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An entire accounting department can be replaced with http://www.freshbooks.com/. They're the ones I used last time I worked 1099, and they're the ones I am going to use next time.

While I agree that logging your time is valuable, that's a bad way to do it. The act of having to remember that it is time to log your hours kills mental flow. Given that mental flow takes close to 15 minutes to initiate, logging every 15 minutes guarantees that a programmer will never get any work done.

Get an account on Fresh Books. When you start a task, start the timer. When you finish, hit stop and log it. Once a month, generate an invoice. It is more accurate than logging what you're doing in 15 minute increments, and doesn't interfere with your productivity.

Damn, I don't think organic soy-based ink would even fit within the pixel dimension limits of the JPG file format in this ink price comparison graph.

I've been freelancing on and off over the last 9 years or so, and I just came out of three years with a successful company where I learned a lot about how to be a consultant, how to create happy clients with clear expectations on both sides and how to not get soaked. Here are some things I've picked up, YMMV.

• Always bill hourly. Always. Don't work with clients that aren't comfortable with that, you will get screwed. The talking points of the conversations I have with prospective clients go something like: "If you ask me to do something, you should assume that you're paying for my time - it's that simple. I don't work for fun, though I love my job. Have you ever had a consultant start ignoring you before a fixed-bid project is finished? That's because you aren't paying hourly and they have given up on you - they have too much time in for the amount you've paid. Because you - and all my other clients - are paying hourly, I don't ignore anyone. Time and again fixed-rate consultants burn out because they find they are doing too much work for free - I'm in this for the long haul and part of that is everyone paying their share so I don't burn out." I like to talk long-term, looking for clients that want me for more than just a one-off project.
• Give estimates, but stress they are just estimates, the client is still expected to pay for the full amount of time a project takes. Let your client know you will check in with them frequently as the hours pile up to ensure you're on track or - if you aren't - that you'll discuss how to get the most important 90% of the project as quickly as possible.
• Conversely, I think it's OK to do fixed-rate projects for long-term clients and/or where you've done a similar task many times over. Generally, I would avoid it, though.
• Track all your time - even the non-billable sys-admin-y / business development stuff. It'll be invaluable when it comes to planning to know exactly where your time is going.
• Double any estimates before you pass them to the client - things always take longer than you think (the devil is always in the details), and the client will be happy if you come in under what they were expecting. Many consultants are uncomfortable with this idea, but it has never been a mistake as far as I'm concerned.
• Bill every month, or on whatever schedule you normally bill on. Get in the habit of billing regularly - too many consultants get too busy to bill their clients! It's odd, but totally common.
• Don't take projects that're completely outside your skill set. Admit your limits - taking on a project that's out in left field is a sure way to a bunch of stress and an unhappy client. An example: if you don't really have an eye for design, find someone that does that you can trust.

For time tracking and invoicing, I'm enamored with Freshbooks.com (referral link, non-referral link.). It's cheap, you can accept online payments, freshbooks can snail-mail invoices for you (!), the billing options are pretty flexible and the timesheet app is pretty slick with desktop widgets aplenty. I haven't found an open source project as polished and featureful as freshbooks - please let me know if something like it exists. SQL-Ledger is not a competitor to freshbooks - not by a long shot.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

I've been freelancing on and off over the last 9 years or so, and I just came out of three years with a successful company where I learned a lot about how to be a consultant, how to create happy clients with clear expectations on both sides and how to not get soaked. Here are some things I've picked up, YMMV.

• Always bill hourly. Always. Don't work with clients that aren't comfortable with that, you will get screwed. The talking points of the conversations I have with prospective clients go something like: "If you ask me to do something, you should assume that you're paying for my time - it's that simple. I don't work for fun, though I love my job. Have you ever had a consultant start ignoring you before a fixed-bid project is finished? That's because you aren't paying hourly and they have given up on you - they have too much time in for the amount you've paid. Because you - and all my other clients - are paying hourly, I don't ignore anyone. Time and again fixed-rate consultants burn out because they find they are doing too much work for free - I'm in this for the long haul and part of that is everyone paying their share so I don't burn out." I like to talk long-term, looking for clients that want me for more than just a one-off project.
• Give estimates, but stress they are just estimates, the client is still expected to pay for the full amount of time a project takes. Let your client know you will check in with them frequently as the hours pile up to ensure you're on track or - if you aren't - that you'll discuss how to get the most important 90% of the project as quickly as possible.
• Conversely, I think it's OK to do fixed-rate projects for long-term clients and/or where you've done a similar task many times over. Generally, I would avoid it, though.
• Track all your time - even the non-billable sys-admin-y / business development stuff. It'll be invaluable when it comes to planning to know exactly where your time is going.
• Double any estimates before you pass them to the client - things always take longer than you think (the devil is always in the details), and the client will be happy if you come in under what they were expecting. Many consultants are uncomfortable with this idea, but it has never been a mistake as far as I'm concerned.
• Bill every month, or on whatever schedule you normally bill on. Get in the habit of billing regularly - too many consultants get too busy to bill their clients! It's odd, but totally common.
• Don't take projects that're completely outside your skill set. Admit your limits - taking on a project that's out in left field is a sure way to a bunch of stress and an unhappy client. An example: if you don't really have an eye for design, find someone that does that you can trust.

For time tracking and invoicing, I'm enamored with Freshbooks.com (referral link, non-referral link.). It's cheap, you can accept online payments, freshbooks can snail-mail invoices for you (!), the billing options are pretty flexible and the timesheet app is pretty slick with desktop widgets aplenty. I haven't found an open source project as polished and featureful as freshbooks - please let me know if something like it exists. SQL-Ledger is not a competitor to freshbooks - not by a long shot.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

Our organization was only affected by outage #3. To my knowledge nobody was affected by all three outages; when Rackspace needed to choose which rows of servers to take offline to save the rest, they chose ones that hadn't gone down the day before. Tough choice, but they did the right thing, rather than waiting for everyone's servers to burn out.

Obviously this was a worst-case scenario, but they did handle it admirably. All hands were on deck all night, their chairman even posted a personal apology on our blog inside an hour of our post about the outage. It was good to know we weren't the only ones rushing to work in a panic late at night.

Still, it's an outright disaster when a data centre goes down. You would think a company that advises on redundant servers, redundant storage and redundant networking would recognize the importance of redundant cooling. They tell us this scenario was part of their disaster recovery plans; those plans simply didn't work as designed.

Let's just be grateful two hours of business was all that was lost.

Our organization was only affected by outage #3. To my knowledge nobody was affected by all three outages; when Rackspace needed to choose which rows of servers to take offline to save the rest, they chose ones that hadn't gone down the day before. Tough choice, but they did the right thing, rather than waiting for everyone's servers to burn out.

Obviously this was a worst-case scenario, but they did handle it admirably. All hands were on deck all night, their chairman even posted a personal apology on our blog inside an hour of our post about the outage. It was good to know we weren't the only ones rushing to work in a panic late at night.

Still, it's an outright disaster when a data centre goes down. You would think a company that advises on redundant servers, redundant storage and redundant networking would recognize the importance of redundant cooling. They tell us this scenario was part of their disaster recovery plans; those plans simply didn't work as designed.

Let's just be grateful two hours of business was all that was lost.

I myself have 2 monitors at my workplace, it definitely helps do things faster, even better than having a single huge monitor...

More on this topic can be found here, here and here.

I also get time to do other things at office by the time saved :)
some examples are at my blog
http://techniche.blogspot.com/2006/02/some-pics-fr om-my-cubicle-in-office.html
http://techniche.blogspot.com/2006/02/expressive-p ictures-of-my-ferrari.html
http://techniche.blogspot.com/2007/02/harley-garag e.html
http://techniche.blogspot.com/2007/04/and-best-pic ture-from-my-harley-model.html