Self discipline more….

Before I show you my arsenal of the best Internet tools that are sure to help you to work remotely, I wanted to write about one more item about self management and especially to do with maintaining your focus and levels of concentration

I’ve observed and verified a common behavior in acquaintances who work online and I’ve been in contact with for some time and I call this behavior the fifty min effect. I spotted these people who focus and work for fifty mins. and then make themselves take a whole ten mins. break and are a significant order of magnitude more effective and produce a substantially greater quality of work than people who don’t have well organised working methods.

OK as promised here is my list of favourite remote working software:

E-Mail

Google Mail has a price tag of zero. For my money the search & label (categories) functions are the best implementation I have encountered. So far the only gripe I have is that it runs a bit slow on not so new PC’s

Phone calls

Skype used to infuriate me as the call performance was atrocious, but a big pat on the back for the coders at Skype now as they have really improved the quality of the service. For few dollars a quarter Skype lets me call and conference in any handset and Skype subscriber on Earth. The latest version of Skype has an abundance of very useful functions and there are now plenty of of practical add ons.

Organising Content

Evernote has reached over a million users in no time at all – it lets you to store, organise and add notes to any type of digital media up on the Internet. Just go check it out…it’s free.

Invoicing, Time and Expenses capture, Accounting and CRM

You probably know that my urge to work remotely was originally sparked off by Quickbooks Online, a small business accounting software system. But it is easily beaten hands down by the free edition of salesorder.com – a lead to cash system that’s as easy to use as a pc mouse I looked at NetSuite whose pricing (and people) scared me off. My choice here is salesorder.com – Go check it out.