What busy looks like

My partner and I use Workflowy to keep track of everything we have going on in our business. Everything from customer status tracking, bill paying (and we have some of that, let me tell you) and flat out to-do lists are tracked, tagged and dated in Workflowy. I love it. It is free, too. At least until I fill up my free amount of data, but even after the free status goes away through much love and use, to buy a Pro account is nothing, really.

It isn’t a perfect method as we were spoiled rotten with a fantastic CRM that kept track of every freaking thing on every project we ever had when we worked at the college. However, leaving the college meant leaving the CRM - and all of the lovely data. Since it was something that has to be used in order to make it useful - much like having an exercise plan (or a fitness goal in mind), one must actually DO THE WORK before the results start showing up - even the college’s CRM had problems. Specifically, staff wouldn’t use it - even upon pain of death (or firing via bad performance review).

But now that we are just two in this little pea pod we call a business, just about anything will work for a CRM these days. Provided we use it. And we do.

And it looks like we are getting the college CRM back - because they love us. The CRM not the college. The college still hates us.

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While my silence here is deafening, I have been writing on a closed platform called 750 Words for about three years. Off and on. Mostly off. And by closed platform I mean NO one sees it. Yes it is online and yes it is in a ‘cloud’ or whatever, but I’m the only one who sees it and honestly, once I close the entry page for the day, I never go back to it. It is more of a brain dump than anything else.  Just taking the 15 or 20 minutes it takes for me to dump 750 words out of my head helps to focus me and keep me just a skosh to the good side of sane.

No edits. No spell checks. No censorship. And as long as 750 Words stays true to its mission - private writing - all will be right with the world.

So here is a bit of a pickle: 750 Words is not going to stay free. The guy who runs it is going to work for Twitter and doesn’t have the bandwidth to keep it going without something in return. You know, I’ve always wondered how something like Workflowy and 750 Words (and initially Facebook, et al) were able to offer their services - and ideas - for nothing. Now in the case of Facebook, I am the commodity, and I understand that; however, in the case of 750 Words where there really isn’t a business model of any sorts except a kind of positive existential karma, which has apparently paid off (if they guy is moving his family so he can go to work for Twitter), how does one pay for the server space? The tech support? Upgrades?

So it makes sense that 750 Words is going to a paid platform - and the prices are pretty cheap really.

But I have to wonder if I would write more here if I didn’t have that private space - that cone of silence - the vault - in which to confide? Would the quality improve? Because what I’ve been writing there is crap. Much the same as it is here.

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I went to Mexico at the end of January.

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Then I went to Chicago the first part of February.

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I get around.