As much as we love paper and ink, Plain White Press hums along on by using the internet to manage our projects and business. We had a conversation with Smart Money Small Business about how we use Basecamp, Freshbooks and other favorite applications.

We’re a small office with more work than we can handle on most days, which, on most days, is a good thing. So we’ve enlisted Ruby (www.callruby.com) to answer our phones and Emma (www.myemma.com) to handle our email. OK, there are lots of virtual assistant and email services, but we like Ruby and Emma’s sense of style and the way they handle business. Even my daughter isn’t sure if it’s Ruby or me answering the phone!

I just returned from an inspiring and contact-filled meeting. What to do with all of those business cards? For the last 3 months I’ve been testing out Highrise (www.highrisehq.com) from 37 signals (the makers of Basecamp and Backpack), and I’m thrilled with this new way of tracking my contacts.

To start, I imported my contacts via a .csv file from my Treo. Once I created the database, I added “tags” and notes to the contacts I use most often. Highrise creates a page for each of my contacts and I can keep all my correspondence here — email, documents, links, to-dos, and follow-up reminders for each. I can even share all or some of my contacts with my team and assign them follow-ups too. Highrise has it’s own email address, so I can forward emails to it, and it matches that email with the appropriate contact’s record. When graphics are attached, they show up as thumbnails in the record — making them so much easier to find than by name!

Two things I’d like to see here: I want to get my contacts back into my Treo for the road, and I think I waste too much time finding just the right image for everyone’s record. I wish the program came with a set of friendly avatars. Nonetheless, in the short time I’ve been using the program, Highrise just keeps getting better, and I’ll never even consider using Outlook again!

When your illustrator is in England and your designer’s in D.C., there’s no easier way to keep track of everyone and everything they need to do than by using Basecamp. I can store all project-relevant files and automatically send e-mails to let everyone know when something’s been updated or a deadline is near. Easier (by far!) and more fun to use than Microsoft Project. Who needs Gant charts. Who even knows what a Gant chart is?

The free (with a google account) Google calendar solves one of the working mom’s many dilemmas. How do I remember when I have to go home? This calendar lets me set up a different color calendar for each of my “lives” - meetings & deadlines, events, kids’ soccer & school vacations, and my husband’s travel schedule. You can even subscribe to public calendars such as the phases of the moon. Data can be imported and exported in iCal format. The only shortcoming is that I haven’t yet figured how to sync it to my Palm…but I think I have a lead…

I use Backpack to keep all of my notes, to-dos, and to share ideas with colleagues. I use this everyday to keep track of all the stuff I have to do and things I want to remember for later. I’ve set up my Backpack pages in a quasi-GTD (Getting Things Done/David Allen) way. A good article on do this is posted in on Patrick Rhone’s blog.