last week

Oops!

I got so late with posting my journal last week, and still didn't find time to edit and publish it later in the week, that I decided to roll it over to this week. I've decided to just edit everything together so this post covers the last two weeks.

Co-working

I ran another free co-working day kindly hosted by CoTribe. It's fantastic to see CoTribe getting busier and busier every month, with the extra Redhill Micropreneur people it was tricky to find a chair at a couple of points!

Small business events

It's great to see a new idea for a series of local small business events being suggested. I'm looking forward to attending when they launch and learning some new tips and tricks for business life.

Lots of phone calls

I seem to have spent a lot of time recently on the phone. Some to individuals discussing projects, details and progress; but I've spent a lot longer on conference calls. These calls have ranged in subject from PaTMa to architecting big-data research systems to learning about property angel investing.

The last of those being a step on the path to deciding to put a small amount into an invest-and-learn HMO conversion project. In theory a reduced-time method of property investing, but I'm currently spending so long reading and enjoying the updates that it's not been very time-efficient so far!

Podcasting

I enjoyed (slightly nervously) my first podcast interview for what promises to be a great new small business podcast. I'm a long way down their list of pre-recorded episodes and they haven't even launched yet (edit: they have now!) so it will be quite a while before my episode goes live.

(Now the podcast has launched I'll start listening and report back in my next journal.)

Half term non-work

I swapped a weekend and week-day to enable a family trip to Chartwell for their pumpkin trail. Some of the extra large papier-mache pumpkins had seen better days but the children didn't seem to mind at all. We even managed the trek up to their new tree house again and made it home roughly when we planned!

Other half term entertainments have included Liz and our older children watching the 42nd Street Musical and us all taking a visit to the London Transport Museum which was physically smaller than I'd expected. Of course we still managed to run out of time to do everything though - at least in part due to the three tube driving simulators that had to be tried out (and argued over).

So the week included lots of extra family time and childcare and wasn't the best for accomplishing lots of work. Especially as the house seemed to slip, as it always does during holidays, into a pattern of later starts.

No void

I went through both the end-of-tenancy and start-of-tenancy process for one of my rental properties - very unusually without any void at all between them! The departing tenants were buying a house and their completion was slightly delayed so they needed a few extra days and thankfully that lined up nicely with the new tenants.

Of course I used PaTMa's recently added tenancy start checklist feature to walk through the process and generate the document (contract and inventory) plus send all the required tenant information, complete with collecting digital signatures.

Scan to email

I delivered a new all-in-one printer and scanner to my parents. Despite being physically very large, these are really quite cheap and include the ability to scan double sided, multi-page documents straight to email (without a connected computer) as PDF attachments. Strangely you seem to have to spend about 4x as much to get a smaller, dedicated document scanner that can do scan-to-email! Please let me know if there's a suitable device that I've missed?

Being able to scan documents straight to email is also going to help with an exciting new feature I'm planning for PaTMa, but more on that another time.