What is Hosted Exchange?

If you have worked in any corporate environment, most likely you were using a Microsoft Exchange powered e-mail solution. The powerful service is used in the vast majority of the businesses today, and many of these servers are administered and maintained by the company I.T. department.

Hosted Exchange is a viable option for those individuals and freelancers that want to harness the power of an Exchange server but don’t want to pay for a full server license, buy the appropriate hardware and deal with the maintenance. Much like the web hosting industry where a company bundles many customers on a single web server, Hosted Exchange is a cost-effective option for individuals. The Exchange service provider bundles many customer mailboxes on a single Exchange server for a monthly or yearly fee.
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Open thread: How to get things done?!

We previously chatted about finding inspiration. Now we shall talk about getting things done. Not the actual book, but about what all of us do in order to move forward in our projects.

I am a mac user, and I use calendar app a lot. I have a couple (7 actually) different calendars, ranging from business tasks, to deadlines and personal plans. This has helped me stay on track with what I do, and make extensive plans up to almost 2 weeks ahead.

However, this didn’t work quite well, and just after this last Easter I ended up on the first working day with about 40 tasks to complete. That was obviously way to much I could handle, even if I had 10 employees. I ended up with those 40 tasks because I usually planned for each day much more than I could do. At the end of each day, all uncompleted tasks were postponed to the next day. In the long term, this technique proved very bad, but I switched it upside down.

Now, I pushed all my tasks to the end of the next week, picked the most important 5 of them, and moved them on the to-do list for today. Having the pressure off my shoulders, it turned out that all those 5 tasks were completed a couple of hours before my “working time” for today was over. I then looked and checked the next important task in the long list that was pushed to the next week. I did that task too, and repeated the process. When I finished work, and started writing this article, I realized I have finished 9 tasks, as opposed to 5 or 6 with my previous technique.

I think I got better results because I didn’t look ahead and try to multi-task. So, how do you do it?

6 Alternative Work Spaces to the Home Office

The freedom to work from anywhere is one of the greatest perks of freelancing.  So why do many freelancers spend all of their working hours at home?  Of course the home office (or sofa) is comfortable, but working in a new setting can spark ideas to improve your business, promote creativity, and offer opportunities for socializing and networking.

So, let’s get out of the house!  Here are 6 alternative work spaces to explore, ranging from office-like settings to some very casual places.  Try them out, work them into your schedule periodically, and enjoy the benefits of adding variety and renewed thinking to your work day.
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26 Useful Tips and Tricks for Freelancers

Freelancing is by no means easy. You are given responsibility of your own future, your own earnings, to choose who and what you want to work for; but this responsibility comes with a whole set of unique challenges in itself. You’re in charge of your own future, so if you make a mistake, you’re the only one to blame. You dictate your earnings, so it’s up to you to hunt down clients and make sure you’ve got a consistent cash flow. These are but a few of typical freelancer’s worries.

So how do we tackle these challenges? Well, put your seat-belt because we’re about to go through an entire list of ’26 Useful Tips and Tricks for Freelancers’.

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Tools: A New Resource On Freelancer Magazine

We’ve included a new tools page on Freelancer Magazine. This page comprises of high quality online applications for freelancers to use daily. From client management systems, to to-do lists, we’re going to try and include everything a freelancer will need to increase the efficiency and quality of work.

The page will constantly be updated as much as possible, and please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us or just leave a comment below if you have a tool in mind that you want added to the list (even if it’s your own!)

We also invite all visitors to subscribe to our RSS feed to receive quality content daily.

Time Management And Efficiency – The Key To A Successful Freelancing Career

Time management is one of those topics many people looking to go into freelancing fail to address and think about when making that ever so crucial decision on whether to go into freelancing or not; yet the topic itself is of utmost importance. The freelancing work style has no boundaries, no set times, no periods, no start times and no end times. There is no set structure. You may think to yourself that that’s a pretty easy problem to solve: just create your own structure if need be, but let me tell you know, sticking to that structure will be ever so difficult.
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3 Ways To Structure And Keep To Your Deadlines

I mentioned in my last post that I was experiencing some kind of procrastination problem; a very weird problem indeed. I realized though that one way to get on top of your work and never miss a deadline is simple, I call it ‘Shadow Deadlines’ (more on them later). I also realized that there are small steps you can take in order to increase your chances of hitting your deadline drastically, and keeping yourself moving in terms of working toward that deadline… Read more