Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: ‘What are you working on?’ (source)

I would describe Yammer as the in-house Twitter for companies, with more than 140 characters allowed.

Since I don’t work for an organization or company I haven’t had the chance to experiment with it. You can only form a network when using a valid company email address, meaning all with the same domain-name. This is to prevent ’strangers’ to get into the network.

However, last week my co-worker Joitske suggested for me to take part in an initiative by her and Christian to join the ‘non-existing organization for independent consultants net4dev.org’. By assigning people an email address using that domain we can now exchange more in depth about work, without having to worry clients (or family) ‘listening in’ to what you’re saying.

We’re only using it for a week and it needs more members (interested?), but I can see this can grow into a great networking tool for us independent workers.

Some of the features I like and use often:
- different views on the same content;
- full screen mode (no other windows visible);
- import .pdf in a project.

And today I discovered a new one:
- a screenplay mode.

The screenplay mode uses some presets, such as “Scene heading”, “Dialogue”, “Shot”, that you can select which translates the text you write into a page lay-out suited for screenplays.

So far, most of my video work were projects without a clear scenario. For tomorrow’s client project, however, I took the classic approach and created a scenario first, using Scrivener. And it really helped to structure my ideas and streamline it into a document that I can use while filming tomorrow.

I’m convinced that I can do a lot more with Scrivener, but even for the few features I use, this piece of software is worth more than €30,02 ($39,95) for a licence. Go try it for yourself (Mac only!).

(about the number in the title)

Last week I ordered a whole new toolset for planning: a magnetic board and magnets.

I wanted something to schedule my week in blocks of various activities: reading, writing, video-editing, sports, chores, etc. (see my notes on what the colours mean)

I wanted something that I can’t ignore by closing the laptop and pretend there is nothing to do. The tiny board (A4-size) now stands on top of the piano in the living room.

I wanted various colours to be able to see at a glance whether the week is balanced or not.

It’s a step towards a more structured worklife (and it already helps me keeping up with the ‘one blogpost a day’)