Whether it’s a do-it-yourself renovation of your home office, a one-month trip, or participating in NaNoWriMo, there’s always the big, personal project that you’re trying to fit in your schedule. How do you make sure that it won’t have much of a negative impact on your work?

Evaluate Your Situation

There are several issues you need to address before you rearrange your schedule around your personal project. To start with, ask yourself the following questions:

Which projects will be affected the most? Some projects consume your time and effort more than others. Identify the clients or the tasks which will be most affected by the changes in your schedule. The best way to do this is to audit a typical workday and see which tasks you accomplish and how long it takes to finish them.

It’s also important to note how they will be affected. Will you have less time for live support? Will there be connectivity issues that will prevent you from uploading and downloading large files?

How will the work get done? Are you going to do all the work yourself or will you require assistance? Whenever I’d take more than a week off, I always do as much work as I can beforehand, so that only daily tasks such as checking and responding to email are affected.

Still, no matter how much work you try to finish ahead of time, new tasks will always accumulate and someone has to do them. Subcontractors or assistants can be helpful — but only if you hire and train them well. There are many things that can go wrong with such an arrangement, especially if it’s your first time to work this way. To ensure that your relationship with hired help will go smoothly, plan for a transition or trial phase and start working with them before you make any real changes to your schedule.

What is the best way for clients and colleagues contact you? While you’re working on your personal project, will your clients have to change the way they contact you? Let them know the best way to reach you in case of emergencies that can’t be easily discussed via email.

Develop a Contingency Plan
We’ve discussed contingency plans here at WWD before. If having contingency plans is important during regular workdays, they are even more important when you’re making changes to your schedule. After all, you might not be around when problems occur. Here are some problem areas you should plan for:

• Internet connectivity
• Hardware and software failures
• Data backup
• Revision requests and new orders from clients
• Complaints, questions and other support issues

Let Everyone Know

After planning the adjustments you need to make, you have to decide whether you’ll let relevant parties know about the changes. Sometimes, personal projects hardly make a difference in your schedule or work process. But if they will, your clients might need to know about it.

While you may have clients that are supportive and understanding, there will also be those who will worry and think you are abandoning them. Think about each client’s attitude to risk and changes before spilling all the details. As long as you don’t sacrifice the work quality or your adherence to deadlines, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

Once in awhile, it’s good to take advantage of the flexibility that our teleworking schedules have to offer. With careful planning, we can strike a good balance between both paid and personal projects.

Have you altered your work schedule for a trip or a personal project? Share your tips in the comments.

Image by shadowkill from sxc.hu

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Unfortunately, I’m not a programmer, so the ideas for these apps simply take up valuable space in my brain. So I thought I’d do a brain dump of a few of them to make some space. When someone actually comes up with a Web App that gives you more brain capacity, let me know. I’ll sign up for the beta. But until then, here are two of the apps I wish existed (and if they do, please point me to them).

Ticklr

This is a writer’s tickler file system – not the more formalized tickler filing protocol of forty-three files (31+12 = 43) that represent files for 31 days in a month and 12 months, although that would be an interesting way to present a reminder system. The way I’m using the tickler file system term is as a writer.

In the “old days,” I labeled manila folders with broad categories that corresponded with my regular writing assignments: Female entrepreneurs, Miscarriage news, Dog products, Entrepreneurship. Then as I came across related articles in newspapers, magazines and newsletters, I’d drop them into the folders. When I was having trouble coming up with a topic for a regular column or article, I’d sift through the fie and see if something sparked an idea.

I’ve been thinking that bookmarking tools like del.icio.us could be slightly helpful with this task because almost all my ticklers are now on the Web, however, the “filing” system of bookmarks doesn’t work for me. I want to be able to:

• click a bookmarklet on my browser when I find a relevant article or blog post;
• give it a title that specifies exactly what about the content interested me in the first place;
• tag it with a few keywords;
• file it into a digital manila file folder that I’ve created and labeled with the name of a publication or blog client. I want it to LOOK like a folder. I need that visual.

Then when I open a particular file folder, it presents me with screen grabs of each article. Mousing over each one brings up a pop-up window that lists the title I gave it, the actual title and source, the keywords I gave it, and a link directly to the article or blog post. That allows me to scan across the digital pages to see if something tickles my brain, and link into the piece to get more information.

Someone please create Ticklr, and I’ll use it every day!

Blink

I have far too many social networking pages these days to manage them all. I’m just looking for a social networking management tool – really just way to create a home page of all of my social networks. So many of the aggregating tools include some, but not all, of the social networking sites out there.

I want to be able to add every single one of my social networking pages into a Web app and then have an easy-to-use layout tool – like the Blogger drag & drop layout tool – where I can arrange them in a way that is logical to me such as:

1. Most Frequently Used

such as Twitter, Facebook, Upcoming…

2. Professional

such as LinkedIn, Ryze, Xing, Soflow, DOPPLR, Plaxo…

3. Personal

such as MySpace, Gather, Bebo, Maya’s Mom, Friendster, hi5, WorkItMom…

4. Marketing

such as MyBlogLog, Scribd, Pownce, Jaiku…

5. Second Life-Related (for my avatar Cybergrrl Oh or SL events)

such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Eventful, Plaxo…

6. Entertainment

such as Dogster, Flixster, Virb…

In addition to a nice drag/drop layout to create my own “dashboard” of all my social media sites, it would also include a panel for my RSS feeds – the most recent from the ones I want to see at a glance without having to go to my feed reader.

Of course, in the perfect world, it would operate like HelloTxt by allowing me to check the ones I’d like to broadcast a post to, although this could unwittingly facilitate spam so I’d have to use this feature thoughtfully.

More than anything, it would put all my social networks at my fingertips, and when I’d click on each respective link, it would open up an elegant new window where I could accept friend requests, post my mood, clear out my inbox, and then move on to the next tool with ease.

So…anyone out there want to create these apps? Or do they exist, and I just haven’t found them yet?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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