My business coach has been a great help over the past year, but she has now moved on, so I need a replacement. I have tried a few companies I found online, but they all seem to have a relatively fixed product that is way beyond what I need in terms of time and cost. Happily, I’ve now found two alternatives: A friend who …
Useful tweets?
I subscribe to an e-newsletter from the site I Heart Technical Writing, which last week focused on how technical writers could use Twitter. When the newsletter arrived in my inbox I went to the twitter page and found some useful links (at least, I thought I did, but now that I look at it again, all I can see is …
Momentous day
Last Thursday I went with about 300 other women to the 1 million women breakfast in Canberra, accompanied by Diana (my production assistant) and Lee (our MYOB mentor). By a happy coincidence, that turned out to be the day we got our first female prime minister. There was a great buzz of anticipation throughout the breakfast, although sadly we’d all …
A milestone!
It was very exciting this week to find that the income from the business has now surpassed the amount I was earning (including superannuation) as an employee. This doesn’t mean that I’m now earning more than I used to, because there are lots of expenses to come out of that amount. However, I now have most of the equipment and …
WHO style guide in PerfectIt!
Thanks to a conversation on LinkedIn, over the past few months I’ve been working with Daniel, creator of PerfectIt, and Bernadette, one of my colleagues, to customise PerfectIt to cover the World Health Organization (WHO) style guide. It’s been a laborious process – the guide includes hundreds of preferred terms, and in each case we had to work out how …
More tools
I recently bought yet another e-book from Wordtips – Terrific tables. I can see that I will get a lot more use from this than from the Macros book, which was mostly beyond me, even though it did help me to get started with macros. From the tables book, I’ve already learnt some useful tips, such as how to: insert …
Time to start single-tasking
I’m an inveterate multitasker. My workstation is set up with two screens, one with the main task I’m working on, the other with related documents. I do this because it seems more efficient. For example, I might have a scientific report on the main screen and an Endnote database on the other, which allows me to add references to the …
Getting organised
It’s been a major week for getting organised. First, I sorted out Thunderbird. Last year I managed to find and install a SmartSave add-on for the program, to allow me to save folders of emails to my computer when archiving a job (and I started this blog to brag about my amazing technological feat). However, that system broke down a …
A useful plan
Back in June 2009, I started work on a business plan using a 20-page template provided by a friend. However, I didn’t finish it (hence my post last December that I didn’t have a plan, even a 1-page one). So I was pleasantly suprised last week when I opened up my half-written plan to find that: the bits I had …
All-day jobs
When I worked for someone else, a job that took all day – such as running a training course or attending a meeting – was great. I was pleased to get out of the office and meet new people, focus on a single project for a day and have lots of billable hours to record. Now that I’m working for myself, all those positives still apply, …