Newsletter – January 2021

Here’s the technology and people update for January 2021. Thank you again to all of you who sent me messages based on last months content and also to those people I spoke to.

GROWTH
This seems to word of the month. It’s been a fantastic start to 2021 and I am ever more grateful given that so much of the world is locked down at home right now. My forecast that online business is the place to be is very much at the forefront. Investing in high quality helpful content and publishing it online will attract customers. It’s certainly working for me.

January has seen growth everywhere, enquiries, take-up on free consulting calls, search queries, visitors, everything. It’s almost if the new years resolutions have kicked in for small business and entrepreneurs and everyone is taking action to move their venture forward.

My own goals for this year are to publish more content – I’ve almost had a post a day on Instagram, and my life being a series of swimming pools. I’m also publishing more YouTube tutorials and general business video’s. The plan is to have 100 YouTube videos by the end of the year. I’m following the advice of many of the successful vloggers who say the first 50-100 will be rubbish, but you’ll learn a lot. I’m learning a lot and I’ve already had plenty of criticism so the strategy seems to be working 🙂
It would be really helpful if you could subscribe to my channel.

PRODUCTIVITY
I’m still loving ToDoist (see below) and have now automated tasks from Asana and Pipedrive to be automatically added to ToDoist on certain conditions via Zapier. My personal productivity is still at an all-time high, but there are some things that I still procrastinate on. I really do need something that could write my documents for me and discovered an AI platform that can theoretically do this. It’s a tad expensive but I may end up giving it a try later this year if the troubles persist.

PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS
I just love ToDoist and have it configured almost perfectly now. The trick is to minimise projects and what you add to it. I continue to test out filters and labels such that I ony see the tasks relevant to the time of day, or the project I’m working on. Its weird that my ability to complete tasks is directly linked to the number of tasks I see on a list. The fewer on the list the more I complete, even when the bigger list view may contain tasks that don’t need to be completed now. Its almost as if my brain says – there are only a few tasks, I’ll just keep going and get them done.

ASANA & PIPEDRIVE
I’ve had lots of calls about Pipedrive this month. In fact I would go as far as to say 80% of the consulting calls I have are around improving CRM. Both in terms of better managing customers as well as better fitting a CRM system into small business. It still surprises me how many businesses don’t have their CRM connected to their website, forms especially.

Asana have made improvements to their reporting function this month. I have to confess that I think there are more important things for them to be doing, like being able to trigger the creation of a template from the API, something so many people want to be able to do in terms of automating task creation. Let’s see what happens as the year moves on.

CONSULTING
I’ve turned away quite a lot of work this month, some of it was just not my thing, but a few requests involved custom development and building bigger databases than Airtable can handle. If there’s a freelance developer out there who can build AWS databases and custom scripts for data parsing, please do get in touch.

TECHNOLOGY
I’ve spent lost of time with Video and Audio this month. Stands, microphones, Final Cut Pro and learnt lots. I’m continuing my life-long learning into video editing and trying to get a more professional look to my videos.

As a consequence I also ended up purchasing Loom Pro. I guess this is exactly what they wanted you to do when they reduced their recording time limit on the free version to just 5 minutes. I’m sure lots of people will be disappointed with this. I was also disappointed to find that I can’t record 4k video as my monitor isn’t high enough resolution.

RECENT PROJECTS
I presented on behalf of Britcham Cambodia about some of the lessons learnt in eCommerce. The session was members only, but I’ve added my presentation to my YouTube channel if you want to take a look.
More E-learning platform development
Lots of mentoring for 500 startups

MISCELLANEOUS LINK
For those of you who have the afternoon slump there’s an interesting article that suggests you stop working between 12 and 3pm. OK for those of us who work for ourselves I guess.

That’s it for this month. As always I love your replies, and continue to be interested in some of the challenges you face and problems you want to solve. Please do let me know what you’re up to.

Chris