This past weekend, Laura had a wedding to photograph on a beautiful 4,000 acre corporate retreat property in the North East corner of Pennsylvania. If you are a NASCAR fan, you might also recall that this weekend's race was at the Pocono Raceway track. I traveled up with Laura to the wedding and spent the day exploring and people watching in the area. At one point during my travels, I heard the phrase screamed out "Get' er done". This lead me to thinking about productivity and how people actually GET THINGS DONE.
How do you manage the mutiple tasks it takes to run a business? On a given day, a studio owner might face several to-do items such as payroll, marketing, a photo shoot, editing, and networking to build the business. Some people use PDAs (sounds like some people want the iPhone) and others use simple notebooks to keep thoughts organized.
One interesting piece of software that I found yesterday is iGTD (it is based off David Allen's book Getting Things Done). It is a free download from Apple and can be found here.
The program allows you to establish projects and assign tasks to each project. Within each task you can create priority levels, start dates, end dates and decide what effort level the task mighttake to complete.
Here's a screenshot:
Take a look. It is worth exploring-I am actually using it to help keep on track with our wedding plans...(PS-don't tell Laura, she's a big fan of her multi colored spreadsheet which can be found here).
Great recommendation! I've been using iGTD for a couple of months now. I run two businesses (photography and graphic/web design) and it is hard to keep it all straight sometimes.
I was pretty desperate for a good system to keep track of what needed to be done for both when I found it. Using this software has made me way more effective in my business. It keeps me on track and accountable to all those "little things" I promise to people, but forget to write down somewhere (or lose the sticky note!). It also frees up my mind from having to keep all these details in my head.
(Laura's colorful spreadsheet is cute!)
Posted by: Shelley Paulson | June 13, 2007 at 08:15 AM
I've been a GTD user for a bit over a year. The methodology is fantastic. I'm currently a test for Omni Group, who's developing this product: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnifocus/
I think you'll love it!
You might also check out http://www.photographersoffice for a photo-centric version of a GTD application.
Another fantastic GTD resource: http://www.43folders.com
K
Posted by: Kevin Swan | June 13, 2007 at 11:37 AM
oops: http://www.photographersoffice.com
hahah
Posted by: Kevin Swan | June 13, 2007 at 11:38 AM