 So, my name is Wendy Baum. I work for a company called Commit Change. We create software to help nonprofits process donations online. And I think that when I was especially in college, my mom had a joke that was a joke to her but not necessarily a joke to me about how I always seemed to do things just to put them on my resume. And one of the things that I did when I was, I think probably about a sophomore in college in 2005 or 2006 is I created my first WordPress blog. It was a free blog. It's probably still floating around there somewhere. My professor in journalism school made me do it. So, I would have multimedia experience and if there's one thing in my life that I can sort of point from A to B like how did I get here in my career, I think that creating that WordPress blog was one of the big steps forward because that blog when I made it, I was thinking that it would be a portfolio for my journalistic work. That led to writing for the St. Petersburg Times and the Tampa Tribune, Creative Loafing, a lot of different little online magazines and newspapers, but it also gave me like an online record that I knew how to code, I knew how to put a website together and eventually it led to me working for a software company and at the same time because I could always make a living doing what I loved. It also helped me control my schedule and throughout the years I've almost always worked my own schedule, made my own hours. I've rarely had somebody sort of breathing down my neck and watching my schedule and like micromanaging me. So, hopefully some of my experience will help some of you guys out. This is sort of a beginner's look at managing a flexible schedule, but I do have some resources that will help people that are sort of at the mid-level of freelancing too, hopefully. So my number one piece of advice that nobody ever wants to hear is that in order to have a flexible schedule, you really need to embrace routine. Everybody wants the four-hour work week. What makes some of my friends, especially developers, really sad is that I get up at six o'clock in the morning every morning, whether it's the weekend or the weekday, and I sit with a cup of coffee, enjoy my morning, read the news, figure out what's going on in the world, and just take a moment and relax. And if I get up at seven or eight or nine, like my whole day is shot, it's gotten to the point where waking up every morning, embracing my routine, like taking that moment to breathe really sets the pace for my day. And the truth is, no matter how free your schedule is, if you can work from anywhere, you really want to block out time when you're going to be available. So if I'm waking up at six, seven, eight or nine, I'm usually logged into work between nine and five central standard time every single day. It sets the pace so that our clients know that they can reach me when they need to, and it helps me sort of frame out my schedule. So depending on whether I'm writing content for our website or our blog, or I'm helping people with technical problems or I'm coding somebody's site, like I have a framework for my time. There's a whole industry that's set up around workflow and figuring out workflow. You can check out lifehacker.com. If you go to Barnes & Noble, you'll find all kinds of books on having the schedule that works for you, or finding the job that works for you, or gamifying your habits so you can start building new habits. I've sort of become obsessed with workflow. I've become obsessed with figuring out how to optimize my time. So one site that I really like, and so this presentation is going to be sort of visual heavy. But when this goes online, there's a whole resource page that has links to everything. So if you really enjoy this and want to look at some of the resources I'm mentioning, the final page is all going to be resources, and then once that hits online, it's all links. So Mason Curry has a blog called Daily Rituals, and it's all about the rituals of famous artists and architects and writers. And he has a book that just came out called Daily Rituals, How Artists Work. So I work with software people. I consider a software design to be an art form. The people I work with, depending on how they feel, would probably disagree because they consider software and coding to be sort of more of a science. But one thing that struck me on reading the Daily Ritual blog is just how many of the artists that we sort of think of as free spirits or prolific authors, they all follow their own routines that work for them. So this is just a little bit written about John Grisham. So when John Grisham first started writing, he says that he had little rituals that were silly and brutal, but very important. The alarm clock would go off at five, and I'd jump in the shower. My office was five minutes away, and I had to be at my desk, at my office, with the first cup of coffee, a legal pad, and write the first word at 5.30, five days a week. His goal was to write a page a day, and whether that took him 10 minutes or five hours, that's what he would do for the day. And I sort of lived by that philosophy. I sit my butt down, get the work done. I'm lucky enough that I work for a job where I can develop my schedule. And depending on what task I have, if it takes me five minutes or if it takes me five hours, I work until it's done. So like to me, this is sort of my life in some ways. Like I can work from my office. I have a co-working space that I rent space from in Appleton. I can work from my parents' house if something's going wrong in their lives, and I have to take care of one of them. I can work from my company's headquarters in Oakland if we have an all hands. I've set up my life so that I can work from everywhere. And this is sort of on the rise. Remote work is on the rise. Like Wired, The New York Times, UK. Like The Independent have all had articles on digital nomads. And whether it's somebody writing about working from Tokyo or it's someone writing about working from Jamaica and Paradise. A lot of times when they talk to these people, they pretty much say, my clients are in America. And I have to work the hours that my clients can be available. So sometimes I work from the beach in a beach chair with my cell phone next to me and get it done. And sometimes I have giant parts of the day where I can actually enjoy myself. But still, it's the routines that keep everyone going. So if you're an entrepreneur or a freelancer, chances are you don't have an IT department that's buying your laptops for you or picking out your tools. You sort of have to go it on your own. And at different points in my career, I've had different tools that I've needed to use. Like when I was in grad school, I wrote my graduate thesis on an iPad with a wireless keyboard. And that worked fine for me. I wrote it in IPages. I would upload it to Word. I would reformat it on a PC so that all of the formatting issues that came through Pages, I could take care of those and turn it into my thesis advisor. But when I got a job as the editor of an online magazine a few years later, the iPad did not work. Part of that was actually because we published our magazine on WordPress. And the iPad app for WordPress didn't work very well. So within just a few months of getting my job, I realized that my whole workflow had to change. And I got a Google Chromebook. So the Google Chromebook worked pretty well for a few years. I could edit my photos on Pixel or Editor. I could publish everything on WordPress and everything worked fine. But then when I got another job at Commit Change, all of a sudden I had a Chromebook that could barely work with Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets. And I had to open up spreadsheets that had sometimes thousands of rows of information and try to reconcile the information for my job. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to have an IT department that said, here's the laptop we're going to send you. It meets our specifications. But whether you're a freelancer or an entrepreneur, you need to figure out not only the job that you have now, whether you're a college student who can get away with using pages to send copy to somebody who's far away. Or if you know that you want to be a web designer and you're going to use Photoshop, you need to know what specifications you need and plan accordingly. Also, with so much focus on tools and having the newest doodads, it's important to remember that if you have good old pen and paper, it's not going to crash on you. You can take notes. You can send notes to your coworkers. I actually got my job now because I sent a handwritten note to my bosses. So keep in mind that there are lots of processes that can be useful. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you need to have the latest and greatest equipment. This is actually an example of bullet journaling, which is sort of a new catchphrase that a lot of people use for managing their schedules and project management. At the same time, if you really want the doodads, Moleskine has a notebook where you can upload your notes to Evernote. And LiveScribe has a pen where you can record your voice and upload your notes to the cloud. So you can be the cool hipster on the train with a notebook in your pocket and still have an accessible digital record of what you're doing. So we're a pretty technical bunch. I'm sure that everybody here knows what the cloud is and has embraced the cloud. But I also work with nonprofits for a living. So I have people who have been enmeshed in their jobs since the 60s that I work with. And I have nonprofits that are like the hippest new podcasts that I work with. So I have people who do not want to embrace the cloud at all. They barely feel safe logging into their Gmail accounts. So I'm going to quickly go through some resources that especially if you're just starting out as a freelancer or you're starting a new business, you might want to keep some of these in mind. So the first is pretty basic. It's Google Drive and Dropbox. You upload documents. You save them. Dropbox is a little bit more basic as sort of a storage space. But with Google Drive, you can open documents inside Google and make notations and send them off to people in the comments that you can make or can be reconciled by people on your team and followed. So it really has become a robust sort of collaborative tool, especially if you're, say, writing web content that people need to sign off on or you're writing for a digital publication. So Basecamp is probably at this point, my bane and a saving grace. So last year, I was editing a publication for a conference in Madison. And we worked on Basecamp too. And I got all of my notifications about what people were doing with different tasks. And it was great. They made an update to Basecamp 3. And since they've made the update, it's been so much harder for me to keep track of what's going on. Just for people who are unfamiliar, Basecamp is sort of like a service where you can create departments and you can add people through their email. And all of a sudden, you have a space where like 100 people can collaborate on the same project. So it really sort of adds scale to a service like Google Docs where you can have a few people commenting on a document that's been uploaded. But Basecamp allows you to manage how to-dos on your to-do list. You can set up notifications. You can comment between people in different departments. And you can get email notifications of all the different conversations that are going on. So if you have a project or say you're with an agency where you have to have lots of groups of people collaborating on different projects, then Basecamp might be a good solution for you. So I put up some logos of different-like. So there's a concept of software as service. So you have FreshBooks, which is sort of like QuickBooks, except it's on the cloud. Like now you can usually either for free or for a small fee sort of subscribe to a software program that you use for your job. So like WalgreensPhotos isn't very-like it's not the most robust and exciting service ever. But I've had projects where I had to say print out 500 postcards and have them delivered to someone in the same day. And you can upload an image to WalgreensPhoto and have them printed out and have it to you in a few hours. So if you're sort of like-if you have an immediate need and can't go to somebody like Mu, who is a really good business card and like postcard producer that I've used for about 10 years now, like if you can't wait for a package and you have a tight deadline, you can send your files to WalgreensPhoto or Costco Photo and get something pretty slick printed out. And it's not going to cost you too much and it's not going to take five days to get mailed to your house. My company uses YouCanBookMe to book our sales demos. So what YouCanBookMe is, is it sort of like Google Calendar, except it's a grid that you can put pretty easily on your website and people can go see your schedule, click on times, and make an appointment with you. You both receive an email notification and then instead of sending three or four emails back and forth and trying to organize your Google schedule, it's just like they click on the link, it processes to you, you confirm with them and all of a sudden like a giant hassle out of your day has been taken care of. Help Scout is a customer service ass. So what they do is they, like if you set up a customer service email address, you get a record of all of your support emails, but then you can manage it all through Help Scout. So even if somebody texts you or chats at you, they have a lot of plugins that allow you to just manage those interactions with their record and set up teams of people on your company so that everybody can see exactly what everyone else is saying with customers. And you can see if people have notes about specific customers and what their last interaction with you was if you have to bring up their account. And then Grasshopper is just a sort of phone rerouting service that's managed online. So if you need a toll free number, you can easily set up a number on Grasshopper and set up your menus and stuff. So it's like an automated phone service. It just makes everything really easy. You can even set it up. So instead of receiving your voicemails through phone, you'll receive an email for it. So you can actually read the transcripts and have a written record of your phone conversations. So being agile is a big thing these days. So agile is just a methodology that allows developers to create products and manage them in a way that you can quickly get everything out the door. And so with agile, you break everything into small manageable tasks that can easily be assigned to other people or pivoted on. So if you have a project that you're working on, you'll have a bunch of to-dos all falling under the same project. And if I assign it to one of my employees or one of my coworkers, they can mark it off. And you have a record of all of the tasks that have been completed. But also, you can see the progress that you're working on in its way to not be overwhelmed by a project, especially if it has a large scope. So I actually use agile methodologies in all kinds of projects. This is actually a writing project. It's a novel that I completed. So I use a really simple sort of agile board called Trello. It's a program that you can log into online. And what I did is I made a to-do list of all the scenes that I had to write for each chapter and any editing or research tasks that I had to do. And then as I completed each task, it's really easy to just click over and show that it's done. And I found that through applying this methodology to writing, I was able to write a lot more. Because instead of being in charge of writing an entire novel, I was in charge of writing small scenes that could be a couple hundred words long. And it just made the whole process run a lot more smoothly. So I know that everybody here is sort of at a different level and that not everybody is going to be familiar with GitHub. So GitHub is a repository where if you have a large coding project, like software that you're developing, the files for that project are going to live on your computer. So when you have those files for a software project, what happens is you can tell your computer to push all of those files up to GitHub. And it manages everything for you. It shows if there have been changes that have been made. It shows who's working on each part of the website. And they've actually unveiled some new features lately. They have a new projects board where you can easily set up a whole board for a project. You can set up wikis and documentation that will show other people how to use the code or what they need to be aware of. And at my company, we've actually just started using GitHub for our project management. So this isn't necessarily like if you own a small business and you sell products or you work for an advertising firm or you're a freelancer, you may not deal with something like this a lot. But let's say you're a freelancer who is working on a website and you're going to have 100 pages of the website that you're responsible for completing. You may end up with a GitHub account that's assigned to you just so you can keep track of all the changes that you're making and all of the files that you're asking for people to update on the website. And then just as something that's a little bit fun. So this is Habitica, which is an online task management system that works a lot like Trello or other project management systems. This is going to be really controversial. I actually got kicked out of my company's Habitica quest because I wasn't pulling my weight. So basically, for every task that you have to manage during the day, you can set up a point allotment like how important that is to your day. And you get points for everything that you do. And then you can use those points to buy mounts or swag or weapons or special shields and stuff. So it's just a way to get your day to day tasks and actually have something fun come out of them. And then you can actually, if you have friends or coworkers that you want to band together with, you can go on quests and be in cheesy little battles together and eventually get a flying pig mount and a pet rainbow lobster creature, like the cool kids. So the thing that people really never want to hear when they think about like, oh, I'm going to work for myself. I'm going to make my own schedule. I'm not going to have to work for the man anymore. The number one thing is always I don't want to have a routine. I want to work four hours a week and then play on the beach for the rest of the day. I want to work as little as possible so I can go out to shows or enjoy dude bro culture, whatever it is. The second thing that people really don't want to hear is that in order to figure this all out when you don't have your schedule figured out for you is that you really have to experiment. And the thing is that when you build a routine, and I don't know if you guys can really see this, but this is a guy like sort of making art out of smoke that's going out onto a very placid like green verdant scene from like a mountain top. As you experiment, none of the changes that you're making are really set in stone. Like you're the person who determines what your schedule is. So if you wake up at 6 o'clock every morning and you can barely function because you're so tired, that's not going to be the routine that works for you. If you do a lot better rolling out of bed every morning, grabbing the pizza box that's next to you on the floor, grabbing a slice, and just like immediately getting to work because that's the motivation that you need, then that's what you need to do. The thing is that people don't want to mess this up. So I know that myself, I've spent countless hours like reading how to build a routine on Lifehacker, like reading the how to gamify your life books, asking questions from people that I knew were in a similar boat. But even just like saying, I'm only going to answer emails between 10 a.m. and noon. It's like, oh my god, but those people are going to be counting on me when they send me an email at 2. Or what if I get this like grand inspiration for the world's like greatest novel type blog post at like 10.30 when I'm answering emails? So as you're like figuring all of this stuff out, you really have to realize that life and routines and everything that we're doing is really transient. And you have to be willing to raise up your arm and blow the smoke out into the like verdant green mountain top scene and just see where that goes. So the other thing about working for yourself in a way like I have a team, but we're all spread out. I have people in Ireland, people in Amsterdam, and people in Oakland. And I am the only person in my company that works in Wisconsin. So it's very easy for me to feel like I'm all alone out there. And it's very easy for me to forget, especially if I'm having a bad day or things just don't seem to be flowing well, that I'm accountable not only to our clients but all of the people on my team. So I've learned to use online methods to build accountability into my own schedule. So sometimes that means going into our chat room, we have an inner office chat on Slack and posting what I'm doing for the day. Sometimes it means just watching all of the different GitHub tickets that I'm making for different reasons on our website's repository. Sometimes that is gonna be what speaks for me and my output. Sometimes it's gonna be me sharing like copy that's going on to the website on Google so that people can see that I've been working. So really like we have clients and constituents and collaborators in our work from day to day. So I think the days of when we could just clock into work, sit at our desks, shuffle tasks around to other people and get done as little as possible are like through. Like you could automate whatever you want. You can automate your email to send an email to somebody when they send you an email to like be like I'm on it boss so it looks like you're working. But we live in a digital world where people can see the results that we're creating and we just have to keep sort of all of that in mind as we're working. Does anybody have any questions or comments or concerns? Okay, so I'm gonna be here. There's 30 minutes left in this space so I will be making myself available if anybody wants to come up and talk or chat or ask questions, feel free. And then you guys have 30 more minutes before the end of the conference so enjoy.