Time Tracking & Productivity Blog
Thomas FuchsYou run a business, and your business runs on time. Whether your need to bill your customers, or knowing which projects use up precious...
Time Tracking & Productivity BlogBusiness
Jazzercise! Processize!
Screw singing for your supper — freelancers dance for theirs! High-kicks and project kickoffs, dips and onboarding questionnaires. Tapping. The questions to ask. Jazz hands. The agreements to sign. Interpretive swanning around — the clarifications to clarify. You’re a pro; you know all the moves. But you’re only human. Occasionally, [...]
Amy Hoy
How Freelancers Can Avoid Old Boot Soup
### PROBLEM: Cash-flow ouchies You’re in the middle of a project that you thought’d be a snappy 2-weeker, but somehow it’s turned into a snippy 6-weeker. The end is in sight… but your pay day’s another Net 30 away. It’s not quite time to start those old boots a-boiling but, all the same, it’s not exactly [...]
Amy Hoy
Avoid the Sales Funnel Swirly
Do you track your clients before the ink is dry? **PROBLEM:** Your True Hourly Rate is a hidden, mystical creature. A unicorn! But you want to find and pet the unicorn. Petting unicorns is profitable. To find the unicorn, you must go on a quest… to track all the time related to your work. **SOLUTION, PART ONE OF MANY:** Figure out exactly [...]
Amy Hoy
Too Hot to Work: the Freckle Summer Series
**Summertime, and the living is easy… or at least really freakin’ hot.** In Freckle land (Vienna, Austria), things are really heating up. Until a week or two ago, the summer was all grey skies and rain. Now it’s bright as you please and 90 degrees F (that’s 32.5 C, for our fellow non-USians). And in Freckle land, nobody [...]
Amy Hoy
Eat the Damn Cookie – Unthink Your Way to Productivity
**A single cookie can make the difference between a great day of work, and a disasterous one.** Imagine you’re sitting comfortably at a table. In front of you is a plate of cookies. Delicious, warm, gooey, wafting cookies. You know how in the cartoons, delicious smells morph into fingers that snare you by the nostrils? Yeah. It’s [...]
Amy Hoy
European Networks: Cogent Disrupting Freckle
Argh! **You may have had some trouble accessing Freckle from Europe the past 24 hours.** We’re very sorry! It looks like a major backbone internet provider, Cogent, is experiencing major outage issues. Freckle the application is up and running just fine; our hosting company is running just fine; but the connections between you, and the [...]
Amy Hoy
Ringing in the New Year as small biz honchos, indies, & moonlighters
Yay, it’s that time of year again! That time of year when the year’s almost run out, the time of year to look back on the past 12 months and beat ourselves up for not following through with the starry-eyed resolutions we made to lose weight, earn more money, and be less of a slacker, this time *last* year! Orrrrrr…. not! [...]
Amy Hoy
What to expect when you’re expecting… to launch your product
It’s two weeks since we launched [freckle](http://letsfreckle.com/) to the public. I know, now, what it feels like to have a small child. Perhaps I am a wee bit melodramatic (some might say “whiny”). Actual parents of small children: please do not assault me or storm my castle with pitchforks. But drama queenliness or not, [...]
Amy Hoy
Stats week 1: What a lovely long tail you have!
Before we launched, I made a prediction to the rest of the teamThomas, Dieter and Joethat the majority of our traffic, and thus our market, would be American. Well, I can admit when I’m wrong. Hooray for numbers! I like facts! ## Visitor Locations It’s true that American traffic has been the single largest unified segment [...]
Amy Hoy
Ecommerce Stuff Nobody Tells You
Well, we’ve solved our latest credit card validation problem and it seems like a good time to give a quick recap of the lessons we’ve learned during this whole sordid process. Things that nobody bothers to tell you, not even the people you’re paying to do just that. This is 2008, but credit card processing is a technological [...]
Amy Hoy