Project Planning and Anvil
As I mentioned in the last post, I have been getting a bit behind as I came across a bit of problems with the threat modeling tool and other revenue generating work in the office needed to be taken care of. I believe I can make up some of the time next week, and that is in part due to the fact I manage my time rather well with a combination of project planning with mindmapping and respecting Rule 1440.
You don't know what rule 1440 is? It is the fact that you only have 1440 minutes in a day... and you should respect that and maximize the limited resource as best you can. It is so easy, especially with the Internet of today, to get distracted... or waste time in useless meetings and frivolous conversation. Rule 1440 puts it in perspective.
A balanced lifestyle means you can't let work consume you. Trust me. It took me years to learn that. You HAVE to have passion... and you MUST have a driven desire to succeed... but it doesn't mean you have to spend 16 hours a day in front of the computer every day of the year. An intense and productive 8 or 10 hours of work a day is much better than 16 hours of poor performance.
This is a common failure with most startups. They are consumed with their work... but are rather ineffective with their time. They FEEL they are giving all their time, energy and life to the project... when in reality they would be far better off focusing their efforts with PRODUCTIVE time which is balanced with life outside the office. A business is supposed to serve you... not the other way around. And more importantly... if you don't do this you need to ask if are you building a business that can grow and be executed by others, or are you creating a JOB for yourself where YOU are the company? If you ever expect to exit your business and profit from it... it has to have value MORE than just you.
To show you what a project schedule mindmap looks like, I have done a quick screencast to show what it looks like with MindManager.You will notice how things are broken down, and how we can track our progress with progress icons.
The weekend is here, which means my birthday has come. I am using the time to take my wife to go see The Phantom of the Opera (the one opera she has always wanted to see), and to visit some of my pilot friends at the Abbotsford Airshow. I also hope to catch the Snowbirds, my favorite precision acrobatics team in the world. See you next week!
Anvil Project Scheduling Mindmap Screencast [Flash ~2.5MB]