You kids these days have it easy. I can remember hauling Jaz disks – as well as a Jaz drive and a PCMCIA SCSI card – around in my carry-on luggage, just to get a decent amount of portable storage with me to client sites. Now, of course, memory sticks and SD cards and the ubiquitous keychain USB storage devices make it easy to haul gigabytes around in your shirt pocket, and web workers no longer have to imitate pack mules.
But the age of miniaturization is far from over. Alignment-Based Approach for Durable Data Storage into Living Organisms is the title of a paper from a group of Japanese researchers that appeared recently in the journal Biotechnology Progress. Using sophisticated genetic engineering techniques and redundant data storage and error-correcting coding inspired by magnetic media (think of it as RAID for biotechnology), the researchers encoded the message “E=mc^2 1905!” into a population of the bacterium Bacillus subtilus. They were later able to breed descendants of the original bacteria and recover the encoded message.
Of course, there are some practical hurdles to overcome before bacteria-based storage replace electronics in our daily work. The price and size of DNA sequencers will need to drop considerably; it doesn’t do much good for the storage media to be microscopic if the reader takes up a large desk. And while the sterotypical geek with low social skills has plenty of places to store a population of bacteria, more fastidious web workers will need some way to make sure that washing their hands after lunch doesn’t destroy the proposal that’s due to the client that afternoon!
March Madness is much more than a some spring college tournament. It is the nail biting, single elimination tour de force that, by months end, has crowned the NCAA’s top team. The winning squad has to out perform 63 of the nation’s other top performers.
While the action on the court is intense it pales in comparison to the drama, the tension, and the heartache of the office pools that accompany it. These coworker competitions, often for money, bring out everyone’s inner Nostradamus. Luckily, trying to guess what will happen from the 9.22 quintillion possible outcomes puts the sport neophyte in accounting on equal footing with with ESPN junkie in sales. But if you’re a web worker without an office what madness does March contain for you?
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Web work can be insidious. With laptop, cel phone, Blackberry, the web, and the rest of our digital lifestyle, we can work anywhere. For many people, that translates to working any time. And then, by degrees so gradually that you hardly notice it, “any time” becomes “every time” and web work takes over your life. You find yourself rolling out of bed at 6 in the morning to check your e-mail and still answering messages at 2 the next morning on your cel phone, just because you can.
While some people thrive on this lifestyle, others prefer a bit more balance. When you have a family, finding that balance between work and life can be critically important. If you’re caught up in the web work rat race and don’t know where to begin looking for balance, here are some ideas:
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lifehack.org’s Craig Childs suggests using micro-blogging and message sharing tool Twitter to manage your to do list:
[it's] particularly useful while I’m away from the computer. I can send Twitter an SMS of something to do when I get back home. Or just something to remind myself of something; a song to download or an an email to write.
It’s basic but requires a few extra functions. One being tagging. At the moment it’s very linear with the most recent tasks starting at the top and working back. There’s no room for prioritizing, or sorting – with tags.
Also I can’t cross a task off after completion. I can, however, Trash the item, or mark it with a star as a favorite – which is the closest I’ll come to tagging.
Ben Mattes expands on the idea of SMS-to-Twitter to do lists by describing how he uses a desktop RSS aggregator KlipFolio to manage to dos once he’s added them to Twitter. KlipFolio organizes feed subscriptions into post-it note style windows that you can move around on your desktop.
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As web workers, we can go days or even weeks without having a face-to-face business meeting or interview. Are your interview skills rusty after months of working barefoot? Can you effectively sell yourself, but only in an email or on the phone?
If you read “How to Interview” advice books, they may say to practice your interview in the mirror. Watch your facial expressions. Make eye contact. Have the right answer ready to common questions, but don’t sound rehearsed. The challenge with practicing in front of a mirror is that you are the only one who can give you feedback.
If you have a big meeting or interview coming up, and you have a webcam, take a look at InterviewTrue.com.
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Brazen Careerist Penelope Trunk offers 4 New Ideas for Becoming More Effective at Work including this one:
Pick a pace that’s right for you.
Today waiting the typical three to five business days for a package to arrive seems like an unbearable amount of time to some people, and news travels in real time — text-messages sent from parties to bloggers at home, ready to post.
Alexander Kjerulf self-published his book, Happy Hour is 9 to 5, because he thought the typical publishing cycle was too long. “I’m an impatient sort of guy,” he says. The book sells well on his blog, and he feels certain he did the right thing, for him.
Fast all the time isn’t right for everyone all the time. Adrian Savage, author of the book, Slow Leadership, writes daily on his blog urging people to accept that often workplace success comes from downshifting into a slow gear for a while.
One benefit of web workerhood is the possibility of establishing a working pace that works best for you. But even the most independent of web workers can’t always control the flow of work demands.
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“If you build it, they will come.” We’ve all heard those words way too many times, and yet I’ll bet if you look around at your online haunts you can find more than a few ghost towns: places that some web worker built where nobody bothered to come. Part of the problem is that we tend to be the virtual vanguard: we assume that everyone else on the team will “get” the latest bit of social software as fast as we do, and jump wholeheartedly on board.
In real life, things are different, as anyone who has ever tried to set up a corporate wiki has probably discovered. Faced with the possibility of building up a vibrant company-wide user-edited online resource, most people end up scratching their heads and retreating back to more familiar modes of communication. Now Atlassian (makers of commercial wiki software Confluence) have done something about this particular problem with their new site Wikipatterns.
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Web designer Cameron Moll is leaving his freelancing career after 18 months to take a traditional job. He says “it was a blast while it lasted” and shares his tips for succeeding as an independent.
Here’s a good tip on smoothing out your cash flow:
Smooth out revenue flow with residual income. As a freelancer, I launched Authentic Jobs to assist companies and applicants with targeted job seeking, with the added benefit of creating a more consistent income for myself. Hourly and lump sum billing, as many of you know, isn’t always consistent month to month. Supplementing that income with recurring revenue — hosting, product sales, advertising, a web app, etc. — isn’t only wise but often essential, too.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
