When people find out that I’ve been working from home for years, they often respond with both envy and fear: “I’d like to do that myself…but I can’t afford to give up my paycheck. How could I possibly get started in a web work career? How do you get started on something like that?”
While there’s no magic formula, there are things you can do that make it more possible to move successfully from a 9-to-5 office career to a freelance web worker one. In the past we’ve covered some of the things that help web workers be successful after they get going. Today, I’ll offer some advice on actually making the transition.
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There is a dichotomy in home-based web work: we’re more liberated than almost any other gainfully employed professionals, and yet it seems that at times this freedom makes us free to work all day and night in blissful (or not) isolation from our small home offices.
People are looking for ways to counteract the inherent isolation that comes from being a lone wolf. Whether it’s virtual tools that approximate the experience of having people around you, or the group of casual or formal co-working arrangements that seem to be cropping up, there is a growing movement to take web work back into a pseudo-office environment.
But why?
Why are we driving to coffee shops and meet-ups and other places that are filled with the distractions that we’re supposed to be getting away from through the peaceful beauty of our web workerhood? Could it be there is a happy medium between coding for five hours without seeing another human face and sitting in an open bull-pen listening to our colleagues yak about their mortgages, hairdos, man/woman trouble, man/woman success, and beer-drinking plans?
What do you think?
It’s hard when no matter how good you are, your brother is still everyone’s darling.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a rather amazing email client in its own right. It’s quick on its feet, it’s customizable, it’s cross-platform, and it handles IMAP email and identities better than most of its competition in the desktop email client space. Despite Thunderbird’s obvious advantages, Firefox is Mozilla’s crown jewel and gets all of Daddy’s love. Does Thunderbird continue to grovel for table scraps or is it time to strike out in new territory?
Mozilla has declared a “call to action” asking users to weigh in on the future of Thunderbird.
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Well-known .NET developer Scott Hanselman is gearing up to leave the corporate office and work out of a home office, and as part of his preparation he’s asking readers a question that should resonate with many web workers: where is your current third place? The “third place,” of course, is the spot where we go that isn’t home or work when we want to hang out and feel connected with other people. For some of us this is a shifty concept, of course: if you do web work at home, and socialize exclusively on Twitter and IRC, do you have three places or just one?
Still, most of us can draw lines to divide our lives into compartments, even if those compartments aren’t watertight. As web workers, we tend to have less opportunity to socialize with others at work, so you’d think we would put more energy into finding vibrant and engaging third places to fill that side of our lives. Is there anything to that thought? Do you have some real-life third place where you hang out, whether a neighborhood bar or a church? Or is your third place online? What fills that niche in your own web working life?
We’ve written about creating your personal brand and an online persona before, but given the importance of that branding in the world of today’s web worker, it’s important that you understand the underlying laws of branding.
It’s not enough to write prolifically, to have a great Facebook or LinkedIn page, to comment everywhere or be everywhere.
Those things are important, of course, but what’s just as important is knowing what works and why it works. To understand that, you need to understand the timeless laws of branding — stuff that has worked from the time of Henry Ford onward. Heck, even Shakespeare and Da Vinci and Socrates seemed to understand branding.
The Three Laws of Branding all revolve around a message: when you create a brand, you are sending a message to anyone who sees or hears that brand. You aren’t just creating a name that has no meaning. For example, Pepsi doesn’t just put its name and logo everywhere without thinking about what message it is sending. Sure, it puts its name and logo everywhere, but it is also careful to create ads that reinforce the message that Pepsi is not only delicious and refreshing, it is also the hip choice of the younger generation.
It’s that message that you need to pay attention to when branding.
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Not every web worker is a web designer, of course. But enough of us at least dabble in that side of things that it’s worth keeping an eye on tools to make web page design easier and better. Here are a couple that I ran across recently and added to my collection.
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Web Worker Daily will reach its first birthday in September. As we refresh the site design and direction, we’d like your feedback on what you’d like to see from us.
When WWD launched, it focused on neo-Bedouins, those web workers who move from café to café, looking for a reliable Internet connection and a good cup of coffee. We broadened the focus when we realized that anyone can use the web to work in new ways, whether employee or entrepreneur working from anyplace at all, cubicles definitely included.
We hope to add more financial advice, lifestyle coverage, and coverage of you — the web worker — in the form of field reports that you submit or interviews our writers conduct. We’d like to continue throwing out the occasional controversial idea about new ways to work so you can chew on them and offer your own. We want to continue our regular open threads where we hear about the ways you work and the tools you use.
Please share with us in the comments:
- What would you like to see more of?
- What would you like to see less of?
- Is there anything we’re not doing that you’d like to see?
We look forward to hearing from you!
Angela Booth suggests that experienced writers can use journals as their idea banks:
If you’ve been writing for a few years, your journal acts as your idea bank. It’s best to maintain several journals: one for ideas, another for essays, as well as a journal for a long project like a book.
If you’re writing a novel, for example, your journal will keep you “in” the novel, even if you have to leave the project for a week or two.
An idea bank would be helpful for anyone who works with information and ideas. You don’t have to use a paper journal, because there are lots of desktop or online solutions too. You could use a wiki, a note-taking application, a desktop information manager like DevonThink or PersonalBrain, a password-protected blog (to keep your ideas under wraps while they’re gestating), or text files.
How do you capture your ideas?
