While most would say this is a good problem to have, I have had more work in the past month than I can shake a stick. So much so, I’m saying no to more potential jobs than usual. The Design Mission routinely says no to a few potential jobs each week simply because it’s not a good match given our availability, the scope of work, etc. Our best clients are ones that recognize our lack of availability during normal business hours and who prefer email to phone calls like we do. That can be a limiting factor, obviously.

Still, there are several past clients with new work that have returned to us, a few open projects that we are working on, and about 10 interesting/fun projects currently being considered or planned. As I said, this is a good problem to have, but it has meant having less time to learn new things and stay current with some of the open source world.

Saving time has become a bigger priority due to this work load. The beauty of RSS feeds is truly coming to the rescue here! My work mate at Patagonia was a great example to me here for how to use RSS feeds as a time saver. While I get information from only the sites I have subscribed to and not the random happenings web surfing provides, I can quickly filter and view articles from my favorite content providers.

After playing with several different RSS readers, I have come to love Google’s reader best. I liked some others, but the portability of Google’s reader, and the integration with some of the other Google products I use, made this an easy sell.