I know we’ve all had that moment when you feel super stressed and like you’re not able to get any work done? You’ve been there right? Yea, me too and this week was a great example of being able to manage my time and prioritize my projects because I finally missed a deadline. I know it would happen eventually in the world of development something can always come up and cause you to miss a deadline. I have a test this coming Monday on the 12th and I was studying for it and doing my projects which most of these week I’ve had 4 open and the one that got away from me and I missed was a PHP Timecard Form. Of course I had everything mostly done and when I tested with the client he loved it and got all excited but then came the hammer and he said “alright, there’s just one thing”. He needed the ability to add rows and it store duplicate dates in some in case their contractors works on multiple projects each day, they could insert and save 1 record per project. Now this thing wasn’t something he had mentioned he had given me the layout and it had 7 rows and he told me he was wanting to do it by week. So it was developed to insert the selected date into the correct row and save. So I had to fix that and I’m still not done with it really. I’ve been trying to study, I’m doing a WordPress site and while I’ve contracted someone to do it I’m in charge of all the communication between the client and the developer. I’m also working on a mobile site for a Law Firm and so far that one is going great and I’ll have it done in time. However a few things I’ve realized that cause distractions and I need to overcome are: Facebook, Youtube and Miniclip. I’m sure I could of earned some extra time by disciplining myself to now view these sites until my work for the day is done but I haven’t and that one big reason why we run out of time and full behind, distractions. In the coming week, I’m vowing that I stay off any site until the end of the day when my projects are complete or I’ve done a good amount of work that has gotten me ahead of schedule. Now we all need a break every now and then so to replace these sites I’m going to go outside and walk around, maybe do some cleaning and I’m getting a dog this weekend so he will be a welcome distraction since he will be an inside pet.
This past week though really tested me and I realized that I’m no where near organized as I should be and that in order to succeed in this and still be able to do my schoolwork I need to make a schedule and stick to it instead of just working here and there or when I think of something. So this next week I’ll be using my Outlook Calendar more and am looking for a good free or open source project management application to track meetings, keep to-do lists, set priorities for each project and be able to set up how long I can expect that to take and it provide reminders as the deadline gets closer. Now I’ve done some research but I’m interested in hearing what others might use for this kind of task so leave me a comment and I’ll be reviewing some over the next week.
