Infographic by R.O.I. Media

Discovered thanks to Mike Baierl

Long term projects, however, are easily transformed into slow moving mass of molten lava of not-so-smart client requests, reemerging issues and lost hopes which ultimately leads to frustration – the feeling that you would rather tear of your face, than to [add your work here]. Frustration is not good for you, your code nor your client.

The easy solution would be to focus on short projects: Sign up, code fast, stay up late, deploy, grab cash, run/forget. But (and there is always one) from my experience longer and bigger projects are paid much better. The flow of income is more stable and once you get used to your clients, cooperation can be pretty smooth. So, how can I avoid frustration, that comes with it so I can enjoy advantages of long term projects?

Do something different

If source of you frustration comes from repetitive or similar tasks, go and do something different. I don’t mean just replacing CSS development with voluntary camel feeding at local Zoo. If your schedule allows you start another project and switch between them (just not too often). Doing various stuff helps to suppress the brain-cell-killing feel of monotone work.

Note: That works like a charm for me.

Find solution

Frustration often comes from seemingly unsolvable problem. It can go so far as to you starting to fall behind your schedule because you refused to work on that nasty issue. If you cannot find anyone else to do it, you need to overcome your urge to kill yourself and fix it.

Communicate

Clients sometimes ask weird things. If you come across such request (and believe me you will) talk to client about it – there is nothing worse then to work on something, that does not make sense at all. You are the subject matter expert so reasonable client will listen. If not just do it. You still get paid and you can comfort yourself that you at least tried. Who knows; you may find out, that you were the one missing something.

Ask for more

Ask for more money. It will temporarily help you with your motivation. Just imagine how much [add your favorite item] you could buy with 10% more income.

Quit

If nothing above works quit! Don’t let any project to suck the life out of you.

Created by Voltier Digital for ScottMonty.com

Organize incoming communication (almost) on the fly

One of the common advices, when it comes to incoming communication, is to deal with it on the fly. While this can make you appear very responsive, it can make you interrupt your work almost every 3-4 minutes. On top of that, not all incoming communication is easy to deal with. Some things need investigation, tests or input from third side. Extra work needs extra time so schedule it accordingly. Don’t just jump out from what your are doing at the moment. Don’t be afraid to respond later.

Instead of replying to all communication the second it comes in, try to split it into two groups:
1) I can reply to this now
2) I need to think about it

But don’t do this on every beep. Do it periodically every n minutes depending of frequency of your incoming comm. Some may need to check email every 30 minutes (I wouldn’t go below that), others will be fine with every couple of hours.

Use blank time to (not to) work

Another popular advice is using blank times like when you are waiting for bus, on traffic lights, traveling or doing anything, that doesn’t fully utilize your brain power. I tried that, and it works well, but why should I do this? These moments could be your little spots of relax, when you open a good book or listen to music. You’ll be more refreshed and your have more energy to work when the time is right.

(Do not) Do everything yourself

I used to be the one-man-show guy. I built whole webpages including graphic design, html/css, javascript, php cause I wanted to enhance my skills in each field. Now I am done with it. Big projects taught me, that you should focus on tasks, that match your skill set or specialization. If you are a graphic designer and you struggle for hours to write 4 lines of php, you should get back to Photoshop and vice versa. Why? Lets say those 4 lines of code took you 2 hours and if you would hire and expert, it would take him 5 minutes (it usually does). This isn’t very productive, is it?

So unless you want to learn something new, you should work on you main skills. You’ll avoid wasting time (yours and others) and frustration. Important part of being productive is to know, when to step back and let others do what they are good at.

People Talking About This and Weekly Reach

Here is what Facebook officially says:

People Talking About This is the number of unique people who have created content about your Page on Facebook in the past week. The more people that talk about your Page, the more distribution it will get. The number of people who have seen your message is displayed in Weekly Total Reach.

I’d just add, that with sufficient number of people talking about your site (30+) you’ll get insight on demographic data (age, gender…). I only wish I could see all the created stories. It would give me much better overview how visitors are reusing my content.

Virality

Facebook says something like this:

Virality measures how likely a person is to share something about your posts with their friends. This is a great indicator of the kind of posts your audience responds to.

Virality is quite useful. Just be sure it won’t make you post only certain type of content. Users will get bored soon. In same overview table, where Virality can be found you’ll see other interesting metrics like Reach, Talking about this and Engaged users for each post.

If you need more comprehensive guide to new Facebook Insight, you can grab official one here.

Lea Verou | CSS3 Secrets: 10 things you might not know about CSS3 | Fronteers 2011 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

found via PerunGrad – php programing tips and advices

Fortunately, Google decided to make their own Google+ Pages and they are officially available for everyone since yesterday (or so).

Related embedded video

This one is actually quite nice and instead of boring list of features it rather shows (social) implementations:

Why should one create a Google+ Page?

You have a web page for whatever you do, you have a Facebook page and a Twitter account so why should you get Google+ page? Google+ already impacts Google search results (if you are logged in) so why it shouldn’t be the same for G+ Pages? One day people who circled your brand, will see items your page shared higher.

Even if you won’t be logged in, how long do you think it will take for Google+ Pages to replace Twitter and/or Facebook in (Google’s) search results?

Conclusion

Nourishing its own products and feeding off their synergy Google grew from email and search into one of the most impressive portfolio of services out there and it’s slowly becoming an internet inside an internet.

Google+ Pages bring Google one step closer to wining the internets!

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