Web Worker Daily

How do you decide what you should do from your to do list? You have a free hour: should you write a blog post? Prospect for clients? Code a new feature? Instant message your boss? Take a nap?

In other words, what are your priorities? It doesn’t matter how much you get done if you’re doing the wrong stuff. Along with a to do list, you need a way of prioritizing that helps you decide what should be done.

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It used to be only graphic designers and fine artists played with color professionally. Now everyone with a website gets to choose color themes and schemes. But where do you find help and inspiration? Here are three resources you might want to check out if you need to get creative with colors online.

Adobe Kuler color theme creation and sharing tool. From Adobe Labs, this Flash-based tool lets you create color schemes, tag them, share them, and download them. When you create a scheme, you can choose from rules like Analogous (close together on the color wheel) and Complementary (opposite each other) or make a completely custom scheme.

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There’s no shortage of articles published about how to take control of your email; we’ve contributed quite a few ourselves. This week, I’ve seen the extremes of email management approaches, from very simple to incredibly complex:

Plain. Gina Trapani of Lifehacker offers Empty Your Inbox with Gmail and the Trusted Trio. With Gina’s scheme, everything that needs some action in the future goes into Follow Up (messages you need to take action on) or Hold (where you are waiting on something or someone else) with the rest getting archived. Voila! Clean inbox.

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We could already be suffering a recession in the U.S., and the tech industry is not immune, as potential Yahoo! layoffs show. What should you be doing now to protect yourself?

Keep building that online persona. Share who you are and what you’re about online — through a blog or other means. Raising your professional profile online is one of the best ways to attract new job and business opportunities your way. Don’t just create an online version of a resume; get active and connected online.

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I bet some Web Worker Daily readers can see themselves in Seth Godin’s description of the passionate worker:

The passionate worker doesn’t show up because she’s afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it’s a hobby that pays. The passionate worker is busy blogging on vacation… because posting that thought and seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on the beach for another hour. The passionate worker tweaks a site design after dinner because, hey, it’s a lot more fun than watching TV.

The only problem with being super-passionate about your work life is that work can take over your whole life. That’s especially so for web workers since near-ubiquitous connectivity means you can almost always tweak that website, write that blog post, or code that next feature no matter where you are or what time it is.

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If you work from home, you may be wondering if you can deduct costs related to your home office — a part of your mortgage payment or rent, for example. But unfortunately the U.S. tax law in this area doesn’t recognize the work-life blend that most home workers practice. If you mix business and personal activities in your home office, you can’t take the deduction.

The Wall Street Journal reports that most people eligible for this potentially lucrative deduction probably don’t take it:

“It is questionable whether most taxpayers who are eligible to take the deduction actually do so,” IRS National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson said in a report to Congress last week. She urged lawmakers to offer taxpayers a simpler, optional method of calculating the home-office deduction. [subscription required]

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While perhaps only our geekiest readers have a favorite programming language, it’s a useful question since so many web workers do know how to code, even if it’s just hacking up JavaScript and PHP on a WordPress installation.

Java, the choice of enterprise IT shops everwhere, isn’t feeling much love online these days: first InfoWorld calls it the new Cobol. Then two professors emeriti say it’s ruining computer science education.

Meanwhile, Ruby-based web framework Ruby on Rails doesn’t seem quite so hot this year as it was last January, Scala’s getting some laughs, and people have been wondering why Erlang’s so buzzy.

So geeks: share your own programming language opinions here. What programming languages do you use right now? Which ones do you love? Are there any you want to take a closer look at? And what programming languages suck, in your (surely humble) opinion?

If you work remotely from your colleagues — whether you’re a telecommuter or a freelancer or entrepreneur joining with other entrepreneurs loosely across geography — it’s helpful to let associates know what you’re up to on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis. In the presence of ubiquitous connectivity and absence of facetime, use workstreaming.

I defined workstreaming last March as “the publishing of work-related activities and events to your remote colleagues, usually via RSS but sometimes in other formats and ways.” This jumps off the idea of lifestreaming: sharing a moment-by-moment or event-by-event account of your life, whether through video or blogs or tools like Jaiku and FriendFeed.

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