This thread is intended for all those "multiple hat wearing, computer consulting, small business owners". Other opinions are totally welcome.
Recently my time management problems have been scratching at my skin quite furiously. It seems like i'm going through my day wondering "who am I going to need to let down today so that I can get what I need to get done, done?" At the end of the week I just try and disconnect so that I can enjoy the 2 days off.
I want that "I really accomplished a ton today, I wish everyday was like this" feeling.
Hat One: I act as a level two help desk to a Small 25 user company. I am also designing a Quoting program for them that is pretty much an endless project. They email me or call my cell phone with sometimes simple, and sometimes 1 to 2 hour requests. I'm failing to work on the quoting software. It's been a very long project and I would call myself an intermediate programmer. The items I have left to do are complex and require a lot of time. I spend a lot of time learning and therefore cannot charge the client for that time. How do you guys charge for 'learning' time?
Hat Two: I work for my Dad's software company. Most of my time is spent maintaining 9 servers. Updates, Renewals, Repairs, Certificates, Active Directory, Exchange. There are two other network techs in the company that share some of the responsibility for the higher end tasks, but they are full time programmers. This hat keeps me very busy. I've been asked to learn VMWare VI3 from them. Which eats time like it's free! I'm able to work at a lower rate and receive income from training time, which is nice. Each day seems to be something new. I work very hard learning and don't really produce any results, which leads to a lot frustrates. I work in the same office as my Dad, I use it as my base of operations. This makes interuptions a little more frequent but the setting and internet speed is very nice.
Hat Three: I'm a paid-on-call fire fighter. I work across the street from the fire station so when we get a call I usually go. We get anywhere from 0 to 10 calls in a given week. Not a huge interuption as the average call is only 45 min long. I recently applied for a Lieutenants position which will be adding ~5 hours a week to my already pretty busy schedule. Every Tuesday night we have training which starts at 18:00 and goes until late.
Hat Four: I just bought my first house and and am gutting and remodeling the bathroom, then the kitchen. Enough said ,we all know what house projects are like.
Hat Five: My Mom, bless her heart, gives all her quilting friends my phone number and when they are problem with their dial-up connection running AOL 3.0 on their windows 95 machine that's 12 years old they come flocking. :) Some of these jobs are horrible messes, but for some reason I really enjoy them. I think it's because it's what I know. I spent so much time trying to fix problems, usually these problems are something I've seen before and can accomplish them. This is my 'Home-user/very small business' hat. Lower level fixes.
Hat Six: Accountant. Wow.....wow. Book keeping is so tough for all these companies/clients! I've been using Quickbooks which is great for my timesheets, but at the end of the day I just seem drained and it's the last thing I want to do. I get lazy, then I get backed up, then I have to end up guessing and it takes almost 2 whole days to catch up on the time sheets! When I don't work, I don't get paid. Huge loss here.
I've tried a couple of different ideas, so i'm out looking for more.
I tried locking everything out except one company a day and getting the littler stuff at the end of the day. That failed because I would get important calls from the other companies that really couldn't wait...Or maybe that's where my downfall is? I'm not sure.
So i'm interested how you guys manage this kind of stuff. I know i'm not the only one out there struggling with this. How do you guys manage all this stuff and go home on Friday feeling successful about the week?
Thanks!!!
