Posts Tagged ‘project management’

I think we achieve very little alone so it’s imperative to join forces and energy with other people. You need to involve co-workers, teammates, people in your field (collaboration), friends & family (sharing), and the world (publishing).

In sports, collaboration is usually in-person. Professional tennis players or runners have an entire team of people training with them. They “collaborate” with training partners, share their efforts with friends and family, and they eventually “publish” their results when they go out to compete. (more…)

One of the main things I’ve come to realize about getting things done and optimizing my creativity is that organization doesn’t help. To the contrary – it kinda gets in the way. You get so focused on keeping track of everything and being on top of your projects that you lose the flexibility and “looseness” that’s necessary for creativity to flow. You’ve got to let go of the illusion that you’re in control and embrace the uncertainty that’s part of any project in life.

Same with planning. Planning really is guessing and it’s totally useless. Like organization, planning kills creativity, motivation, and productivity. (more…)

I always say that cooking is all about the ingredients. If you take the best ingredients of the highest quality, it almost doesn’t matter how you mix them up together, cook them, or arrange them. Even if you were to just blend them all together there’s a good chance a great smoothie will come out of that.

What really matters is the ingredients. That’s why it’s rewarding when there’s no food left at home but you’re still able to cook up a great meal just from leftovers and random ingredients. It’s because it’s a challenge to make something great without good ingredients and overcoming a challenge is always rewarding. While you can welcome this challenge from time to time, you’ll eat much better food (and get much better results) if you prepare your meals from really good ingredients. (more…)

If you’d simply take some time to create some goals for yourself and then write them down, the chances of reaching your goals would go up by a huge amount. (more…)

“Here’s a slide about the illusion of agreement that occurs when people agree over bullet points instead of sketches and screens:”

Source: Illusion of agreement by Ryan of 37signals. (more…)

For those of you who are following us and keeping up with our company history, you know that we’ve setup a remote work environment and that we don’t have a physical office space any more. We mostly work virtually.

We’re using technology to communicate, collaborate, and achieve a lot! In particular, we use a bunch of web applications to do what we need to do and share what we want to share – some of them we’ve developed ourselves, some we’ve bought, and some are free. Project management, task management, time tracking, file sharing, chat, are just a few examples of what we handle through web apps.

But sometimes all these tools and technology just defeat the purpose. It kinda gets in the way. When you have a bunch of things you need done, but you don’t necessarily need to cooperate on these things, or track the time you spend on them, or be particularly organized, then there’s nothing better than a good old quick text document you use temporarily and discard when you’re done. As an example, here’s my to-do list from last Sunday (08/07): (more…)

Every time you’re considering working with anyone on a project, ask yourself “why would this person work for cheap?” It is particularly true when it comes to web design and web development and this is something I tell pretty much anyone that inquires about working with us.

You’ll be able to find cheaper companies to work with. But you won’t be able to get the same value. Every dollar you invest here at Noam Design will yield an unbeatable value for your project.

You have a limited budget? Reduce the project’s scope. But don’t try to get everything done under your budget because in the end that’s the more costly road! Instead, reduce the project’s features and be more flexible about the creative process. Brainstorm with your project manager on what can be achieved within your budget. But don’t shop around for the team that’d give you everything on earth within the smallest budget.

Where you can save costs is being smart about using resources. That’s why we created Template Action – you can download a template and setup an award winning website at a ridiculous price. And you can get such a great value because we don’t have to deal with pre-sales discussions, back and forth emails and phone calls during the creative process, time spent in meetings, etc. We created great websites you can easily manage and edit – if you like one of them you can purchase it for less than what a single consultation would cost you. It’s that simple.

People plan. When it comes to planning a business startup or a website, often months pass by and they’re still planning. Planning how much money they’ll spend, how much they’ll make, how long it will take, what their customers will do, how things will happen, etc.

When you realize that planning really is guessing, you start doing more and talking about doing less. You’ll start creating, achieving, launching, testing, trying – all but postponing. Realizing that you can’t plan too much is a huge milestone for any project. Your approach suddenly changes. You focus on reality and loose the illusion that you know what you’re doing.

This is a very powerful insight from the creators of Basecamp:

“” What’s that mean? A manager of one is someone who comes up with their own goals and executes them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins. They do what a manager would do — set the tone, assign items, determine what needs to get done, etc. — but they do it by themselves and for themselves.

These people free you from oversight. They set their own direction. When you leave them alone, they surprise you with how much they’ve gotten done. They don’t need a lot of handholding or supervision.

How can you spot these people? (more…)

I’ve noticed how much of a difference you can make in how a business runs simply by knowing when it is the most appropriate to deliver the news. As a rule of thumb, always deliver the bad news on Fridays and the good news on Tuesdays. Your business will run that much more smoothly!

Delivering the bad news on Friday lets people have the weekend to digest it. And announcing the good news on Tuesday has a lasting effect throughout the week. Don’t deliver anything on Mondays though – it gets lost with all the other stuff people have to deal with at the beginning of the week.

A great application of this principle is knowing when to invoice your clients! (more…)