I’ve run successful ‘offline’ businesses and know what how much time, effort and organisation that takes.
So why haven’t I yet been able to do this for an online business?

Last year I attended Chris Freville’s “7 Figure Success Formula” course.
And one of the first things Chris advised was to ‘get organised’ and chunk down tasks into manageable one hour blocks.

Sounds easy.
Just like a training book I read over 10 years ago that started off by saying ‘make $1 passive profit online’ on page one followed by 200 pages explaining how to scale it up! Even today, I haven’t discovered a way to do that without hard work.

There are so many easy excuses I could make – shiny new ideas and toys, far too much for any one person to ever learn etc. etc.
But none of that helps to make me more productive or able use my time to earn more $ cost effectively.

I’m working harder than I have ever worked before – often 12 to 16 hours a day.
But never seem to find enough time to do all the things that are really necessary.

So today, I took a step back and decided to research Project Software.
Like most things online, I quickly became bewildered with all the possibilities and baffled by what software is really ‘free’ or a reasonable cost.

Programs such as Microsoft Project are far too expensive and cumbersome for a one man business plus the work I outsource – mainly graphics.

A Google search quikly led me to a Wikipedia page listing 140 different software products.
Quickly selecting a few free products to investigate further, I wasted a lot of time discovering most weren’t actually free – versions of interest needed to be paid for ant typically $25 a month!
And they had far too many features taking lots of time to learn.

I wouldn’t mind paying a one off fee of $25 or even $50 – but have no interest forking out $100’s or making ongoing monthly payments.

One thing that did surprise me was that almost all Project Software is now web hosted.

Next I focussed on software with open source GPL licenses.
The biggest problem I found was that most of the software was old, no longer supported or wouldn’t work with operating systems later than XP – such as Windows 7.

But in the end persistence paid off!
I found a site that explained a couple of products were readily available for installation using my hosting cpanel and Fantastico or simple scripts!
How I kicked myself for not thinking of that to start with.

Firing up cpanel on one of my hosting accounts, sure enough two open source Project scripts were available for instant installation – almost exactly the same way as a wordpress blog is installed.

Five minutes later I had not only installed dotproject but also fired it up and got started using it – just following my nose, without bothering looking for any manuals.

I decided to install the script in a folder called ‘projects’ on an unused domain:

Now I’m busy setting up projects and tasks – already I can see just how many different things I am trying to do and how many hours it will take.

Hopefully this will help me focus on my most important tasks and reduce time I spend on other less important ones.
Tomorrow I’ll let you know how I’m getting on.