Series: Google Liberates the (Shared) Home Office, Part 2-Google Calendar
This post is the 2nd in an ongoing series about how web-savvy home office types can free themselves from their businesses one step at a time using Google Apps. Topics I’ll discuss in the series include:
- Read Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail
- Google Calendar to manage scheduled actions and commitments
- Staying current with Google Reader
- Research and note-taking with Google Notebook
- Google Docs as THE alternative to Microsoft Office
Google Calendar is the single most useful tool for any home business owner, and gives specific advantages to husband and wife teams. Here is how I arrived at that opinion.
My wife and I were running 3 separate businesses between us. I also held a part-time job with a wildly varying schedule, which I wrote down on tiny slips of paper and brought home. We were also busy parenting a toddler and a baby.
Needless to say, scheduling our life was just ridiculous!
I used my little slips of paper, she used her Palm Pilot and sometimes iCal on her Mac. Pretty primitive setup, I’ll admit, and it did not allow us to manage our lives in any meaningful way.
We needed a solution that would:
- Show different colors for each individual (and grouping) in the family
- Allow both of us to view and edit the schedule without a bunch of B.S.
- Send reminders when and where we can best use them
- Display the most current version of the ever-changing family/office schedule
Google Calendar Delivers the Goods!
After way too much research into desktop software packages that would satisfy these goals, I decided to give Google Calendar a whirl. And boy, am I glad I did!
Google Calendar has a simple interface that displays all your events with colors assigned to each person or group. Adding an appointment is as easy as clicking any open space on the calendar or using the “Quick Add” feature.
Check.
Sharing a calender with a coworker or partner is simple yet sophisticated. As you create a new calendar, edit the calendar settings and type in the email address of the person with whom you want to share. Make sure you enable “Make changes AND manage sharing” if you trust the other parties. If not, either fire them or set a more appropriate access level from the four options. Your choice.
Share your calendars and set your permissions correctly, and it will be like your personal calendar software is installed on every computer in the world. Access and edit anywhere. I love this!
Double-check.
Of course, what good would your calendar be if you had to constantly remember to look at it? Google Calendar’s killer feature is SMS text reminders so you can relax your mind and focus on taking action in your business.
You can also do this by email, but SMS is the most convenient and useful because it delivers me the reminder wherever I am on a device that I always have on me: my phone.
Triple-check.
And the fourth requirement in the list above—always having the most up-to-date schedule information—is handled readily by the fact that all of this calendar mumbo-jumbo resides on the Internet.
Check. Check. Check. Check. All requirements met!
Google Calender is a robust, convenient solution for any business you run out of your home, and liberates the home office family from a nightmare of schedule management.
So, step two in your journey to liberate yourself from your home office may be to migrate to Google Calendar. You can start here by creating a Google Account. Also take a look at Google’s Getting Started Guide.
Let’s dig deeper!
What is your favorite Google Calendar feature? Let me know in the comments below.
Tags: virtual home office, liberate, google, freedom
About
My name is Devin Best. I own my own business and am an advocate for small business owners. I see opportunity for people like me to explore blogging, podcasting, and online video as powerful ways to differentiate themselves and their businesses online.
I’m an Internet / social networking geek, among other things. My success derives from helping others achieve success and accomplish their goals online.
I come from a short line of short entrepreneurs (my dad), and business ownership is in my blood, which is one of the reasons I have historically been so unemployable. I grew up knowing that I would run my own business one day, but following in my father’s footsteps in the gourmet food industry wasn’t for me.
Turns out, neither was printing (my major in college), multi-level marketing (both telecommunication and health & wellness products), corporate out-sourcery, document management, video production, insurance, photography, real estate, computer network administration, or food service.
Go figure.
None of those occupations occupied me for longer than two years. I needed the paychecks, but held no illusions that I was serving my life’s purpose. The icing on the cake for me was realizing that my role as corporate out-sourcerer was to save somebody else money!
What a yucky position to find myself in! My mark on the world would be that I saved some corporate hospital chain $32,000 in one year. Great. Not the legacy I envisioned leaving my sons.
This is what brings me before you today.
My purpose in being here is to create a valuable resource for people like me who want to succeed in online business of all varieties. I am obsessed with information marketing and determining how to deliver the most compelling content and products to the people who most want it.
Listening to podcasts is actually what turned me on to the world of information publishing and marketing online. From there, I belatedly started reading and subscribing to blogs, and eventually started blogging early this year.
I have no credibility, only ideas. This blog is an exercise in the belief that what we can learn together will genuinely help you liberate yourself from some of the mundane struggles of your home business.
I plan to share with you my discoveries and techniques for both managing and marketing a small home business online. Along the way, we will explore such topics as:
- Outsourcing—the single most powerful tool available to the overworked home business owner. Learn the value of sharing that load with capable virtual assistants.
- Business Automation—Anything that can be automated, should be automated.
- Podcasting—how to get the attention of the people who can most benefit from your services and expertise using online, portable audio and video.
- Social Networking Sites and the Relationship Marketing Model. Crowdsource your way to better products and services by working with your audience!
- Web-based applications that enable your virtual home office to exist anywhere within range of a hi-speed internet connection
Learn as I learn. I’ll show you the implementation of new ideas, strategies, and tactics as they happen.
But hopefully I won’t just be bouncing ideas off the wall around here. I’d really like to get your feedback on the content I produce, whether you hate it or love it, whether what I suggest is realistic or not, or whether I’m on-track or off-base.
You are witnessing the foundation of what I hope will be a thriving community of home business entrepreneurs.
I’m here to keep the conversation going.
Why are you here?
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Tags: social networking sites, Devin Best, Business Automation, liberateWhither Problem Customers?
Tina Hilton of Clerical Advantage, writing on Grant Griffith’s blog Home Office Warrior, wrote an interesting post that got me thinking about how I want my life to be and how I want my business to look. The topic of her article is problem customers and their impact on business.
There’s an interesting comparison to be drawn between how entrepreneurs handle this idea and how managers or employees address it.
At a restaurant where I once worked, we received abusive complaints from time to time. The manager would shuck and jive, eventually comping food for the complainant in the hopes of keeping their business. (Like averting negative feedback on eBay in the hopes of maintaining a pristine rating).
His response was predictably consistent—make the customer happy at all costs. Even known complainers and problem customers got the same treatment. I remember a placard on the wall that read
“Every unhappy customer will result in 12 others who won’t show up or come back.”
This is why excellent guest service or customer service is a critical part of any business interested in success. Of course it’s necessary to do my absolute utmost to ensure client / guest / customer satisfaction. But there’s a point beyond which I have to look at what’s going on and assess whether or not MORE is actually better.
I encouraged my boss to run the numbers to determine if the complainers were WORTH the time they took to please.
If you know how much your time is worth per minute, and can figure out an average amount of time each problem customer takes, you can objectively see how much money you’re losing by keeping that customer around.
Just figure out how much of your time they waste and compare it to how much income they generate for you. Don’t forget to factor in the emotional stress that long-term problem clients can cause. The disruption. The constant and ever-increasing demands. We’re talking about the quality of your working life here!
Of course my boss never ran those numbers - he subscribed to “The Customer is Always Right” mentality, fed to him by the higher-ups. He consistently taught our customers that they could walk all over us for the honor of keeping them as customers.
I think it pays to be selective, in business and in all other relationships. The clients and friends that I choose to surround myself with all support me in some way or another. They wouldn’t be in my life otherwise.
The great thing about flying solo is that I get to choose whom and how I influence, and vice versa. Life is too short to suffer fools gladly.
Tags: customer satisfaction, complainers, customer service, unhappy customerMindset Series: The Best Way to Make Sure Your Home Business Makes Enough Money to Survive (and Keep You From Going Back to Work for Someone Else)
This post is the first in an ongoing series about how successful home office types can free themselves from their businesses one step at a time by adopting the proper success mindset. Topics I’ll discuss in the series include:
- How to market your expertise to generate new profit centers in your business
- How to recession-proof your business by developing a loyal following of raving fans who buy from you again and again
- How to migrate your business to a new model using the Internet as distribution channel
Fear is the Mind Killer
The home business owner’s biggest fear is not having enough money to keep the business going. You ask yourself, “What if the business fails? What if it all falls down and I’m left with nothing?”
This fear is what drives you, motivates you to continue plugging along. While anyone who works for himself does so for his own reasons and motivations, the common thread among the self-employed is an overarching desire to control your own time, tasks, and income. The threat of losing it all and going back to work for someone else should scare the living daylights out of you!
Consider, then, what most threatens your autonomy. How have you structured your business?
- Is your cash flow dependent upon one or two key clients, without whom you’d find yourself homeless?
- Do you have enough time to add more clients and more work to make more money?
- Are you busying yourself in the day-to-day activities of your business, or are you planning and executing strategies that guarantee inevitable success and eventual liberation from your business?
If any of these circumstances reflects how you see your life and your business, please read on.
Tags: skills, Income Streams, freedom, liberateSeries: Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail
This post is the first in an ongoing series about how web-savvy home office types can free themselves from their businesses one step at a time using Google Apps. Topics I’ll discuss in the series include:
- Using Gmail as the first step towards getting my home office out of my home and accessible anywhere.
- Google Calendar to manage scheduled actions and commitments.
- Staying current with Google Reader
- Research and note-taking with Google Notebook
- Google Docs as THE alternative to Microsoft Office.
So let’s start with Gmail. For years, I held onto my beloved desktop email software: Mail.app on Mac OS X. The usual Apple polish combined with incomparable integration with the computer operating system itself was enough for me to overlook some of the limitations not shared by other programs.
So I kept using Mail.app until I began to be continually frustrated because I couldn’t get to my mail while out of the office. Since my iMac resides comfortably within the confines of my home office, I had to physically be in front of the machine to access my email, and frustration ensued whenever I was out and about.
I did a little dance with Yahoo! Mail several years prior and got burned in a mystical lost-password-lost-email-account situation. It was an endless loop on which I wasted many hours, trying in vain to recover data locked up within Yahoo’s merciless servers.
Enter Gmail.
When Yahoo! trashed my email account, I was just using it as a throwaway email address to sign up for webisites that required such things. I thought Gmail would serve the same purpose, but as I began to use it, several features stood out as quite useable:
- Emails are stored in a conversation-like display by default, meaning I could easily follow ongoing email discussions and refer back to them effortlessly.
- Tons of storage: almost 7 gigabytes of email storage available, growing all the time.
- Integrated instant messaging lets me talk to my friends with Google accounts from within Gmail.
- Amazing spam filtering: I NEVER get spam in my Gmail inbox. Never.
- Google Search built-in: this allows me to search through both emails and archived chats with lightning speed.
So Gmail began to grow on me–very quickly, in fact–so I decided to make the jump to an all-web-based-email. Gmail is my killer web app because it works, simply and elegantly, consistently, and from whatever computer I can put my hands on.
Of course there are some limitations and less-than-desirable interface elements. As a Mac aficionado, I prefer the elegant, aesthetically pleasing interaction with technology that Apple delivers. So the circa-1998, flat, HTML-ish look and feel of Gmail was a little off-putting at first, and seemed out of place in my glass+aluminum polished Apple world.
But what Gmail lacks in elegance and polish, it makes up for with usability. The web app gets out of my way and let’s me do what I need to do. I don’t have to roam around, wondering where in my folder structure I placed that all-important registration email with all the passwords. Now, I can find it faster by searching for it.
A few other things to be aware of:
- As is Google’s usual modus operandi, Adsense ads are served along the right side of the screen, relevant to whatever information is contained within the email. They’re unobtrusive, but they’re there. If this bothers you, a desktop app may be your best bet. I don’t have a problem with it, and some of the ads are actually useful.
- I have some misgivings knowing that Google has indexed my “private” email, but I’m willing to trade that off for the usefulness of Gmail. This is one of those leaps of faith that we all have to take from time to time, and Google’s history of trustworthiness allays my fears to the extent that I can use their fantastic service without any difficulty.
So, step one in your journey to liberate yourself from your home office may be to migrate to Gmail. You can start here by creating a Google Account. Also take a look at Google’s Getting Started Guide, then print out the cheat sheet of Gmail shortcuts.
These actions will take you one step closer to freedom from your home office shackles. Please let me know in the comments how you use Gmail in your day-to-day operations.
Tags: liberate, virtual home office, google, home business ownersPolls
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