Implementation Day 23 – Time management and CRM
I started today with a jog. That may not sound like much of a business implementation, but I definitely need to make some time to exercise. Healthy body healthy mind n all that. Anyway …
I had lots I wanted to do today, but knew that I’d also have lots of interruptions due to a couple of prior commitments and the kids after school clubs. I decided to plan out my day and use the ‘Pomodoro technique‘ to keep me on track.
I stumbled across the Pomodoro technique a few weeks ago. I believe it’s a pretty old idea though. It’s basically spending 25 minutes really focussing on something, then having a 5 minute break. You can then either go back to the same thing or have another focused session on something else. It sounds good for either splitting a job up into bite size chunks or for doing a significant piece of work on several different jobs.
There’s a great app for this for the iPhone called Pomodoro Pro which I highly recommend. Unfortunately, I lost one of the planned chunks of time this morning because the app wasn’t giving me the alarm noise at the end of 25 minutes. I found out from their tech support (which was incredibly fast and solved the problem straight away) that the fault was due to an option I clicked during the iOS5 update on the phone. All is working again now, but the whole thing did loose me a bit of valuable time.
So, one of the things that I didn’t get time to do today was write some promotional copy for a new product (not magic related) that I want to sell. This is one of the big guns that I want finished within this month, but the clock is against me now!
What I did manage to do was some detailed preparation work for massaging the CRM system to accept my optimised chunk of data. All is looking good on that front and I’m now seeing that SugarCRM will be able to do the vast majority of what I want from it. It still needs a fair bit of time spending on it to get all of the various strands of data in there in the right places. At least I know where I’m going now though. For a long time, this CRM thing which I’ve known I ‘should’ do has been little more than a black hole at the end of a dark tunnel inside an abyss that’s wrapped in an enigma. Now I feel like I’ve got a torch and a map.
Other relevant bits from today are a bit ‘same old story’. Enquiries that lead to probable maybes and one almost definite that called back to say unfortunately someone else in the family had already arranged some other entertainment. D’oh!
The good news is that I got the gig that I had the meeting about yesterday! My gut feeling was right on that. Time well spent there.
I’m writing this sat in the car while my eldest finishes her drama group. Bloody spoilt kids. Nothing like that when I was a lad! She’s out in a sec so I’d better sign off. Back into the brave new world tomorrow!