This approach doesn’t have to only apply to corporate employees — it can apply to web workers as well. Whether you’re a freelancer or a corporate employee, if your work is measured on your performance rather than your presence, your work hours may be flexible enough to accommodate your own “20-Percent Time.”

But why do it in the first place?

• Innovation and creativity. Innovation is one of the most cited perks of 20-percent time. According to this handy infographic, half of Google’s products are a result of this employment perk. The products that have resulted from 20-Percent Time include Google Adsense and many Google Labs features. An example that might seem closer to home is cartoonist Hugh MacLeod. He drew his first gapingvoid cartoons during his downtime while he was working as a copywriter. Now he’s published a book and does commissioned art. He may not have had a firm policy on creating things outside of work, but it’s easy to lose sight of side projects when one focuses on their “real” work almost every waking hour to the exclusion of everything else.
• Exploration. By making the time to pursue personal passions, you can dabble in different areas, which sometimes results a broader understanding or a new perspective on the field you’re working in. It might even lead to a new line of work altogether. 37signals started as a web design firm, but couldn’t find collaboration tools suited to their needs so they created Basecamp. This led them to develop their own web apps instead, eventually leading to the Ruby on Rails framework.
• Opportunity. By making time for personal projects you give yourself license to act on ideas, questions and passions that you might not be able to do during your work week. You’ll have a chance to do tasks would’ve been too risky, or even seemed downright strange.
• Motivation. In a popular TED talk, Dan Pink discussed the science behind three major motivators in the workplace (which I elaborated on in a previous post). These motivators are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Though your experience with the latter two may depend on the project you choose, giving yourself 20-Percent Time allows you to exercise your autonomy.

Setting Your 20-Percent Time

Before you schedule your 20-Percent Time, remember that the number shouldn’t be taken literally. Allocate the time that works for you. You can take one day each week, an entire weekend, or even 30 minutes each day. Personally, I like to start my day working on a personal passion project. It gives me fuel to work through the rest of the day. Plus, it eases me into a heavier workload ahead — after all, if I make a mistake on my personal project, none of my clients will suffer.

As Simon noted in a previous post, it’s easier to get burned out when you don’t work a typical 9-to-5 job. With that in mind, how can the typical web worker manage to have 20-Percent Time especially if they have a busy home life? It’s hard to squeeze in a personal project if your family, pets, and home errands suddenly require your attention.

Taking a cue from Sylvia Plath, why not work on your project before your household wakes up? This might mean waking up earlier than usual, but even 15 minutes per day spent on a passion project is better than nothing. Plus, the quiet environment might make it easier for you to work.

But here’s some more common sense: mark the end of your workday. It may not be a cutting-edge life hack, but it’s simple and, more importantly, it’s true. Only by setting actual work hours can we draw a clear line between work and the rest of our preoccupations.

Do you set aside time for personal projects? If so, how did you manage it and what do you do with your time?

Photo by flickr user net_efekt, licensed under CC-BY-2.0

In this post, I’m going to list the standard things I provide every client. If any of these elements are missing, I find that someone walks away dissatisfied, be it the client or me. When present, they seem to allow things to progress fairly smoothly, although, as we all know, there’s no such thing as a sure thing.

Contract Document

Get it on paper. This is something I can’t stress enough, and something which still gets forgotten or overlooked so often it makes me doubt our capacity for learning as a species. If you need any evidence about the necessity of a contract document, look no further than the recent kerfuffle between TechCrunch and Fusion Garage over the CrunchPad/JooJoo device.

You don’t have to spend hours putting together a huge and complex contract before you start doing any work. At one firm I used to work with, we would issue proposals that included an abbreviated contract component. It wasn’t much, and it didn’t require a massive amount of time upfront when we weren’t yet getting paid, but it did ensure that clients felt the agreement was strong, and protected the interests of all parties.

Simple Mission/Objective Statement

The key to the document I’m talking about in this section is that it be simple. Make sure that you can express in plain language what it is the project is meant to achieve. Ensure that both you and your client agree on the wording, and agree on what it means before you set it in stone.

It will also help if this statement details a specific product or project endpoint that’s measurable. Otherwise, you might run into problems with an unknown quantity or an ambiguous endpoint that could result in a contract that drags on to a point where it isn’t really profitable for you to work on it any further.

Scheduled Check-Ins

Just like your significant other, your client is going to want you to check-in once in a while to make sure everything is still OK. It can become quite annoying, depending on the client, though you should always remember that the client is risking money on you as a contractor, so progress updates really are their due.

However, you can make it easier on yourself. At project outset, set up a regular schedule for progress updates, and hopefully that will curtail some of the unnecessary looking over the shoulder clients tend to do. It will also give you mini-goals to work towards between your larger milestones or deliverables, which should keep you on target.

Scope Change Documents

This isn’t strictly always necessary, but if it looks like the scope of the project is going to change, then it’s a definite must-have. I have a template of this type of document ready to go at project outset, in fact, because I end up using it so often, even though it only comes into play when the project you find yourself doing deviates from the one you set out to do.

As soon as you anticipate having to do more or different work than you and the client had agreed upon, the best thing for all involved is to provide them with a scope change document for approval before proceeding, unless you absolutely know that you have free reign. You’ll be protecting yourself from a whole heap of trouble, believe me.

Needs and Wants

Not every client will want all of the things I’ve listed here. In fact, a good many of them may try to talk you out of some of these. The fact remains that I think they’re necessities, and most clients will, too, once you actually use them. In the end, it’s all about making sure everyone involved gets what they want out of a project, not just what they think they want.

Do you agree with this list? Is there anything missing?

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As a longtime user, I’ve seen that one of the biggest obstacles to users adopting Microsoft Project is the app itself. It’s quite a complex application, and so it’s due for a productivity makeover to help it become more accessible to users who aren’t PMI certified.

The launch of the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta brings with it a number of changes. Here are some of its productivity enhancements:

Visually Enhanced Timeline View. Because the Gantt chart can be a miss with some audiences, the multiple and enhanced view options in Project 2010 should help project leads communicate project scheduling and status data to stakeholders and clients.

“Excel-like” User Experience. As part of the core Microsoft Office suite since the beginning, Excel is a familiar application with users of all levels of mastery. Microsoft is finally latching onto the similarities between Excel and Project by adding  more Excel-like features to Project 2010, including enhanced copy and paste, enabling you to copy and paste project data into other Office applications; automatic text wrap that adjusts row height to display full task names automatically; and auto-complete for data entry that displays your previously used values for you to select from. Project 2010 also enables you to add columns dynamically to a project. Another welcome feature is additional color and text formatting options, which I’ve longed for in the past when I was trying to make a Gantt chart I was creating more readable for my clients.

Enhanced Collaboration. Project management is not a solitary activity, so Microsoft Project 2010 enables you to save, print and publish project data from the Backstage view. There’s also enhanced integration with SharePoint.

The focus on flexible views of project data and collaboration gives Microsoft Project 2010 great potential to capture and communicate project data in the hands of all users, even those who aren’t trained project managers.

Have you tried Microsoft Project 2010 Beta? Share your experience below.

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How do you know if a project has failed? Although you can have specific quantifiers such as revenue or number of users, the simple way is to ask yourself this: “Did it meet any of its objectives?” If the answer is no, then that means you’ve got a failed project in your hands. Some of these projects can remain buried and forgotten, but there are others that you can’t stop thinking about even years down the road.

What do you do if there’s an old failed project that you want to bring back to life?

Why Try Again?

The first thing I do when I try to resurrect an old project, whether it’s mine or a client’s, is to evaluate why it should be done. The reason is sometimes simple. It could be that when the project started, the people working on it weren’t mature or skilled enough to give it the proper follow-through. Now that they know better, they think it’s time to try again.

This was the case with one of my new clients. When he started his blog, he bought into get-rich-quick schemes and short-term tips on how to boost traffic. As his blog’s advertising income diminished and he saw few returning visitors, he called the project a failure. After looking into his mistakes, he’s determined to try again. It’s the classic case of being passionate about a project but not knowing enough to execute it well.

There may be many reasons to revive a failed project, but there’s one you should avoid. Don’t bring it back to life just because you have nothing better to do. I have to admit that sometimes this is the justification I have, and every time I use it all I get is a new way to fail at an old project. “Well, I need something new to work on…” is not going to cut it if you want to rework an old mistake and turn it into something great.

Evaluate Your Past Efforts

The first things we need to look at are our mistakes. In “The Dip“, Seth Godin lists 7 different reasons why one might fail. This includes the lack of time, money, or enthusiasm. Other reasons include picking the wrong thing to try, getting scared, not being serious enough, or focusing too much on the short term. In the failed projects I’ve evaluated, I can see that all of them failed because of at least one of these reasons.

Many of my failed projects, and even some of my clients’ failed projects, were also the result of a lack of definition. Here are some of its common symptoms:

• Saying “Our target audience is everybody.”
• Adding all the possible features and widgets into the project, even when they are unnecessary.

Apart from looking at these past mistakes, we also need to celebrate our successes. In the midst of all the chaos, what worked for you? What went well before the project failed? By looking back at both our successes and our mistakes, we can be better prepared for our next attempt to make it work.

Starting Over

If you’ve realized that resurrecting your failed project is the best thing to do, there are some things you need to keep in mind:

• Remember to quantify. “What’s measured improves,” as Peter Drucker once wrote. If you can, quantify the hours, cost, and other resources used up by your project. Other necessary statistics such as sales, users, and bug reports should also be recorded. By keeping a close eye on the numbers, we can predict most incoming challenges and plan for them accordingly.
• Things to avoid. Instead of just writing a lengthy to-do list, why not factor in your previous mistakes and remind yourself what you shouldn’t do? It’s easy to fall back on bad habits, especially if new processes take longer to pay off.
• Keep it simple. Whether you’re relaunching an old product, service, community, or blog, start with the simplest version you can possibly think of. This allows your project to remain flexible when there are a lot of unpredictable and volatile factors that may affect your success.

The truth is that it takes a lot of planning, effort and passion to bring an old project back to life. If done right, the attempt is usually worth it.

Have you ever tried to revive a failed project such as a blog, online community or an app? What was your experience like?

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I had a chance to speak to Senior Director of Product Marketing for Project, Seth Patton, prior to the announcement to get the lowdown on the new version. Patton says that it will be significantly easier for non-PM professionals to use, with an interface that includes the Office ribbon and a wizard-like Task Inspector that will make it easier to discover Project features without overwhelming the user, while at the same time retaining (and building on) the functionality that seasoned Project pros need. Simple collaboration will be available via SharePoint (so companies won’t necessarily need to shell out  for Project Server), and Project now integrates tightly with Visual Studio and Dynamics. The Project product range will also be streamlined, with a clear pathway to more advanced project and portfolio management capabilities as business needs change.

If you’re growing tired of the lack of updates to Project and are considering switching to one of its online competitors, you might want to hang tight until you can give this new version a run for its money. Somewhat annoyingly, Microsoft hasn’t made a beta available with the announcement, so you can’t try it out just yet; according to Patton, the public beta (which you can sign up for here) is due to land “before the end of the calendar year.” The final release should happen early next year, to coincide with the main Office 2010 launch.

Are you looking forward to Project 2010? Or have the lack of updates to the product forced you to jump ship?

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I’d read my post through three times before hitting that button, but somehow missed adding a crucial word — the word “don’t”. Inadvertently, I had told my readers that they “have to sacrifice too much to lessen their cost of living,” . Furthermore, two of the hyperlinks I had added were broken.

I am a sloppy self‑editor, mostly because I am forgetful. I realized it was time to create a standard checklist to remind myself of all the steps I have to take before clicking “Publish”.

Since creating this checklist, I’ve made fewer mistakes and I haven’t had another “oops” moment. I created a similar list for my fiction, too. Anyone who does creative work should have a similar checklist to ensure that their projects are polished before submitting them.

Why Have a Standard Checklist?

Apart from remembering the small yet essential steps to finishing one’s work, there are other reasons why a standard checklist can be useful:

• Smoother workflow. Since all the steps to a polished project can be seen in a single page, you spend less time asking yourself “Is there anything I’m forgetting?” Once you’ve checked each item on the list, you can look at your project one more time and feel confident enough to send it.
• Objectivity. Ideal list items should be objective enough for you to check off each one without much thought; it’s hard to measure items like “Make the design pop” or “Write compelling copy”. Opt for quantifiable points, such as “Test design/copy with 10 different users and make sure that at least 8 take the preferred action”.
• Consistency. A standard checklist for major projects allows you to deliver a consistent output. Plus, it becomes a handy reference when you’re subcontracting work.

It helps to look at the project checklists of other knowledge workers for inspiration, so you might want to look at the following examples:

• A web site accessibility checklist by Aaron Cannon.
• A comprehensive content quality checklist by Colleen Jones from UXMatters.
• A list of essential checks before launching your web site by Lee Munroe from Smashing Magazine.

Making My Own List

For my blogging projects, I spent half an hour listing the important things I had to do before publishing a post. Some of the items I included were as follows:

• Print the article and read it. Spot all spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes.
• Make the necessary corrections on the soft-copy.
• Read the revision backwards, sentence by sentence to check for overlooked mistakes.
• Add post tags.
• Use correct HTML for punctuation.
• Preview the post, click each hyperlink and make sure they work correctly.

To make the list reflect how I work, I also noted the gaps and weaknesses in my process for the last three posts I wrote. While I added an odd item from time to time, I had to remind myself that the goal was not to create a longer list. The goal is to make sure that each article I deliver is as clear, concise and as polished as it can be.

Which brings me to my final point: Know the reason why your checklist exists. By having a clear objective, you’ll know whether your list works or not. It’s supposed to streamline your process, rather than adding another step to an already saturated workflow.

Do you have a project checklist that you use before handing finished work to clients?

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In this post I’m going to discuss deadline management. Successfully managing deadlines is part knowing why specific deadlines exist in the first place, part knowing which are soft and which are firm, and a big part relationship management. Striking the right balance depends on the situation at hand, but generally speaking, deadlines fall into one of three categories and should be managed accordingly.

First Type: The Faildate

Depending on the institution you’re dealing with, and the level of consultant or employee they’re used to working with, a deadline might actually be a test to see if your work is up to their standards. As a consultant taking on a first contract with a high profile client, for example, a deadline could be the point at which you’re no longer considered for future work. And that’s if you meet them, not exceed them.

To beat these kinds of deadlines, you actually have to beat them. Coming in early is the real key to success, but of course your product can’t suffer as a result. You’ll know when these kinds of deadlines are in play if you do adequate research before signing on with a new client or employer in order to find out about their corporate climate.

Sometimes these types of clients will also want frequent, regular status updates, either weekly or bi-weekly, but even if they don’t, it’s a good idea to micro-manage these deadlines by breaking them down into sub-tasks on a fairly small scale. Hourly goal setting might even be appropriate. Good tools for this kind of work include GTD apps that send you notifications on a schedule you set (Things or Remember the Milk are recommended).

Second Type: Firm, But Flexible

This sounds contradictory, but it isn’t. This will cover the vast majority of deadlines you’ll encounter. These are deadlines that are set as firm, and that should be met if at all possible, but that are susceptible to change depending on circumstances and when in conflict with other deadlines.

The key to successfully negotiating these deadlines is finding out why they exist in the first place. If, for example, a deadline exists for the group you’re working with because without that piece of work, another group is just sitting around waiting, then that deadline takes priority. If it exists because it’s based on a reasonable, pre-project estimate of how much time a task should take, then consider it flexible and move on.

Zen is a nice tool to use to track these kinds of deadlines, because it allows you to create custom groups for your different tasks, so you can make your own priority categories depending on the deadline source.

Third Type: Staledate

The final type of deadline isn’t really a deadline at all. It’s the date at which something ceases to really be a concern, and passes into a client or employer’s distant memory. Be careful, because no one you work for will likely admit that these kinds of deadlines exist, so identifying them won’t be easy.

The best way to go about finding your staledate deadlines is by watching ones from the second category you’ve flagged as low priority. Other signs a deadline may actually indicate when you can drop something entirely include a lack of ability to quantify what would result from meeting said deadline, a lack of client stakeholders associated with it, and lax reporting requirements.

Keep tabs on these as you normally would other dates in your usual PM tools, but don’t worry too much about following through until someone important starts asking questions.

Deadlines don’t have to be the movie monsters we make them out to be. Sometimes they’re just a way of saying “we would like this done within a reasonable period of time,” or even “we don’t care about this at all, but we have to pretend to until time X because the policy says so.” If you listen to your deadlines and monitor them properly, the won’t loom so much as pass uneventfully.

How do you manage deadlines?

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While I believed in my output and knew that the customer was satisfied with my work, I didn’t want these projects to be the first thing that potential clients saw. After all, I hadn’t written about dating for several years. I wanted to focus my writing efforts on business, freelancing and travel.

If you’ve ever done low quality work, accepted a project only for the money, changed niches, or even worked on something ethically dubious, you might understand this situation. There are just some past projects that should be buried by your current ones.

How can you make sure that happens?

Highlight your best work. To reduce the negative effect that an embarrassing project has on your portfolio, focus on promoting your best work instead. Revamp your portfolio to include only relevant, high-quality samples. If you use social media, put them at the foreground when discussing your work.

Work the search engines. My problem with the embarrassing e-book projects was that they belonged to the top three search engine results for my name. This meant that anyone — from potential employers to curious friends — would find that project if they typed my name into Google. If you can easily find your “bad” project using your name as the search term, here are some ways to fix it:

• Purchase your own domain name if you haven’t done so already. Many new web workers tell me that they just can’t afford to buy their own domain name and set up a blog. But what they really can’t afford is the lack of control over what shows up first when you enter their names (or the name of their business) in search engines. This is why it’s important to get domain names based on your real name and your business name. Anything you pair up with it — a blog, a splash page or a static site — has a good chance of ranking well.

You don’t necessarily have to buy hosting and code your own site, either. You can point your domain name to your LinkedIn or Facebook profiles or to a free hosted blog (such as Blogger or Tumblr).

• Get backlinks. Once you have your domain name make sure people link to it. This is easier to do with a blog, since it’s more encouraging to link to something that contains an interesting idea or discussion, rather than just a personal profile. Also, it’s better if they use your real name as the anchor text.

• Learn the basics of on-site SEO. You don’t need to be an SEO (search engine optimization) guru to get your professional blog to rank well for your name. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and using some of those techniques might make your blog look spammy. Here’s a good introduction that talks about capitalizing on simple, long-term tactics rather than the “SEO trick of the month”.

Contact the person in charge, if applicable. Since the agreement with my previous client involved using a pseudonym for the dating e-books, I immediately contacted him about it. In a polite email I asked if he could use my old pseudonym for the books. He apologized and told me that he had simply forgotten about our agreement when he had his site and the e-books redesigned. He then corrected this oversight and changed the byline.

This approach may not be useful to those who have different arrangements. Still, if you can do it without upsetting anyone and it’s within the limits of your contract, it doesn’t hurt to ask a previous client to change the credit or byline. They can be very understanding if you explain the situation well.

Become more conscious of these projects from now on. As the old adage goes, prevention is better than cure. Go uncredited or use a pseudonym for projects that aren’t up to your usual standards or that are incompatible with your personal brand. Your future self will thank you.

Remember that whatever happens and no matter how shameful your previous projects may be, it’s important to stay honest. If ever someone asks you directly about these projects, tell the truth and accept it with grace. These projects may be embarrassing, but it’s more bearable than being caught in a lie.

Have you ever worried about embarrassing projects from the past? How have they affected your brand?

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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.

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Gantter is a web app that provides Gantt chart project planning and much of the basic functionality of Microsoft Project for free. Considering that it is emulating a very complex desktop app, it works surprisingly well.

A project plan in Gantter

With it you can:

• plan your project and estimate timeframes
• review your plan using a Gantt chart, check project progress, review critical tasks
• manage project resources (work or material) and assign them to tasks
• manage project calendars (set working times, add holidays, etc.)
• manage resource calendars (indivdual working times, vacations, etc.)

The way you work with Gantter is also remarkably similar to what you might be used to from Project. Enter the tasks that make up the project, estimate the time they’ll take, assign the dependencies between them and allocate resources. Gantter will then work out when all the tasks should start and finish, and display the project in a nice Gantt chart. Make any changes and Gantter automatically adjusts the plan. It’s quite easy to use if you’re familiar with Project, and runs snappily.

One feature I wasn’t expecting to see is the ability to import files from Project itself; you just need to make sure that your .mpp files are saved as XML first. Perhaps a little unfairly, I first tested this out with a huge and complex Project file (over 500 rows, 7.5MB) and it didn’t work. But with smaller files it worked well, so Gantter could be an option if you want to share Project data with clients or colleagues who don’t have Project installed.

It’s probably best to think of Gantter as no more than an online Project clone as it lacks all of the collaborative features that you’d really want from a PM web app, like 5pm or Basecamp. You can’t even create an account; if you want to save your plan you have to export it as an XML file locally. However, if you’re looking for a tool to help plan a reasonably complex project and don’t want to shell out for Project, Gantter might be just what you need.

(Via Lifehacker)

What project management tools do you use?

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