Robbie's Inner Workings…

OK, so I kind of wanted to write something on here just for the sake of it. I don’t want it to go to waste while I pay yearly for a domain name and web hosting. That’s like, buying shoes and walking in bare feet. I never walk in bare feet. I always wear shoes and socks, always. Inside (not shoes), outside, even at the beach. Yep, I wear my shoes and socks to the beach. And you know what, I have some of the softest feet going around because of it. Anyway, back to what I was talking about before going off on this crazy analogy… I don’t want to waste what I’ve got, so here I am posting to you.

I wanted to let you in on some of the cool little going ons that I’ve found recently. Having announced my latest endeavour of a new business – or for lack of a better term, my freelance design identity – I’ve found a few little gems that perhaps you might be interested in. These are small little things that you, the aspiring business Entrepreneur (did I use that term correctly?), can possibly use on your own endeavour to build that little idea into something bigger.

First of all, a little disclaimer… I use a Mac. I have nothing against PC users, that’s totally fine, each to their own and all that. But if you’re looking for things to help your business on your PC, you’re mostly at the wrong place. If you’re undecided or have neither a Mac or PC and are looking to purchase, perhaps this will tip the scale one way or the other. Anyhow, I’m now going to introduce you to a couple of things that have helped me so far in the setting up/running of a business and what I believe will continue to help me in the coming stages of my business.

First up organisation. I’m probably the LEAST organised person that I know of and anything that can help me to organise myself is… Lists! I love writing lists, it puts all the jumble in my brain into somewhat of a chronological order and allows me to address each issue/problem/thought one at a time. When you think of lists, you probably think, piece of paper for each list, write each item down, do the task, cross it off. And I know that ‘cross off’ is such a good feeling! However, I didn’t want to have to write everything down, waste paper, or lose bits of paper and have to try and find list items that I had or hadn’t completed. That’s when I came across a nice little app called Things.

Things

Things is a nice little application for the Mac that makes your task management so much easier! The layout is easy to navigate around, making it simple to start making instant ‘Things’ that you might need to do for that day, or the next, or any day in the future! You can organise your tasks into projects or areas of responsibility and it integrates with basically everything on your Mac. It syncs with iCal and of course syncs with the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad app of the same name, allowing you to add things to do on the fly and update your Mac at a later stage. Things is the most popular paid task manager in the entire iTunes App Store. I love it, it gets everything out of my head and onto paper. And of course, it looks sexy as! Go take a look at the Things pages on CultureCode’s website!

You can head to the website right now and try out a fully functional trial version of Things. For the first 15 days of using Things in trial mode you’ll be able to use every function. Once the trial has ended, you will still be able to view and export your things, but changes made inside the application won’t be saved. If you wish to continue working on your lists inside of things, you’ll need to purchase the license code or serial number. The purchase price for this fantastically useful application is a low $69.95 AUD or $49.95 USD. A small price to pay for organisation.

I’m going to leave this little app with you before I continue on with some of the other little things I’ve discovered recently. I’ll hopefully post something in the next couple of days.

You may have also noticed, if this isn’t your first time here of course, that I’ve taken on a new theme. This is not my own work of art, but that of Derek Punsalan from 5thirtyone.com. The theme is called Grid Focus, and that is what it is. A beautiful WordPress theme focused on Grids. I really like the format and I’m happy for it to be a placeholder until I have the time and motivation to come up with my own thing! Go check it out!

That’s it from me.

Cheers.