Something happened to me recently that caused me to reflect on this; I encountered a tradition that I believe actually enhances productivity, and I wanted to share this with you.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed that I was silent  most of Sunday and all of Monday.  My eldest daughter was recently accepted to the University of Georgia, and she was invited to their “Out and About” open house. For the open house, Samantha shadowed a student as the student attended her classes for that day while my wife, youngest daughter, and I went on a tour of the campus.

It was a nice day, a little cold, but the sun and the walk kept us from freezing. Our tour guide was a  very entertaining senior named “Barrett”. After walking  a little on our tour, we stopped in front of the school’s Chapel. Barrett explained a little about the history of the Chapel, and then he took us around to the back of the building;  there we found the Bell Tower. As you can see from the presentation in the link, the Bell Tower is huge; the 173 year old bell weighs over 800 pounds. The bell has a long rope that (though you can’t really see it in the presentation)  extends all the way to the ground. Usually, when Georgia wins a major sporting event,  students flock to ring the bell in celebration.

Here is the really cool part…anyone can ring the bell at any time to celebrate any major achievement or accomplishment; get an “A” on that really hard paper on “The Use of Metaphor in Hamlet”, ring the bell; ace your Chemistry Final, ring the bell; overcome your shyness and ask that cute girl out, ring the bell (and then tell her why, that should put a smile on her face).  Barrett said that he lived close to campus, and he can hear the bell being rung periodically at all hours of the night.  How amazing is that! Of course, you can run out of your dorm and scream at the top of your lungs “I DID IT!”, but this, to me, is a fantastic tradition that promotes achievement. I actually found myself thinking that in the near future,  I would have accomplished something so “Bell Worthy” that when I visit my daughter, I will run to the tower and ring the bell myself.

So now I ask you…What would it take to make you “Ring the Bell”?  What way will you celebrate your major accomplishment? What tradition(s) will you start or do you follow that enhances your productivity and promotes achievement? Let me know…

The the basic lesson of the  Challenge is to pick a niche and look for micro niches that are viable, that have a market of willing and able consumers. You will need to test the market by creating a blog or Hubpage that targets the micro niche. This testing is crucial, because it ensures that you can separate the good prospects from the losers without investing a dime.

I am going to share one technique that I use to keep track of the multiple identities that I have on the various blogs I create to test my markets.

First a little about GMail. Let’s say you have  the following GMail address: Bob@gmail.com. You can use the “+” to differentiate email sources. For example, you can give your family the following email address: “Bob+family@gmail.com” and friends “Bob+friends@gmail.com”; in both cases, the email will show up in your GMail account. GMail ignores everything after the “+”.

Now, a little about niches. I am going to use the example market of “people who play tennis”; these are the people I am trying to reach. Let’s say I have tested all the keywords, and came up with the following viable keyword phrases: my mega-niche phrase is “Tennis Racquet”; my niche phrase is “head tennis racuquet”; my micro-niche phrase is “head liquid metal tennis racquet”.  So I will create my blog with someone like BlogSpot with the title “Liquid Metal Tennis Racquet” which will be at the address “liquidmetaltennisracquet.blogspot.com”. When I create this particular blog it will ask for my email address.

Here is where my trick comes in.

I will create the following GMail address – “CrazyAbout@gmail.com”  (not my real address). When I create my blog, I will use my email address, and append my mega niche – in this case “CrazyAbout+TennisRackets@gMail.com”. I also make sure when I post relevant comments on other blogs, I use this email address and associate it with my blog in order to get valuable links. I do this for each of my niches. So I don’t have to keep creating different email accounts.  You can then create a filter in GMail to either forward it to another account, or to label it so you can display it by label.

So far this has worked pretty well for me and it helps keep me organized. I hope you find this tip helpful. If you have any other tips, send me a comment I will share it here.

Yahoo has an extensive catalog of cool patterns here. It is an extensive list covering many topics. They are a welcome addition to any web developer’s toolbox.

I was happy to see that someone has cleverly applied patterns to productivity. Check out this site, I haven’t gone through all of them yet, but I like the patterns I have read so far, and I wanted to share this site. (Make sure you follow the links to each pattern at the top of the page).

I apologize to the three or four of you that hang on my every word waiting for my next wacky adventure…

Seriously, I have been swamped…

The major rehab on the house has been complete, now comes the little details that need to be finished so I can get the house ready to rent. Today, I went to a local appliance store to get a stove top for the kitchen (I still need a new wall mounted oven and range hood); I also hung the fire alarms and started cleaning EVERYTHING!

The big to-do is getting the garage doors to work. My contractor could not do it, but gave me the name of someone who might. They have yet to get back to me…

I also have to get my “process” formalized. I know what the Georgia Landlord – Tenant law is, and I have a good lease. I now need to get a voice mail service to handle the calls from prospective renters and a way to run credit checks and criminal checks on any applicants. The devil is always in the details.

Still, I am excited. So far (knock on wood) I have been able to handle any problems that I have encountered. It has been crazy leading a double life, programmer by day, real estate rehab project manager by night, but I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Of course, that doesn’t mean that life as a landlord isn’t going to cause headaches, but financially, it will ease a lot of pressure having someone else pay the mortgage – assuming I find a tenant. Then comes the next house…

Keeping productive given my situation has been a challenge, and I have been surfing the net for productivity tips. I have found a really good article here. I hope you find it helpful.

You can find his list of tools here.

One of the tools he recommended is ZOHO, which I also use and recommend. I find it a lot more robust than Google’s office tools.

As I mentioned in my last post, I got the house. In the last week or so, when I was not with my wife and kids celebrating the holidays, I was in the process of getting the house ready for rehabbing. This meant getting the utilities squared away, and, as of today, getting a new furnace installed (Since turning on the water, I have already found four leaks!). We have had sub-freezing weather here in the Atlanta suburbs and ice was forming in my toilets and water lines. I have started insulating the pipes as a precaution. When they installed the furnace, I installed a programmable thermostat to help save money.

So now the house is ready for repair. My crew starts tomorrow and the work should be done before the end of the month. During this time, I am going to meet with my lawyer who is also a landlord and pay for an hour of his time to get me up to speed on what to expect, and how to handle it. Yeah, I’d rather be on some tropical beach, laptop in hand, slinging code, working remotely, but this opportunity came up and I had to take it. I have a one year interest-only mortgage. At the end of the year, I’ll either re-fi or sell the house. Either way, I did it right and made the profit going in, so I should be ok.

I still intend to find a way to become location-independent; it’s just going to be a little harder.

Now, keeping in line with my goal of making this a good resource for people, I have found a really good article entitled “The Ultimate Guide To Not Choking Under Pressure“. It was written with software developers in mind, but the principles are universal, especially for freelancers.