Remote Working Part 3 – Essential tools
October 4th, 2009 ama
self management more….
Before I give you my collection of the top net tools that I promise will assist you to operate remotely, I should alert you to one more pearl of wisdom about self discipline and specifically to do with keeping your focus and levels of concentration
I’ve observed and verified a common behavior in friends who work on the Internet and I’ve known for quite a long time and I call this habit the 50 minute rule. I discovered these individuals who focus and work for 50 minutes and then make themselves take a whole ten minute break and are much more efficient and produce a significantly better quality of work than individuals who don’t have such distinct working methods.
OK as promised here is my list of favourite remote working software:
Google Mail is free. For my money the search & label (a bit like folders) mechanisms have no equal. The downside is it can be a bit slow on older machines
Phone calls
Skype used to drive me crazy as the connection stability was unacceptable, but hats off for the engineers at Skype now as they have really improved the quality of the service. For just a few bucks a quarter Skype lets me call and conference in any telephone and Skype user on Earth. The current version of Skype has a mass of excellent features and there constantly expanding collection of practical add ons.
Organising Content
Evernote has connected in excess of a million users in a very short space of time – it enables you to store, organise and add notes to any type of digital media on the web. Just go check it out…it’s free.
Invoicing, Time and Expenses capture, Accounting and CRM
You definitely know that my urge to work remotely was originally motivated by Quickbooks Online, a small business accounting software web application. But it simply doesn’t even come close to the free edition of salesorder.com – a lead to cash system that’s as easy to use as a fork I looked at NetSuite whose pricing (and people) scared me off. My choice here is salesorder.com – Go check it out.