Customizing Your Weekly Schedule Page A Plan In Place: Fill & Download for Free

Reverse-engineer the process and build an actionable plan.Imagine the product launch. Think about the feature set, the user roles, the actual experience of using the product.Break this down into high-end actionable components. For example:The front-end layerA module for user managementA component dealing with productsA commenting featureThe database schema storing the dataEnumerate all high-end components, features, modules in a list. Once you’re done, take it a step further and define the feature set of each component.The front-end layer will include a homepage, ABC pages, a single product view, an archive, a profile page for users.The user component will include 3 different roles - admin, registered user, subscriber. Each role will have the following capabilities: (make a list). This would require a login area and a custom dashboard revealing different components depending on the role.A product has a name, description, price, color, tags and categories. We’ve just found out that we need a “categories” module for products. Add it to the initial list and define its scope. Then get back to the product and analyze how this will impact the database layer and the front-end.Based on the feature set, design the initial schema for the database - a table for products, one for comments (could be a few if you rely on different languages or meta data), taxonomies (may be structured differently) and so forth.Approaching the actual development may be done in different ways as well.The UI may be the leading component. Or the core business logic.One easy way to approach that is the database-driven - define your schema, create a set of classes (or function collections) interacting with your database and build your UI around your logic.Once you have the feature set in place with a corresponding action plan, calculate the effort for that project. Estimate each feature separately, integrating them into the same project, time for quality assurance (testing) and a buffer for fixing bugs and issues.If there are areas that you don’t understand at all (payment gateways, multilingual support, deployment to a Linux server), do some light reading and try to come up with an actionable strategy before you estimate the entire project.You can try to guesstimate the effort but this may get increasingly more complicated if you underestimate it. It’s not uncommon for a seemingly trivial 4-hour task to turn into a monstrous 400-hour sub-project.Having the final number of hours, figure out how to hit that number based on your school activities and time availability. For example, if the entire project would take 300 hours and you can spend 20 hours a week working, it’s 15 weeks worth of work, or about 4 months of after hours and over the weekend.Don’t neglect some required areas if they are required for the project - deploying it to a server, preparing documentation or building something completely new. If those aren’t included and estimated in your plan, you’ll end up running all-nighters preparing them last minute in addition to the remaining portion of the work.That’s pretty much it. Depending on your skill set, this should be fairly easy and reduce the amount of stress.You will probably need to spend a lot of time in Stack Overflow or re-reading your programming books and online tutorials in order to implement specific features. As long as you allocate enough time for that R&D part, you should be on track with your schedule.

Yes.I live on a houseboat. Because the water starts shallow and gets deeper further away from the bank (normal situation in a river or at the side of a dyke), the boat has to be moored at a distance from the bank (in our case about 6 metres). Obviously, a way of getting on and off the boat is required, which means a ‘bridge’ of some sort. The boat is 22 metres long, so a ‘bridge’ of the same width seems to make sense; let’s call it a jetty. This makes it possible to clean windows without running the risk of falling into the drink.Anyway, one Sunday afternoon, I was repairing the jetty that we had bought with the boat. It had been poorly constructed so I was building a more robust version - that is, until I stepped on a loose plank, fell and slid down the bank towards the water, while my right leg decided to take a different direction, breaking the fibula - what a nuisance!. I soaked my leg in cold water until the immediate pain was dulled, and decided to stop working on the jetty for the rest of the day.Now, I was employed by a software house / consultancy, and had been sent to a customer in Amsterdam to document a system they were using, but which had been created by a sister company in Paris. I had spent 8 months travelling back and forth between Paris and Amsterdam, learning from the Parisians about the system, translating what meagre French documentation there was and basically re-documenting the whole system in English and in Dutch. I had one more week planned, but had a lot of work to do.Next day, I drove to the client and continued my work, dragging my right leg a bit, as it was inconveniently painful. By the end of the week I had just about finished the job, and just needed a couple of hours over the weekend to tidy up the end report, the Management report and document introduction. I completed these at home with time to spare, and was scheduled to present the finished product at 11:00 on the Monday.Got to the office, had a PA type out the last page of handwritten material, put the report and document all together, and photocopy the one page summary for each of the managers. I presented it all, they were very happy. At the end of the meeting I asked if they would mind if I took the rest of the day off to go to the hospital.At the hospital my leg was x-rayed. The radiologist asked in horror how long I’d been walking on it! I was given a tight elastic bandage to hold it all in place and was told to go home and stay of the leg for at least three weeks, but preferably six.I called the client and said I wouldn’t be there for a while. I’d finished the project, but they had requested me to stay on for a couple more weeks to ‘teach’ some of their IT staff the intricacies of the system. They said there was no problem or rush, and that I could come back to do that when the leg was good again.I called my boss and told him I had to stay off the leg for a while. Two or three days later he turned up in his fat Mercedes, stinking of the cigars he used as status symbols, and TOLD me I had to sell my home and get something safer, like a house or apartment! It was not good enough that I was out of action (read: “Not making money for him”) and he wanted me back in the saddle next week!I suggested he get in touch with the doctor at the hospital and ask him if I should go back to work so soon - I said, if the doctor says it’s OK, I’ll be back next week. He didn’t check with the doctor, of course, and left, disgruntled.After a few weeks I returned to the client and spent a few weeks there, coaching their staff. When it was all done, I was treated to a leaving party (in my local!) and presented with a large whiteboard. I was sorry to leave that client, and they were sorry to see me go.Even though I had been to the client, and my boss had been paid for it, I still officially had another week or two in which I was supposed to rest my leg, so after the coaching session, I informed my boss I needed to rest it for another week or so, as I had been overdoing it in the interests of the client. He wasn’t happy, but couldn’t actually make me go against doctor’s ordersAt the time, at the request of my wife, I had been growing my hair and wearing it in a short pony-tail. Halfway through the first week of resting and healing the leg, he called again with the message that this wasn’t good enough and he wanted me in the office for a ‘serious talk’.A friend of mine had just been invited to join a new consultancy start-up and asked if I’d be interested. I was. Was interviewed (during my recuperation) and invited to join the start-up (at a higher salary). I accepted and a date was agreed upon - I was supposed to give my current boss a month’s notice, but I decided I would just give a weeks notice and resign, perhaps losing the last month’s salary, but I was fed up with the situation and his snotty attitude and constant push for me to sell my home.I turned up for the ‘serious talk’ on the appointed day, still limping. First thing he said was “You’ll have to get your hair cut, and have you given any thought to getting rid of your boat and buying a real home?” I told him I wouldn’t cut my hair without consulting my wife, nor would I consider selling my home; I was paid by him to work, and I had just left an extremely happy client, so he really had nothing to complain about. He said, again, I should sell the boat and get an apartment, because he would then have more assurance that I wouldn’t break something and have to stay off work as that cost him too much money!I stayed polite but firm and told him I would not sell the boat, but I might consider cutting my hair AFTER consultation with my wife. This defiance ruffled his controlling nature and, stupidly, he reacted with “Then we have a problem”.He told me he thought I ought to leave the company. If I preferred, he would give me a month’s notice, but I didn’t need to come back to the office again. I looked hesitant, I suppose, because then he offered me a large cash payment on top of that!So I accepted. I didn’t have to give notice, or go back to the office (in another city, driving in heavy traffic twice a day) AND I got a chunk of money as well!The following Monday, I went to my new place of employment, much closer to home and with a new, intelligent, boss who was very easy to get on with.Phew! Sorry to have gone on so long, but that was cathartic! LOL

Hey Kristen,The most important thing to do to create customers rather than followers is to create value. Your customers have to feel that they know you and that you fill an important role in their life.My wife owns a very successful dog rescue (in terms of dogs saved, dog rescuers are not going to get rich). She has a webpage, she is also on several dog adoption sites, and is on a couple of social media sites. Despite this, 99 percent of her business comes from Facebook.One of the social networking tips that marketers will give is the 5:3:2 rule. Out of ten, five posts should be third party industry related posts, three posts should be industry related posts generated by the business, and two posts should be personal posts designed to build your story.I read this rule and realize that my wife had been following it all along. It was something she discovered on her own through trial an error.Why does it work? Because she provides value. She jokingly calls herself the Ann Landers of the weiner dog world (she specializes in Dachshunds). People ask her questions in her feed, and she provides answers, without ever expecting to get something back. She gives the answer hoping that she solves that person’s problem. She doesn’t need to adopt more dogs because there are always dogs to adopt. You don’t need to make every sale, because there are always more sales to make. That low pressure environment help keep bringing people back to her page.Providing knowledge is not the only way she provides value, she also makes her page a fun place to go. She posts funny pictures of her dog in costumes or funny memes or by relating funny anecdotes of her day. The important thing is that she keeps her page active.How many times have you gone to a page to discover that the page owner has not added anything in a week? Two weeks later you go back and still nothing. How long is it until you stop going to the page. Don’t let that be your page. People have told her that they go to her page first thing every morning.Be careful though. Social media is designed to keep you on the site. Create a schedule. Visit your page two, maybe three times a day. Have a plan for what you are going to post, post it and get off the page or next thing you know you have spent an hour watching cat videos.Set a timer if you have to, and tell yourself that you are going to spend ten minutes posting your content and then you are going back to running your business.Thanks for your question.If this answer provided value, please give it an Upvote and go to my page to read other questions.