Clockwise

When I was employed as a web developer my tasks typically came as one or two major priorities for the day or week and small support/update requests that came in during the day. I worked at my position in the assembly line, taking proposals and designs and making the website. There wasn’t much need of organizing myself as all the immediate need tasks were laid out, part of the routine or sitting in my inbox.

Life as a freelancer is not so simple. There is typically no project coordinator, manager or boss. At least not one that is handling scheduling your time for all the various tasks you have to work on. I’ve heard of the getting things done approach before, but it was always overkill for my limited view of my pipeline. Being a freelancer I have a better view at the pipeline. Luckily for me The Omni Group is doing a public beta of their new personal task management program called OmniFocus It’s modelled on the getting things done principles. While I might not utilize all of the features, it has proven useful to be able to get a brain dump of what is on my plate now and getting it organized and done.

In the week of solid use it’s proven useful in scheduling my time and priorities. Before the end of the year I’ll be putting it through the paces as I’ve got a 30~40 hour project to be done alongside a few smaller projects.

The idea of this website has existed in some form or another for an embarrassingly long time. However the time is right to make it happen. A timely message showed up in my newsreader about The Perfect First. A useful reminder that I could spend weeks fretting over the perfect post to kick start this whole affair when I should simply get going and doing.

What did I do to get out of my rut? It’s turned out that the best way to get moving forward was to throw out what ideas I had most gotten attached to. The domain porteighty.com and a shade of blue #003366. I recently moved to Sweden and that opened up another avenue to think about with regards to the domain. I found a list of words ending with se. After reading through the words and getting overwhelmed by the options I was up back by the top with clockwise on the screen, and since it was available I decided to go with it. A visit to Adobe’s kuler and I had a color scheme by Mats Holmberg called Orange on Olive. I swapped the orange for Falu red since I liked the aesthetics better and it could pay homage to my new home at the same time.

I’m not quite sure on the voice that will emerge here. I intend to talk about web development and specifics to doing it as a freelancer in Sweden. There will probably also be random things along the way. Though it’s entirely possible that as time goes it evolves into something different.