable of talking about anything outside our little world of interests.  While I know many people are diligent about reading the papers, I expect you still choose which articles to read, to your detriment.

When we get comfortable learning only things we already know (olds), we run the risk of losing our curiosity for news.  In an industry where we talk about finding inspiration from everywhere, maybe limiting our media choices, forcing ourselves to learn something different, can make a real difference.  I know that my life has become so much richer since I have started listening.

(I also am going back to listening to cbcradio3, Canada’s independent music station, as I have got stuck in a rut on my music too.)

Question: do you participate in limiting media experiences (ie. ones where you have little choice what you listen/watch)?

I was fully booked in for work this week when I checked my calendar last Friday.  It was a well-paid week.  I am not taking on any new clients, as I’m technically overbooked.  I really love the projects I’m working on right now too.  They’re challenging, interesting, and I like the people.

But, with the exception of regular maintenance stuff, all my booked in projects have been hit with delays.  Most of them are understandable, and I’ve agreed to delay them. So, I’ve gone from a well-paid week, to making practically nothing.

Should you charge?

With clients that constantly change their schedules, I sometimes tell them that if they continue to schedule in time with me, I’ll have to charge them for that time, even if they don’t use it.  My problem is, I feel guilty about this: I’m not working for them then.

But, at the same time, I want them to understand that it’s really inconvenient for me to not be able to depend on the work and be able to organize my time:  I could take on other projects in those days.  This week has been the first time it’s been an issue: usually I’ve got enough projects on the go that I can fill my time and offer them a little flexibility, which works well for everyone.

The question

Do you charge?  How much do you charge?  How do you let them know, to encourage them to be more diligent in their organization?  Or, is it merely the price you pay for being a freelancer?

My attempts at dress making have resulted in haphazardly created dresses, which got an initial 5 second sketch, and were then redesigned as I went, and changed features depending on my patience and (lack of) dressmaking skills.

I lament my quickness sometimes, especially as my career is now web design. Never have I met a bunch of perfectionists, who obsess on every detail, they look at me in horror and, I believe, can’t even comprehend how I could POSSIBLY leave something that is a few pixels out.

I learn fast, I design fast and I code up fast. I am pretty good about doing things semantically correct.  But, if I know that doing it semantically correct would take me another 3 hours, and a slightly non-semantic method is perfect in seconds and I have a deadline, my choice is always clear.

BUT I miss a lot of the tiny details. I’ll do things to get them done to a standard of 90% or so, and then go back and fix them later. When I’m learning a new technology, I’m okay with not knowing the right way of doing things, as long as it doesn’t impede my ability to finish things.

Perfection is a luxury

Most projects are impeded by budgets and often times there’s money for new features, but not for polish.  I know mine are, and while I’ll spend some of my own time (unpaid) to make it look a bit nicer, when you have as many projects on the go as I do, you have to stop somewhere.  Close to perfect has to be “good enough”. When you’re on a small team trying to do a lot, you have to sacrifice absolute perfection for speed sometimes. That suits me just fine (it’s also the theory of shipping by Seth Godin:  sometimes you’ve just got to ’ship’).

This doesn’t mean I go back and strive for perfection.

For example, during every release, I spend some time adding a few minuscule details in (a subtle border, moving things a few pixels or cleaning up some code, for example). Most people won’t notice, but occasionally I’ll hear, “It looks much better (for some reason they can’t put their finger on)”. I think you have to continually refine your front-end code. If you don’t, your code base gets completely unmanageable.

On the other hand, I know web designers who ALWAYS does it the absolutely right way the first time. Their designs are pixel perfect to their mocks. They won’t use hacks, but will spend HOURS figuring out the “proper way” to do something.

That’s okay too.  Different styles work for different projects.  I’m always more keen to get the user flowing through the site smoother, rather than making sure under the hood looks amazing.  Surely that matters more to 99% of the people using the site (1% are the ones that view source)?

I’m not scared

I have no problem with using a hack “just for now”, or if it’s an area I don’t know much about. It also means that I’m not super scared of new technology. It’s just the way I get things done; practical imperfectionism works for me.

Saying that, I am a bit tired of too many projects at one time, and am working harder to give myself enough time to actually think about the details.  Being imperfect is not a goal, just a necessary evil for the busy designer.

This was the final straw: I’ve got my mailbox, tweetie, google reader, adium, skype, dropbox, facebook, linkedin… well, since I have a few contacts, and I’m subscribed to lots of newsletters, I was chronically checking emails, twitter, facebook and more.  I can’t stop.

The problem was, although I was more connected:

1) I wasn’t getting anything done
2) I had nothing to talk about, as I wasn’t accomplishing anything

So, in embracing the Linchpin mentality, I’m focusing.  I need some peace.

I need peace!

Turning off the big interruptors

Step one:  Remove growl

Growl is a great way to be notified if something happens.  If you get a message from someone, it’s there in the top right.  It is great, but is also the biggest distraction I have.  There’s no need to be interrupted every two seconds when someone changes a file (in dropbox), or when someone’s internet kicks in and out and they are signed in and out of skype.  By just removing growl, my interruptions decreased by 50%.

How to remove Growl:

http://growl.info/documentation/growl-package-removal.php

Interruption level: 10 Highest
Estimated time saved: 50 minutes

Step 2: Unsubscribe to every newsletter you legitimately don’t read

I’m interested in a lot, but my time is precious. I’ll often try out a newsletter, but if they don’t offer me value every time their emailing me, they’re causing me to chronically check my emails as I see there’s something new. (If they don’t offer an automatic unsubscribe, shame on them. They also get marked as spam.)

Interruption level: 7 High
Estimated time saved: 30 min per day

Step 3: Reduce your rss reader items to only the BEST items

I feel bad when I see my rss feeder unread number increasing and increasing. I want to make sure I read some things, but I do spend a good amount of time every day going through marking blog posts as read to get this number down. I’ve also unsubscribed to those places that I haven’t read recently, and especially to those places that post 20 times a day, no matter how useful some of their items are.

Interruption level: 7 High
Estimated time saved: 20 min per day

Step 3: Turn off Mail notifications

I love getting new emails, and when I want to distract myself, it’s the first thing I check. I actually love that sound: DING! “Ooooh! Who’s written me?” I think! It’s not that I’m actually going to respond to the email right away or anything. So knowing that I have a new email is an absolute waste of time.

Interruption level: 8 High
Estimated time saved: 40 min per day

Step 4: Quit Adium, googletalk, msn messenger, aim, etc

I turned these off a while ago. Not only was I chronically checking who was online, I was making it easy for others to distract me.

Interruption level: 8 High
Estimated time saved: 50 min per day

Step 4: Turn off most of your skype notifications

Skype makes loads of really fun noises… While it’s great to know exactly when you’re being contacted. But, hearing that someone new has come online, knowing when someone has sent me a message actually drives me to distraction. When I’m on a skype call, receiving loads of skype messages makes it difficult for me to concentrate on what I’m talking about. If you need to keep skype on, train your contacts to only contact you when it’s important, and to send you a text and receive confirmation before calling you. I personally only keep the call notifications on, and put it on ‘busy’ mode when I’m on a call.

Interruption level: 7 High
Estimated time saved: 30 min per day

Step 6: Close down skype, tweetie (twitter applications) and mail whenever you can

Set up specific times to check them and respond to people, as well as specific ‘wasting’ time. This is actually my biggest time waster, even though I’ve reduced my notifications. I find when these are off

Interruption level: 8 High
Estimated time saved: 50 min per day

Step 7: Close down any tabs that you might sit there hitting refresh to see miniscule changes.

This means ebay watching lists, facebook news stream, twitter home, anything analytics.  It also means obsessively browsing through Asos’s website for something I might like (but really don’t need anything),  frantically trying to get my google reader count down to zero unread, and anything else you can do for hours which accomplish NOTHING. These are time wasters, and can easily cause obsession!

Interruption level: 8 High
Estimated time saved: 50 min per day

Step 8: Turn off your internet completely

Nothing gets you in the zone better than turning everything off. I start to feel desperately alone, and often reference the web for development, so this is best when you’re designing. If you’re in the right mind frame, turning off the internet can help you do your best work.

Interruption level: 10 High
Estimated time saved: depends (probably a combination of previous entries)

How much time could I save?

On a really unproductive day, I could easily spend over 5 hours (my estimate, 320 minutes) doing absolutely nothing, designing nothing, and accomplishing nothing. It’s easy, but with a bit of diligence you can reduce the amount of unproductive hours.

p.s. These days, I’ve got still got tweetie and skype open, but with their notifications minified, I find I’m not chronically checking them. By the way, what are you doing wasting your time here?  Get back to work!!

Thinking about the user first also makes working with the client easier.  Because I listen to what they like and what they want to accomplish, we both have their best interests at heart.  When you stop designing for how it will look in your portfolio, it makes the world a whole lot smoother.