Use Acrobat.com as a meeting place

Adobe's new AIR/Flash platform is ripe for application development and they are showcasing the possibilities with the latest in web 2.0 cloud computing. Acrobat.com is a powerful little conferencing application that provides for three vital functions:

1. You can make PDFs online and share them with anyone using an email address.
2. It contains a full-featured web meeting application complete with easy to use white board, web cam conferencing and telephone call-in numbers for voice only conferencing.
3. A free word processor, Buzzword, also is available for generating quick documents on the fly. You can also export them to your favorite format and save them on your local disk which is convenient for the jump drive enthusiasts.
   

Though, I love google docs/apps too, this user interface is simple, sleek and efficent in delivering the goods, all for free! Try it out and move into the sphere of cloud computing.

Get Motivated and Stay That Way!

We all know it is sometimes hard to start projects, even those we care about and want to do. Thus, today's lifehack comes from the Zen Habits blog offering The Ultimate Guide to Motivation. My favorite aspect of this article is that it breaks down two categories in which procrastination usually stops progress:

1. Getting started, and
   
2. Staying motivated when you are in the middle of the project.
   

This latter category is especially helpful because natural stalls in project workflow can make downtime, wasted time if we're not motivated to keep moving forward. Thus, for the long hot days of summer, let the zen expert be your guide.

Keep focused while working...

It is easy to get distracted and not get the most out of time set aside for work. Thus, in the spirit of fostering productivity, this post from Zen Habits provides numerous tips for keeping work time focused on must-do tasks. These tips fall into the "don't waste time and prioritize" categories. Though most seem like common sense, there are a few gems worth noticing:

1. Take more breaks,
2. Plan you day with details, and
3. Notice your lazy routines to name a few.

Klok is a cool Adobe Air application that allows you to keep track of the time you spend on projects. It might be useful for quoting jobs or just tracking a work session.

As always, I appreciate feedback on the application if you try it.

Now get to work!

Feeeeeature Creeeeep

http://sixrevisions.com/project-management/eight-tips-on-how-to-manage-feature-creep/

Save yourself a lot of pain in your professional life and learn from the above article.

In my experience (combined with a lot of reading/discussing other artists' own trials and tribulations), learning those lessons the hard way means uncomfortable stretches of unemployment or total abandonment of the industry to avoid dealing with clients.

Hope this prevents some disasters (or at the very lest gives you a cushion to fall on)!