How Online Is My Working Life?

One of my goals is to have a truly officeless life, a situation where I can literally walk into an Internet cafe and have all the tools that I have when I sit at my office computer at home. This, of course, requires web-based applications of a high order. As you may expect, I’m not there yet, but I’m surprisingly further along than I thought I was. This hit home for me when I was stranded in Nashville without my laptop. I literally had to work from the hotel business office, and truth be told, it went okay.

Email

Both my home email address and business email are run off of web-based IMAP servers. I can easily send and receive email from any computer than can access the Internet. This was hugely helpful when I was stranded in Nashville without my computer.

Contact Information

Our company uses Plaxo to organize or contacts, and I can access Plaxo from any web-enabled computer.

Calendar

I use Google Calendar to handle all of my calendaring needs. It’s practically perfect. No–it is perfect.

Reminders/To-Dos

The amazing iwantsandy.com is what I use to handle my appointments. The metaphor of “Sandy” as your personal assistant works incredibly well. I also use Jott so that I can literally phone “Sandy” to set up an appointment or reminder. In addition, all my appointments are seamlessly imported into Google Calendar in real time. It’s perfect. It truly is like having your own personal live assistant to organize your life.

Project planning

A major part of my job is handling business development projects for a wide range of clients. I have unique need in this area and found the ideal solution Batchbook.com, which allows me to handle my projects anywhere.

Voicemail

I don’t even have to call my home office for voicemail. It is transcribed into text and emailed to me via Simulscribe. So even as I’m on a conference call and someone leaves me a message, I can receive it via email and literally reply via email immediately if need be–even if I’m on the phone.

Mailing list management

This was done formerly via a local client, but we now handle it online, which is much better considering that we can now process the documents from any location.

Word processing

I use Zoho Writer for small text projects, primarily those that I need to have on hand for projects. I tried to use it for a long document, and I lost it completely early in the development of Zoho Writer. That kind of soured me on online word processors. I am actually prepared to move to Buzzword (owned by Adobe). It is a very sleek word processor, but there is one problem: Where do I save my documents? The TOS of Buzzword says that they can’t guarantee their storage, and there is no way to save to other sites via the interface. You need to save your documents locally. If Buzzword were to have a more secure document saving system, I would give it a try and move it to the 100% category. It’s that great.

Spreadsheets

I actually use Zoho sheets quite a bit for collaborative spreadsheet work. I also have a document on Google Spreadsheets that I use with a client. I’m not sure why I haven’t moved 100% to online spreadsheets, but there just appears to be something that scares me about them–maybe it was my lost data experience with Zoho Writer.

Storage

I store quite a bit of stuff online, but I haven’t moved 100% online yet. This is probably just due to convenience–it’s easier to access a local hard drive than an online one. But I could see this changing in the near future.

Desktop Publishing

We use the open source Scribus program, which is a good start, but it is a locally run application. I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the point where we could produce a professional-looking document online, at least within the next year or so. Actually, I wonder if Buzzword could do this. Let me check.

Presentations

All of our company templates are built in Powerpoint. I could see us moving online within the next few years, but not anytime soon. For now, 100% of my presentation work is done offline.

Image editing

I just received entry to the Aviary beta program, so this may change, but as of now all of my image editing has been done via Photoshop or Irfanview offline.