Ghost and productivity

Today's post is short, because I'm behind schedule on client work. I was behind schedule anyway, and then COVID knocked me further off schedule. Lots of interesting stuff half finished in my publication calendar, but this one (drafted a couple months ago) is closest, and I'm out of time, so yeah.

Things I'm doing to try to boost my productivity (for everything but little one-hour jobs:

• Asana. I am pretty good at completing tasks, especially when broken down to single task size, and especially when everything I need is attached to the task. This is soooo much better thank looking for details in email.
• Every job gets their own Ghost install, living in ghost-client-clientname. That way when I'm switching between projects I just need to start a different Ghost instance, rather than loading content, routes, etc. I put this off forever, because it seemed wasteful to dedicate a whole Ghost install to each client, but it sooo simplifies my life to just need to start up a client's instance, rather than trying to swap themes, routes files, and databases around.
• All themes get descriptive names and symlinked. I'm trying to really hard to get away from having half a dozen installs of Tripoli, all named Tripoli, but each customized for a different client!
• All themes for retainer clients and other folks with recurring work get pushed to Github and set to autodeploy.

Places to improve:

• Better template for new Ghost installs: include email config, for example. Currently I just run ghost install local but then I have to fix email if I'm doing anything login-related.
• New client process: I really need to stand up an endpoint that takes the new user's contact info and triggers project creation in Asana (including standard start-up jobs), Stripe invoicing, etc. There are APIs for all of this, so there's no reason not to do it. Or maybe even better: A script on my dev box that does all that and sets up the Ghost install? That'd be pretty epic.
• I need to better train clients on using Asana. The ones who do it well are awesome. The ones who reply to completed tasks with new unrelated tasks? That's not much better than email.
• I mostly use Asana's task calendar to see what's up next, but I need to make sure to inspect retainer client task lists for tasks they've added that aren't actually scheduled. It seems like I could do this better.