robbieinjapan.com

I wrote up instructions for the program I want and sent them to my PHP programmer in the Philippines named Arnel. He wrote a script for me in PHP before and is available online a lot so I like him. He was even online this past Saturday night and I was able to discuss the project with him. One of the nice things about living in Japan is that the Philippines is only an hour behind in terms of time zone difference so it makes it really easy to communicate with my filipino workers.

Anyway, this program is going to help a lot. Before, I felt blind in the creation of links so this program will help me see the results of each worker and also allow me to feed orders into the system which will then distribute these orders to the workers as they arrive in to work. This is good because every worker’s work desire is different so even if I give an order to a worker, it may not be completed until a week or two later. This system will give out the orders when the worker arrives to work and when they stop working, it will keep track of how much they completed of the assignment and then give it to the next worker who arrives to complete.

This work flow is more like a stream rather than throwing assignments piece meal at the workers which I feel is inefficient and not focused enough on the orders which are what really should be completed. This program will bring focus back to the work orders and will give the work in order to the workers as they come to work so that even if a worker does not work for 2 weeks, an assignment will not be trapped with him or her. If he or she does not come to work for 2 weeks, the assignments will continue to be completed in good order by the other workers. Hence, the process flows more like a stream.

So, that program is being coded now by Arnel and I look forward to being able to implement it with the workers as soon as it is completed.

However, I have other challenges that have arisen besides waiting around for that to finish. I have maybe 5 or more projects going on concurrently and most of them are in the beginning phases which means that I do not receive any money from them and in many cases, I am actually losing money because I have to spend some money to push the projects forward. The main project that was earning me income before has been reduced almost to nothing because of a few problems in addition to my not maintaining it.

Since the projects I am working on are long term and I don’t expect to earn money from them in the next 2 weeks, that means I need to find some new methods to earn money in the next 2 weeks or else I will risk having to dip into my savings in the future (2-3 months from now if I were to earn $0 between now and then) to continue to pay for my living expenses and workers (workers particularly).

I have some ideas in mind and I feel pretty confident I will be able to hit my aim by December 13. If I hit my aim, I will return to the United States for winter break.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.