Web Worker Daily

As we’ve discussed before, web workers tend to be so passionate about their work that they work to excess. But not being superhuman, we get sick, too. This can pose a problem: entrepreneurial web workers don’t have paid sick days to fall back on, and many of us have psychological problems with the notion of taking a day off for any reason. Here’s some advice for handling illness in a web 2.0 world:

1. Stay home. No, really. Even if you’re determined to load yourself up on cold medicine and soldier through, you shouldn’t go down to your regular coffeeshop and inflict your germs on everyone else there. This applies even if your major competitors also work in the same coffeeshop.

2. Cut back proactively. Before you do anything else, review your schedule and task list for the day, and look for things that you can put off until tomorrow (or later). If you’re not feeling 100%, you shouldn’t expect to be able to do 100% of a normal day’s work. It’s far better to make a plan at the start of the day and push the lowest priority tasks overboard than to be caught out at the end of the day with high-priority jobs undone.

3. Use the web. You’re a web worker; this is a day to depend on that. If you’re being stubborn about working, you probably don’t want your business partners and coworkers to comment on how you sound like death warmed over. Cancel or postpone as many phone calls as you can, and depend on e-mail, instant messaging, and collaborative software to carry the communications load. Remember, on IRC no one can hear you coughing up a lung.

4. Set up a safety net. If your head feels like it’s stuffed with wet cotton, the odds are pretty good that you’re not going to be doing your best work. If you must write code, make sure you’ve got a good test suite, or run it through peer review. If you’re a writer or designer, have someone else look over your great new idea to double-check that it’s not just a fever dream. Better yet, stick to routine stuff today and put off the creative work until you’re feeling better.

5. Take advantage of yourself. If you’ve got a chunk of work that you’ve been putting off because it’s routine drudgery (answering a batch of stale e-mail, catching up on your filing, invoicing clients…) this could be the perfect time to do it. You’re not going to enjoy today anyhow, so you might as well just put your remaining brain cells on autopilot and get the drudgery done, right?

6. Stay away from Google. No good will come of searching for your symptoms to discover the twelve obscure tropical diseases that you might suddenly be dieing from. On the other hand, you might take some comfort from visiting WhoIsSick and seeing that you’re not the only one who’s under the weather.

And of course, drink plenty of fluids, get some rest, and try not to stress too much about the fact that you’re not working as hard as usual. You might even discover that the world doesn’t come to an end if you slow down for a day.