“Paperless Office.”
That has a nice ring to it. But is it really attainable for anyone other than those who can get obsessive about scanning and shredding?
I’ve been trying to reduce paper, but in the process, I’ve felt a mental backlash that is driving me back to paper. Hey, I was one of the first folks to get a Palm early on, convinced that I would be replacing my paper organizer. I had one of the first Kyocera smart phone prototypes in 2000, seeing the possibility of getting rid of my paper address book, too.
My Failed Attempts at Paperless
When I got my 3-in-1 printer, I was gungho about having a scanner. I set out to rid my garage of the most onerous paper pile ever - magazines. I have boxes and boxes of magazines either with articles I’ve written or articles about me and my work in them. I haven’t been able to throw them out. But scanning them, while it seemed promising, has left me with a slew of disorganized scanned articles and once organized magazine piles in disarray.
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I’m a big fan of FreshBooks. I’ve written about and have used their easy Web-based accounting services site almost daily to manage my company’s invoicing.
Today, Freshbooks announced that it is releasing industry benchmark data as an added benefit to freelancers as well as micro and small business owners, arming them with information to better manage business revenue and growth. Based on the anonymous aggregation of data based on input from FreshBooks’ clients, the new reports illustrate billing trends.
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My Twitter Page
Like anyone using social networks for my work, I struggle with the friend feature. There are a number of theories of how and why to friend other people and when to accept friend requests. Clearly, having more “friends” on your social networks has its benefits, but if friending is done randomly, how much value are those very random “friends” for your business goals?
Some of the reasons you might want to friend someone for your work are:
- facilitating business networking
- connecting to a potential strategic partner or virtual team member
- looking for a job opportunity
- building an audience for the content you publish
- cultivating potential customers and clients
To Follow or Not To Follow
Accepting friend offers often seems to be much less strategic. On Twitter, for example, I personally don’t follow every single person who follows me. I do go to each Twitter page for every person who does follow me and peruse a few pages of their tweets. I can tell pretty quickly if they are using Twitter in a way that is valuable or meaningful and worth following. I follow less people because I really want to pay attention to the people I do follow.
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There’s nothing like being able to work from home. But even what so many people strive for can end up being less than ideal. I enjoy the freedom I have to work on my own schedule, however, working from home doesn’t mean you always get more time to do your work. I also find that working from home instead of in an office setting can be isolating. I am not within earshot of peers who I can bounce ideas off of or hear the latest industry developments firsthand.
I’ve been fascinated by businesses popping up around major metropolitan areas that create a shared workspace for independent workers. Imran Ali wrote about the trend of co-working spaces back in April, and I’ll be exploring the trend further as I look to set up a co-working space in my town.
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Cocktail Match
Okay, confess. You work hard for hours on end, never budging from the keyboard, and then, you digress. You get distracted. You find a blog or a site or a Web app that is nonsense, that is fun or funny, that has absolutely nothing to do with your work.
Well, I’m here to say that you are not alone and to prove it, every month or so, I’ll post a new blog, site or app that will truly waste your time. I should know. Because I’ve been there and gotten sucked into the vortex of distraction and lost precious time. But I truly believe we need those occasional distractions or we will go absolutely mad.
Presenting…Cocktail Match
Adhering to the theory that “You are what you drink,” Cocktail Match allows you to create your own virtual bar (VBar) based around your cocktail preferences and invite friends to socialize. Talk about niche social networking. And I thought social networks for cats, dogs and hamsters was really niche.
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live blogging an event
I recently live-blogged a 3-day conference. Gearing up for the event, I posted here about the equipment I was bringing as well as musings about the dynamics of live blogging. While I’ve live blogged parts of events and have Power-Twittered a conference before, this was my first full-scale, solo, multimedia live-blogging project for a client.
The live blogging was a success. In fact, the client was caught up in the excitement of seeing posts showing up literally in the middle of sessions with quotes and commentary about the topics discussed that they finally “got” what a blog could be.
Everyone at the conference was fired up to see images from the sessions and events and video clips of themselves or their fellow conference attendees waxing philosophical about the conference proceedings.
Here are my key lessons from the three days. For anyone whose work will take them into the realm of live blogging, I hope these prove helpful.
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I said it once, and I’ll say it again. I love Twitter. WWD has been talking about using Twitter as a professional tool for quite some now.
I use Twitter daily and often, almost always from my laptop on the Web, occasionally from Twhirl if I want to post to one of my 5 accounts other than my main one, sometimes from my mobile phone and once in a while from my iPod.
Twitter is my watercooler as I work solo from home (or a local cafe) in Alaska. It is my finger on the pulse of social media and things happening in the Lower 48. It is my way of touching base with friends, acquaintances and people who I’d like to get to know better.
Looking at my Twitter account over the last few weeks, I also saw distinct ways I used Twitter in my work proving once and for all that Twitter is not just chatter but a useful business tool.
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I’m still looking for work uses for collaborative scribbling aka drawing whiteboards. I reviewed Bookgoo, but truth be told, haven’t found a use for it. But I’m trying to keep an open mind.
That’s why I took a look recently at Scriblink, another free collaboration tool.
For a fee, businesses can take their Scriblink board, customize its appearance, then embed code into their company site to launch their branded whiteboard. The board is still hosted on Scriblink so the URL for the custom Scriblink whiteboard is http://www.scriblink.com/yourcompany. Scriblink puts a tiny “powered by Scriblink” at the bottom of the board.
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