Tech Talk: Tools for Your Editorial Business

Presenter: Carin Panganiban

As independent editors bringing your businesses into 2016, you are just a few clicks away from countless business tools and new apps designed to make your work lives easier. However, sorting through them all (and then learning how to use them) can be a bit of a challenge. In this "Tech Talk," we will pinpoint some of the best new and tried-and-true digital tools for independent business owners and demonstrate key ways to leverage them for your work. From professionally establishing your editing business and engaging new clients to efficiently managing daily tasks and tracking your hours, we will cover the best tech tools to make your work life easier and more effective.

We will cover:

  • Easy website builders and templates to show off your work and personal brand

  • Great applications that help you build contracts, track expenses, and receive payments

  • Cloud technology that allows you to send, receive, store, and edit documents from anywhere

  • Time-tracking and project management tools that make organizing daily tasks and projects a breeze

  • New communication tools to leverage with clients and fellow editors

Speaker Bio

Carin Panganiban is a technical project manager, designer, and instructor recently replanted from NYC to Bellevue, WA. Before moving to Washington, she spent several years in trade, academic, and magazine publishing out East in roles that ranged from book design, production management, production editorial, and features editorial. She now works building new websites and applications and teaching adult education classes on technology and design. A serial app and device tester, she loves sharing new tools to help people with their businesses and everyday life.

Meeting Notes

Carin's presentation (PDF)Notes from the 3/14/16 meeting (by Janet Kimball)Board president, Kathleen Walker, introduced the new 2016 board of directors: Donita Leeson, Jill Walters, Kerrie Schurr, Rob Esene, Kristin Carlson, Elaine Duncan, Kelley Frodel, Jennifer Grogan, Richard Isaac, Julie Klein, and Kristin Vorce Duran. Kathleen also reminded everyone that 50 percent of the board turns over every year. If you are interested in what the board does, the June and October meetings are open to all so please come!

Announcements:

  • The "Far North" branch of the NIEG is meeting March 16th. Please contact Kristi Hein if you are interested.

  • The Editors Guild lunch at the ACES conference will be April 1 at 12:15.

  • Be sure to check out the job board on the NIEG website. Rebecca Brinbury has been posting a lot of new jobs there so it is worth a visit.

  • The next member survey is coming in April so watch your in-box for that.

  • Believe it or not, planning for the 2017 Beyond the Red Pencil conference starts soon. Contact Jill Walters if you are considering getting involved.

  • The next Guild meeting will be May 9 and will feature a talk on developmental editing by Lisa Owens.

On to the main event! Jill Walters introduced Carin Panganiban for her presentation: Tech Talk: Tools for Your Editorial Business. Carin is a technical project manager, designer, and instructorrecently replanted from NYC to Bellevue, WA. Before moving to Washington, she spent several years in trade, academic, and magazine publishing out East in roles that ranged from book design, production management, production editorial, and features editorial. She now works building new websites and applications and teaching adult education classes on technology and design. A serial app and device tester, she loves sharing new tools to help people with their businesses and everyday life.Carin's slide deck will also be made available on the website so take a look there for more details about the topics and resources below.Carin covered six topics in her presentation:

  1. Simplifying site creation

  2. Controlling your contracts

  3. Dealing with documents

  4. Perfecting project management

  5. Tracking your time

  6. Exciting extras

1. Simplifying site creation: Having an online presence is important in terms of demonstrating your legitimacy to potential clients. There are a lot of options out there that can meet your needs, whether you want to spend a little or a lot of time on your web presence. If you have just a few hours, boost your profile on Linked In: Make sure you have a strong headline and summary; add document links; utilize the Skills & Endorsements section; add recommendations; and add information to the Projects, Certifications, Honors, and Publishings sections.

If you have a few days, Carin recommends the Weebly website builder. It’s very easy to use, with a lot of simple tools and can get a basic job done quickly.

If you have more time or want more customization, take a look at WordPress. It’s very powerful and you can use it to make everything from very simple to complex websites. If you’re concerned about hacking, the only way to really control security is to build your own website from scratch; however, there are plug-ins you can use to make WordPress sites more secure.

2. Controlling your contracts:

Carin recommends three apps for contracts and invoices:

–Shake (www.shakelaw.com): Offers customizable contract templates.

–Bonsai (www.hellobonsai.com): Similar to Shake but also creates invoices directly from contracts and you can integrate it with PayPal.

–PayPal (www.paypal.com): You can build, send, and track invoices; receive reminders about invoices; download invoice history at tax time; and send clients a link that sends them directly to you PayPal account.

3. Dealing with documents:

Carin discussed cloud storage and collaboration apps and went through the pros and cons of each. See the slide deck for details about Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive. Each offers ways to store and share documents and collaborate with teams. She also highly recommends Evernote, a free app, that allows you to write and categorize notes and attach documents and images. It syncs across all devices and is searchable. Other handy note apps are Google Keep and One Note, which comes free with Office 365. Additionally, Carin recommends the Chrome browser for it’s ability to add plug-ins.

4. Perfecting your project management:

Asana (www.asana.com) is a powerful and flexible project management tool. You add info about projects, sections, tasks, due dates, due times, comments, etc. and then you can view the information any way you want. It offers different calendar options, can be used collaboratively, and integrates with many other apps (such as Toggl—see below).

5. Tracking your time:

Toggl is a flexible app that allows you to easily track your time by project and task. The Pro feature enables you to break out billable and unbillable hours as well. It works with Asana to integrate project management and time tracking.

6. Exciting extras:

–Office Lens: A mobile app that takes a photo of any document or whiteboard and fixes it so that it is a readable document. There’s also a related app called Tiny Scanner that turns images like this into PDFs.

–DocuSign: Download documents into this app and you can sign them on a touchscreen or with your mouse.

–WorkFrom: Find places nearby to work; offers information on wifi availability and open hours.

–Freedom: This app blocks specific distracting websites or apps when needed or during specific times.

–Rescue Time: Runs in the background and logs everything you do so you can analyze your productivity.

–Forest: “Grows a tree” while you are working. If you visit other apps when you are supposed to be working, your tree dies.

–MailChimp: Use this to organize your contacts into groups and send mass emails.

–Slack: An app for group communication, this also integrates with a lot of other tools.

Be sure to take a look at the video presentation of the meeting or Carin’s slide deck for a lot more details about all of these tech tools. Questions? Contact carin.panganiban [at] gmail.com.