9miles Media

How We Get Things Done

Below, I’ve given an overview of the services and products that make a small distributed company tick.

Communication

• Google Voice: Low-cost telephony service [link]
• Google Wave: Collaborative document editing [link]
• Skype: Our favorite (free) telecommunications alternative, with video and more. [link]
• Google Apps: Hosted and shared apps, email, calendar, contacts [link]
• EtherPad: Collaborative Text Editing [link]
• Dropbox: Centralized file storage and backup [link]

Scheduling/Planning

• EasyTZ.com: Helps find times that will work for everyone on a conference call  [link]
• ScheduleOnce.com: Set times that work for you, and invite others.  Connects with Google Calendar. [link]
• Google Calendar: The best sharing-oriented calendar as part of Google Apps. [link]

Getting Things Done

Everyone here likes something different for personal task management.  Here are a few:

• Remember The Milk (Web/iPhone/Android): Used by Ben, this GTD app is drop-dead simple and web-based. [link]
• Things.app (Mac/iPhone): Used by Joel, this task management app allows a lot of customization. [link]
• Plain old text files: Used by Donald, this task management app old way of doing things works just fine, thanks.

Administration

• Pelotonics: Outstanding project management service [link]
• Invoice Machine: Integrates with PayPal to send elegant, browser-based invoices.  Allows clients to pay directly via credit card / PayPal [link]
• PayPal: Online Banking [link]
• Mint.com: Budgeting/Financial Planning [link]
• Toggl: Time tracking [link]

Marketing

• Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
• Good SEO Practices!
• Tumblr: Our blogging platform that enables you to read this. [link]

Creativity

• Adobe Suite [link]
• The GIMP: A popular, raster image editor loved by those team members using Linux [link]
• Inkscape: A vector image editor loved by those team members using Linux [link]
• 960.gs Grid System: An outstanding way to prototype designs, on paper and on the screen [link]
• Mockingbird: Fast, some-what collaborative site wireframes [link]
• Google Docs Drawing: Collaborative, free-flowing drawing editor that we sometimes use for wireframes [link]
• Droplr (Mac): Quick screenshots and sharing [link]

Coding

• Firebug: An easy way to find coding errors, and track down specific elements  [link]
• Komodo Edit: Preferred code editor for our Linux-users [link]
• Espresso: My favorite Mac editor [link]
• Textmate: Joel’s favorite Mac editor [link]

DNS/Hosting

• GoDaddy: Domain registration [link]
• Linode: VPS Hosting [link]

I know that when we started, it was really difficult to find quality services available for free/cheap.  The majority of these are either free or low-cost, and we just love them too much to go on to bigger/better things.  I hope this has been helpful.  Keep on creating!

This post was written by Ben Armstrong, project manager at 9miles Media.