Are you backing up your desktop data regularly? It’s one of those important but not urgent tasks that many web workers postpone. Fortunately, a variety of solutions ranging from remote to local to hybrid make it easier than ever to backup your files.
Backup provider Mozy now offers a Mac client for remote desktop backup. You get 2 GB online storage for free and unlimited storage for about $5 a month. Previously, Mozy was only available for Windows machines and competes with Carbonite and Titanize in that space.
Read the rest of this entry »
Slow down. You’re talking too fast for your videoconferencing tools to keep up. Meeting quality when you fire up your webcam to talk to your colleagues is getting better by the minute, but the network is not quite up to shoving all those bits around in real time. We all end up looking a little like Max Headroom. What can you do until everyone on your project team can afford high-end telepresence rigs?
There are a few basic tips for making a videoconference go smoothly out there. And taking steps like using a high quality microphone and a very quiet space to videoconference from are good starting points for keeping the quality high.
But during almost a year of doing all my meetings over a webcam I’ve learned an important lesson: I need to slow my speech rate down. Way down.
It’s incredibly hard for a voluble person to do, but essential. In order to cope with network latency you must take what feels like interminable pauses as you speak and listen. If you don’t, you risk coming across as overly aggressive, cutting other meeting attendees off as they begin to speak, often without realizing that you’re doing it.
Any questions?
No?
Good. Thanks for a great meeting!
Did you ever wish you could delete all your email without responding? Maybe you can. It’s called email bankruptcy. You realize you are never going to dig yourself out from under the pile of email in your inbox so you just declare that you won’t. You start afresh.
VC Fred Wilson and Teqlo CEO Jeff Nolan have joined the ranks of the email bankrupt this week, but it isn’t an entirely new concept. Lawrence Lessig coined the term in 2004:
In a script-driven note sent out last week, Lessig wrote: “Dear person who sent me a yet-unanswered e-mail, I apologize, but I am declaring e-mail bankruptcy.”
He went on to note that he had spent 80 hours the prior week sorting through unanswered e-mail built up since January 2002, and had determined that “without extraordinary effort” he would simply never be able to respond to these messages.
If you find email bankruptcy too drastic, here are some other tactics to try first:
Read the rest of this entry »
Web workers have different styles when it comes to maintaining our professional networks. Some people rely on a small, tight-knit group of like-minded contacts, adding new ones slowly and cautiously. Others focus on collecting additional contacts as rapidly as they can — keeping an eye on the Twitterholic rankings the entire time. Still others aim mainly at connecting with people who seem most important. They’re the ones looking over your shoulder at a conference while talking to you, hoping to find someone higher up in the primate social rankings.
Caterina Fake points at research that suggests different people have different styles in creating and maintaining friendships. Maybe these categories apply to professional relationships as well:
- Friendship Cultivators – friends mean a lot to them and they spend a significant amount of their time nurturing friendships. They’re always arranging get togethers and are in constant touch with friends online and on the phone
- Friendship Pruners – make and drop friends quickly according to how useful they are. Friendship Pruners name drop a lot – they like to be seen to be in social contact with the ‘in crowd’. They hate ‘dead wood’ so frequently prune names from their diaries, online buddy lists and mobile phones
- Friendship Harvesters – tend to have a very wide circle of friends that they get in touch with on a seasonal basis. They’re happy to leave long periods without contact and typically dedicate a set period of time every few weeks or months to a flurry of contact to keep up to date with friends’ news and gossip
- Friendship Gatherers – are quick to make friends but the least proactive at maintaining friendships. They gather friends wherever they go but are socially lazy and once friendship has been established they rely on the other party to keep it going. They often seek out Friendship Cultivators so they can ride on the back of their frequent social contact and arrangements.
What’s your style in maintaining your professional network: cultivator, pruner, harvester, or gatherer?
We’ve written before about coworking – the idea that a batch of web workers and other independents can organize their own cafe-like shared workplace and enjoy the benefits of conviviality as well as a permanent place to park things like widescreen monitors. If you’ve been hopping from Starbucks to Starbucks, or working in high-tech isolation at home, this idea might be sounding pretty darned good to you. For many people, the only thing wrong with the office is the boss; coworking offers the former without the latter.
But how do you find like-minded collaborators and creative types to join you in coworking nirvana? Why, being a good web worker, you use the Internet! Here are three great resources to help you chase the coworking dream:
Read the rest of this entry »
Tomorrow is Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day — an interesting proposition for those of us working from home. “Come on, Janie, step into my office. What’s mommy doing? Surfing the web. That’s my job. Yes, I get paid to surf the Web.” Sort of.
In preparation for this event, the Wall Street Journal’s Juggle blog launched a discussion about how parents talk to their kids about work. Blogger Tom Weber acknowledges the need to teach children that people work for money and for other reasons as well:
That discussion about work and pay can be pretty helpful in the teaching-the-value-of-a-buck department. As in, take care of your things because when you lose or break something, it represents not just money but the work that had to be done to earn the money.
In our family, though, we’ve been wary of overemphasizing the monetary aspect of work. We don’t want our kids to see work as this horrible place their parents trudge off to just to get money. My wife and I both feel lucky to be working in jobs we find personally rewarding. So we have also talked about what drives some people to work hard—the non-monetary aspects of a fulfilling career. These are certainly more complicated to explain than the simple equation of go to work, get paid.
Read the rest of this entry »
Suw Charman recently posted an article on Corante where she begins: “Deep down, we all know it. Multitasking is bad for productivity.” We know that, too.
Later in the article, she realizes that she can eliminate multitasking by using dictation software:
Whilst I was dictating, I had a bit of a mini-epiphany. Despite having all the usual applications and websites open that haunt me on a daily basis, I was much more tightly focused on what I was doing. Because I was speaking aloud and not writing, I found I wasn’t spending half as much time looking at the computer screen as usual – instead, I was gazing off into the middle distance, scrutinising the door jam or staring at the ceiling. I only noticed that there were Twitter messages or IMs to read when I glanced back at the screen. Even though I felt awkward dictating, I got closer to a state of actual concentration than I have in a goodly long time.
Was Suw’s epiphany about voice recognition software, or was it all about her realization that when she didn’t look at the computer, she got more done?
Read the rest of this entry »
Who by now has not seen at least some of the hype for Second Life, the massively multiplayer digital universe run by Linden Labs? Edging rapidly towards the six million resident mark (though some real life human beings have multiple identities “in world”) and home to corporate presences as diverse as Coca-Cola, UGS, and Reuters, it’s been the subject of much press coverage in the last few years.
Despite the rapid growth of Second Life’s user base, it’s fair to say that most people (even most web workers) have no real conception of what it’s like, or why they might want an account there. Now, it’s true that you can find virtual sex, anti-social jerks, eight-foot-tall furry animals wearing clothes, and heavily-armed mercenaries in the world of Second Life. In that, it reminds me a lot of classic usenet, or IRC when I first started using it, or any other frontier of communication. The frontiers tend to be wild and woolly places.
Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
