An Out of World Experience - Freelancing and Time Management

Imagine you will be launched into space and you have been given an assignment to build a research facility and a place for space scientists to live on the moon.  You would definitely have to manage your time to accomplish this goal. 

First you would have to estimate how long it would take to complete the task.  Realizing that multiple trips to the moon might be necessary in order to haul supplies, you would need to set aside intervals to accomplish various stages of the project.  Just as an astronaut schedules stages of his mission, freelancers must outline and plan intervals of time to complete projects.

There may be unexpected obstacles that might delay launching on time.  One would need flexible hours to accommodate changes that come up.  Just as an astronaut learns to work under different conditions and surroundings, so should freelancers. Freelancers learn that not all jobs come there way on a 9 to 5 - Monday through Friday schedule, so it becomes necessary to have flexible hours.

The astronaut needs nourishment and exercise to keep up his endurance and well being. This is true for the freelancers as well. Scheduling time for meals, rest, family activities, and exercise is a vital importance in completing any mission.

Astronauts certainly work under isolated conditions.  Freelancers must also learn to work without multitasking too much and with as few distractions as possible; devoting time to finishing the project at hand.

Just as it is important for astronauts to maintain communication, it is also true for freelancers. They must schedule time for telephone conferencing with clients and time to send emails and updates for projects. 

If you look at freelancing projects as out of this world adventures, you will understand the importance of time management in completing those projects on time. Key factors for time management would include determining time to allocate for a project, scheduling deadlines, breaking projects into manageable time intervals, allowing for flexibility of hours, time for self, need for concentration, and time for communication.  Freelancing and time management go hand and hand.  Tweet

Collage Creator - App for Your Mac

I've been exploring the FREE apps in the Mac App Store the last few days.  I ran across an app, Collage Creator,  that could be useful.  It is certainly fun and easy to use. 

You add photos to the collage window by selecting the Pictures tab and then clicking on the + sign.  This allows you to add photos by opening files on your Mac by using a file selection browser type window. Or you can merely place them in the picture panel on the left-hand side  by using the drag and drop method.  They appear in the collage window on the right-hand side.

You can move them around in the panel by clicking and dragging.  You can  resize or change the angle of orientation using the curved arrow button.  You can position them in front or behind other photos by clicking on Move Up and Move Down buttons.  There are built in buttons to Shuffle and Re-mix the photos that you have in the collage window.  You can also go to Settings Tab to bring up options for setting another photo as a background or using a transparent background.  You can set the Border Width and Color for the photos and add Shadows for those borders.  The layout can be Portrait or Landscape and can vary in size.  There are options for the type of collage arrangement using Grid, Mosaic, Pile or Center Frame modes.

Overall, I give this app a 5 Star Rating and suggest that you check it out for an easy way to create collages of your photos. Tweet

Remembering the PRINT "HELLO" Days - Exploring Basic! App

Last night I downloaded the iPad app called Basic! from the iTunes store to our iPad.  It brought back so many memories of the days I spent standing in line at the University of Texas, waiting to submit keypunch cards for an assignment.  My husband and I explored this app, inputting and running some simple BASIC programs on the iPad, tapping RUN and watching the results as they appeared on the iPad screen.

We were able to recall some of the early basic commands like IF THEN, FOR NEXT and we even played with some of the more sophisticated commands like COLOR, PLOT and LINE.  The app also supplies a list of commands by type.  The Editor  and Terminal mode are easy to use.  The app has several coding examples built in and also allows you to save quite a few of your own programs within the app itself.  There demo programs are pretty good and by jarring our memory we were able to do some pretty nifty stuff on the iPad screen.   I'm sure there are quite a few 35 to 40 year old men and women that remember writing some of their first code to PRINT "Hello" on their first Apple or Radio Shack or Commodore or Amiga desktop computers.   

As we programmed we couldn't help but remember that we had lived in a marvelous time, experiencing almost the entire computer revolution from the huge mainframes at UT to the Macs of today.   We recalled
... the keypunch days - the agony of waiting in line to submit keypunch cards that took days to get back.
...  the times that we had a keypunch typo and standing in line to resubmit the cards
...  the stress of not having our program assignment finished by Friday, because the mainframe went down.  Such agony and stress.
...  our first Apple II, equipped with a tape input device
... to the evolution to today's methods of wireless transfer of data,  cloud technology
... and now iPads that you can use while lounging in bed or traveling the world.

I am so excited about this app, that I am going to try to find some old programs to run on my iPad.   If you ever wrote software or dabbled on some of the first computers running BASIC, I suggest trying out this fun app!  iTunes Link Here. Tweet