Ever wonder what it’s like to spend a day at a web design studio? Well, we thought we would show you what a typical Monday at Eleven Media looks like!

This is an insight into what takes place on a typical Monday from 9am to 5.30pm at the Eleven Media office.

The morning

We open the office flood gates at 9am. Usually resembling two zombies roaming the streets for brains, we stick it out till the morning coffee run for a boost to the morning.

The Coffee Hit

Now when we say we like coffee, we like coffee!

We make the longer than needed trip down to one of the many coffee shops in Berwick and order the usual. The ordering process usually consists of a head nod (indicating that we would like to place our usual take away order) to the staff and within a few minutes we are overwhelmed with the sobering aroma of coffee. Great for the hard Monday morning starts!

My poison of choice is a larger than life Latte and Aaron’s coffee cocktail consists of a large cafe Mocha.

Monday and Friday mornings will usually result with the additions of banana bread and take-over of the cafe’s big red leather couch that we have unofficially claimed as our own.

The extended WIP

At Eleven, we love our WIPs (work in progress).

This generally takes up an hour to go through the work for the week ahead and is streamlined by the fantastic task manger system Thymer. Sadly, because of Thymer, our beloved white board has been banished to the dark dungeon (the kitchen). To find out more about how we use Thymer, Aaron has put together a great blog post here.

Email and Phone Calls

This hour is the ‘prep time’ to clear out your Inbox and clear the slate ready to start a fresh week of work! My email box usually takes about 10-15 minutes to clear and reply to. Aaron’s takes about 45min. Which leaves him sad at the best of times.

The work Begins! Hammer time!

This is when the magic happens. We knuckle down in front of our machines and start chugging away at what we do best.

Client Meetings

Before our client meetings, we often will spend a little time setting the office up and preparing  any material needed for the meeting itself. We love our clients coming into the office to showcase some of our work, captivate them with our boyish charms and show them the office we are so very proud of.

Late lunch – Yay!

My most favorite time of the day!! Here’s a list of our top lunch time specials:

• Pot & Parma at a local restaurant
• Delicious pizza lunch special
• Subway foot-long, for those fat days
• Revival focaccia- a MUST TRY
• Lunch time special from Shanikas

In Summary

We love sharing our creative process and our environment that we spend well a whole lot of time in. Please feel free to comment below and let us know what you think. Even better, why not pop the
team a email to arrange a meeting and come see us in the office face to face.

Thymer: Project management and task planning for people who hate project management and task planning…

When we started Eleven Media in 2008 we would list our projects on a whiteboard and scribble a daily to do list in our diary. This was fine for the first few months but as our workload increased we were wasting way to much time planning our day or week rather than ‘getting things done‘.

I wanted to find a web or desktop application that would allow our team of 2 to easily manage the projects we were working on and to plan out our workdays. I tried at least 35 different project management apps, some of the applications were way too complex, some applications like ‘Basecamp‘ are good at managing projects but not a daily task list and some of the Mac desktop apps like ‘Things‘ are awesome but don’t work that well for teams.

I finally stumbled across a new web app called ‘Thymer‘ developed by Stunf in the Neatherlands.

5 reasons Thymer rocks for project management:

1. Web App: All projects & tasks stored ‘in the cloud’ – this means our project list and task list is always up to date no matter where we login from (desktop, laptop or iphone at home or office).
2. iPhone app: We can view projects and tasks anywhere (Typically at a local cafe over coffee).
3. Powerful Interface: The smart input box means you rarely have to leave the single page design.
4. Great value: We pay around $15 USD per month for the ‘small team’ package
5. It’s easy: We can easily create & mange our to do list and assign tasks to other team members

How we use Thymer for our web design studio:

We set Thymer as our browser ‘home page’ so as soon as we open Firefox we can see the tasks we have on for today and the rest of the week. If for some reason we can’t complete a task set for today we can easily drag it to another day or assign it to another team member.

We don’t just manage projects with Thymer, we can list anything we need to be reminded about: returning calls, paying rent or meetings. We can easily switch between team members to find out what each other have planned for the day and we can generate all kinds of reports.

The best feature of Thymer would have to be the smart input box – it’s simple and intuitive.

For example, if a client calls to discuss a design and Blaz is in a meeting – I’d simply fire up Thymer and type: ‘@blaz @today Call Client XYZ on (03) 9707 2611 to discuss web design.’

For some more examples checkout the Thymer preview video:

Find out more: http://thymer.com