The What Next report in Freelance Time Manager

Freelance Time Manager helps you follow the money: here's the report I look at maybe 40 times a day to work out what to work on next (with names all fuzzed out to protect the innocent):

(Yes, I know it's not pretty. I think I've resolved to get Freelance Time Manager to the place where it supports outsourcing to other users, and I'll work with a graphic designer who wants to find work. So if you want to be that person, sign up.)

Anyway, it's not particularly clever either. All it's doing is:

• Products are listed in £/$ order
• The 'next action' is listed, so you know what next step to take
• It shows any deadline
• To-Do's disappear off the list when you've done today's work on them

Simple, but very useful.

I do need to tweak it a fair bit, it still doesn't take account of, for instance, if two projects are worth the same, I ought to work first on the client that pays on time over the one who pays late. And the money for a recurring product is just one month's money, so it's worth a lot more. I need the system to work out the average number of months a recurring system lasts for, and make the value of it that .. so if my recurring systems last 10 months on average, the value is 10x 1 months billing. That would highlight how much time I have for ad-hoc projects. Then there are diary commitments, things on the list that I can't do anything about until the meeting in two weeks, and then there's the whole idea of day planning, so maybe being able to see what's already diarised, and being able to drag & drop these tasks into the day plan to see what's achievable. But that's all to come.

Anyway, back to Freelance Time Manager.