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.

I like the prioritization scheme that Susan L. Reid offers in her book Discovering Your Inner Samurai. She suggests you pick two top priorities and commit to them for one month:

Two priorities; one-month commitment. That’s all. Of course, if you can, you might narrow that priority down to one. Most of us, though, unless we are in an extreme situation, will have two.

Does having only two priorities mean you completely ignore other things you need to get done — work assignments, chores at home, or your taxes, for example? No. It just means when you’re scheduling your time and picking things to do you first look to tasks having to do with one of your two top priorities.

This may not work for your individual situation of course — two priorities may be far too few; a month may be too long. But it has the benefit of radically simplifying and intensifying your commitments for a duration that seems totally doable yet is long enough that it should produce some real results.

Related posts

• 11 Tips for Time Management in a Web Worker World
• Open Thread: How Do You Decide What To Do from Your To Do List?
• Cut the Fat to Get to Lean Productivity
• 4 Ways to Manage Your Personal Stack

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.

Sessions.edu color wheel calculator. Also based on Adobe Flash, the Sessions.edu color wheel tool works similarly to the Kuler creation tool, but it offers the nice feature of letting you see your color choices mix it up in one of four abstract designs. It also offers a different set of rules than Kuler — I especially like the “triangle” choice which gives a split complement scheme.

COLOURlovers color and design community. This website offers a wealth of resources for picking colors and staying on top of color trends. Go to the Palettes page to search thousands of color schemes developed by COLOURlovers community members, Trends to see where magazines and websites are going with color, and the Forums to talk color.

Share your favorite resources for getting creative with color in the comments.

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.

But remember you might want to transfer to do items from your email into your task manager or you might forget all you need to do. Out of the inbox can mean out of mind, as you may have discovered after you labeled a bunch of emails as Follow Up and then never looked at them again.

Fancy. Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Workweek says you might want to Outsource the Inbox and Never Check Email Again. Tim suggests you hire a virtual assistant to process your email, which would involve too much overhead of time, money, and hassle for most people. But if you’re an Internet celebrity who receives thousands of emails a day, it could be just the thing to free your time from email processing for higher value work.

What’s your email processing personality? Plain or fancy?

Related posts

• Open Thread: Are You a Filer or a Piler?
• A CIO Revolutionizes the Rules of Email
• 6 Tools for the Post-Email Era
• Tough Love for Email

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.

Create additional income streams, even if you are an employee. Or perhaps especially if you are an employee — because your salary is vulnerable to disappearing all at once, while freelancers and business owners usually have multiple clients.

How can you create additional streams of income? Find a side job as a freelancer (be careful not to break any of your employer’s noncompete policies by doing so), start an ad-supported blog, sell products online, or offer consulting services in your field of expertise. While none of these things will — at least initially — make enough money to replace a full-time-with-bennies job, they can cushion the pain of income loss while teaching you new skills and growing your professional network.

Stay aware of what the market wants. Even during a recession, jobs go begging when employers can’t find people with the right skills. Even if you’re not looking for a job or more contract work right now, subscribe to Craigslist job listing feeds using searches that match what kind of positions might interest you. You’ll keep yourself informed as to what skills you might need to add to your arsenal, what companies are hiring in your area, and whether hires in your field are trending up or down.

Invest in human capital. In other words, beef up your skills. You don’t have to spend money on classes to do so, though that might be the easiest way to learn the basics of something unfamiliar to you. You can spend your time: find an unpaid internship with training as your compensation, do volunteer work for a nonprofit, get involved in an open source effort, or start your own just-for-learning-purposes project.

Create social capital too. If you do lose your job or a major client, your next one may very well come through your online network of friends and associates. Your online social network can not only help find new opportunities just when you need them, it can also provide emotional support when you go through tough times. Not sure exactly how to go about creating social capital? Here are some tips for networking like a human.

For more tips on recession-proofing your career, see Robert Scoble’s article from December “Surviving the 2008 recession” and Penelope Trunk’s article posted today “Maybe there will be a recession. Here’s what to do just in case.”

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.

How do you make sure your personal life doesn’t get lost? If you are truly passionate about your work, practices like limiting your work time or batch processing email may not be strong enough to keep work in its place — because your work is so engaging it magnetically pulls you back again and again.

What to do? Use boundary-setting methods that take advantage of your passionate personality. For example, choose flow-inducing hobbies and pursue personal goals with as much attention as you bring to your professional goals. You can read about those methods and more in the guest post I wrote for Tim Ferriss’ blog: 5 Boundary-Setting Tips for the Work Obsessed.

If you’ve come up with good ways to keep your passionate work life from smothering your personal life, share them in the comments.

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]

Why don’t more people deduct home office expenses? The WSJ identifies a number of reasons: the law is quite complex, requires extensive record-keeping, and is perceived to raise a person’s risk of being audited.

What might be the ultimate barrier for many home-based web workers, however, is the law’s requirement that, in order to deduct expenses for your home office, you use that part of the home exclusively as your principal place of business. Very few people use their home office only for work, even if it is their main place of business.

This law hasn’t kept up with the reality of work today. If you set up a comfortable home office with a nice computer, filing system, and workspace, you’ll probably do your personal work there — paying bills, for example. You might play games on the computer or use it for socializing too.

The law could allow a proration of time based on how the office is used; for example, allowing you to deduct 80% of costs if you spend 80% of the time in your office working. While this would add to the record-keeping burden, it would have the great benefit of allowing home-based businesses the opportunity to deduct actual expenses, just like other businesses can.

Related posts

• 6 Things You Must Know About Self-Employment Taxes
• Web Worker 101: Tracking Business Expenses
• Web Worker Year End Tax Tips
• You Can Work From Home: A Free No-Nonsense Guide

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.

How can you do workstreaming? Message boards can work well for corporate teams: post a message when a project milestone is reached, a document is available for review, a sale has been closed, a bug fixed. On her new blog Anywired, Skellie offers tips for using micro-blogs like Tumblr, Twitter, and Soup.io to do it. A macro-blog like WordPress or Blogger works well as a coarse-grained, person-focused workstream. Stowe Boyd is working on a secretive project called Workstreamr that he calls his greatest obsession. I can’t wait to see it.

Do you want to learn more about workstreaming and other new ways that web workers succeed when ubiquitous connectivity is a given but face-to-face contact is not? Then check out Web Worker Daily’s book Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working, where I discuss workstreaming and other secrets of success in the connected age.

What’s the limit to the number of people you can maintain relationships with? What about online relationships?

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests that 150 is the maximum number of people with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships. That theoretical limit is known to sociologists and anthropologists as Dunbar’s number.

Might the number change when you’re talking about online relationships? Do tools like email, instant messaging, blogs, micro-blogs, and online social networks reduce friction and increase communication enough that the number of relationships you can maintain online might be greater than 150?

JP Rangaswami, who blogs at Confused of Calcutta, thinks his digital Dunbar number is higher than 150:

I’ve sensed that I have a Dunbar number of around 300 in the digital world, and I’ve been delighted to find I know most of the steady ones. Over the years I’ve actually met most of the community of readers, usually at conferences. The face-to-face contact, in turn, leads to a deepening of the relationship, and we land up creating and developing links in Facebook and Twitter. [I still land up with a smidgeon of LinkedIn requests, but to be frank the only reason I go to LinkedIn is to deal with Invitations to Connect.]

JP wants to get a conversation started about digital Dunbars and asks his readers:

How many Facebook friends do you have, how many regular readers of your blog, how many followers in Twitter, do you see a correlation between the three, if not why not, and so on. Do you tend to meet a core of this number on a face-to-face basis, if not why not? What other tools do you use, tools such as Dopplr and last.fm and netvibes and so on.

I’ve found I can comfortably follow only about 100 people on Twitter. Beyond that, I lose track of who people are and the experience feels more like noise than connecting. So I think my digital Dunbar might be below 150.

What about you? What’s your offline Dunbar number? Your digital Dunbar?

What does the new way of working look like? Maybe something like Alpine Access, a Denver-based virtual call center. I spoke with Chris Carrington, Alpine Access CEO, about how he’s growing this business — #17 on Deloitte’s Fast 50 for Colorado — using experienced home-based workers, web-style computing, and online social networking tools.

Here’s how Alpine Access uses the new way of working to succeed:

Offer home-based employment. Alpine Access hires U.S.-based call center representatives who work from their own homes. Agents earn between $8 and $13 an hour, receive health insurance and other employee benefits, and can climb a career ladder into team leader and account manager positions. In contrast to some other virtual call centers who mainly hire contractors who don’t get paid for training and don’t receive employee benefits, Alpine Access chooses to hire employees in order to attract the very best candidates.

Hire for passion, skills, and experience, not geography. Because Alpine Access offers desirable home-based employment, they get their pick of people. While traditional brick-and-mortar call centers typically hire people in their early twenties with just high school education, many of whom take the job temporarily while looking for something better, Alpine Access attracts agents with an average age of 41 years old, 80% of whom have a college education, and most of whom are looking for a long-term commitment.

Alpine Access receives huge numbers of applications — over 200,000 last year — so they can hand pick each new agent to match their clients’ needs. They’re not limited to just the people in commute distance from a call center facility. For example, they only hire people with travel industry experience to serve their ExpressJet airline client.

Stay in touch electronically. Agents chat with their coaches and supervisors using instant messaging throughout the day any time they have a question about how to handle a particular call. Alpine Access’ call center technology allows agents and their managers to listen in on a call together.

Use web-style thin-client computing. Since employees are working from home, it’s not feasible for Alpine Access to install, configure, and maintain software on each employee computer. So they use a thin-client model where most of the processing happens on servers. Employees don’t download customer data; they just connect into a central facility that gives access to all the applications and data they need.

Create a virtual water cooler for employees. Alpine Access has deployed social networking tool HiveLive to provide a virtual water cooler to employees. This allows employees to get to know each other in a personal way even though they don’t work physically together. HiveLive is used to share photos, post birth announcements, swap recipes, and more. Some teams even use it to host virtual happy hours each week.

Do you want to know more about new ways of working? About home-based work? Check out Web Worker Daily’s book “Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working” and the free downloadable bonus chapter on finding and succeeding with home-based work.

The Wall Street Journal’s CareerJournal offers tips about talking politics in the workplace, including “If you do want to share your opinions, don’t bash those with whom you disagree” and “Don’t assume people feel the way you think they do.” That’s even more important to keep in mind if your workplace extends onto the web, through tools like blogs. Instead of being heard by three people in the break room, your rant about one presidential candidate or another could be read by thousands and archived for future bosses or clients to see.

But the web is such a great place to discuss political ideas and candidates, you may not want to rule out political discussion online entirely. You may seek authenticity and transparency in the way you conduct yourself online — that’s an attitude common to many web workers — and you may enjoy honestly expressing your opinion about issues that matter. If you do have an urge to join into the political conversation, however, you need to do it in a way that doesn’t create a long-lasting reputation for extremism or rancor.

Do you join into political conversation online? If so, how?

If you’re self-employed or thinking about it and you live in the U.S., one of your biggest concerns is likely to be health insurance. Most people in the U.S. — about 60% according to the National Coalition on Health Care — get health coverage through their employers.

But the health insurance outlook for the self-employed is not as bad as you might think. If you are reasonably healthy, you might be surprised how cheaply you can arrange coverage, especially if you choose a high-deductible health plan. And now that health insurers are looking for growth beyond their bread-and-butter large group policies, you could see even better rates as those insurers compete for your health coverage dollars.

The Wall Street Journal reports (behind the subscription firewall, unfortunately) that insurers are turning their attention to the individual insurance market as the large group plan market stagnates:

[Insurers'] core business — selling group plans to large employers — is stagnant. A Bain & Company analysis of the health-insurance sector shows that total commercial health-insurance enrollment has been flat at around 174 million people since 2001. In response to rising costs, employers have steadily pared back benefits, and the percent of businesses offering health insurance has fallen to 60% last year from 66% in 1999. Since the 2001 recession, the number of contractors, part-timers and small-business employees has grown two to six times faster than the economy overall. In contrast, traditional workers — the full-time company employees that provide the insurance companies’ bread and butter — have declined 0.6%. As a result, profit pools in corporate-funded health plans are shrinking.

So what does that mean for you? It depends. It depends on what health issues you and your dependents have, what state you live in, and even what coverage you’ve had in the past, because some legal guarantees only kick in if you don’t drop coverage for too long.

If you are looking for health insurance on the individual market, here are a few tips to guide you:

• Find a good health insurance broker. A broker who’s knowledgeable about individual policies in your area will be able to help you find just the right health insurance plan for your situation. They can easily check rates at multiple insurance companies, inform you about laws that might apply to your situation, and counsel you about your best course of action.
• Consider a high-deductible health plan with a health savings account. These plans feature high annual deductibles but allow you to establish a health savings account to which you contribute pre-tax earnings. Because of the high deductibles, the policies are usually quite a bit cheaper than regular policies. And the health savings accounts have a variety of nice features, including long-term accumulation of savings and tax-free interest if you don’t use up the money in the account. It’s a great way to save for future health expenses while keeping the lid on current expenditures for your insurance.
• Don’t drop coverage. Besides leaving you at risk for financial disaster should you have health problems while uncovered, it also means that if you later get coverage through an employer or other group plan, the insurer may not have to cover pre-existing conditions. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) says that if you maintain coverage without a significant break (generally defined as 63 days or more), a new group insurer cannot exclude pre-existing conditions, although an individual insurer may be able to, depending on your state’s laws. Always maintain coverage, even if you do so with the most bare bones of policies.
• Consider COBRA health coverage continuation only as a last resort. The federal Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act provides for continuation of group health care coverage for up to 18 months (or longer if you are disabled) after you leave a job. Although it will cover you if you have no other options, it is time-limited and often very expensive. Do use it to keep unbroken coverage if you need to while waiting for eligibility for another plan, though.

For more advice on health insurance for the self-employed, check our open thread where readers shared their experiences. And let’s hope that America’s next president takes decisive action to help those who cannot obtain affordable health coverage for themselves and their families, even as we each (I hope) find the coverage we need for ourselves and our families.

I love my Google Calendar, but I also like the physical experience of planning my days, weeks, and months using a paper calendar or planner. Here are three possibilities for when you want to manage your life with pen and paper instead of using an online calendar.

Doodle while you plan

With a pack of multi-colored gel pens and this 8 Days-A-Week Doodle Planner available from See Jane Work, you’ll be all ready to doodle your plans and dreams each week as you plan out your days. “8 days a week” means it shows Monday through Sunday plus Someday, so you have room to write things you want to get done as you have a spare moment. The Doodle part of it means you get blank pages interspersed with the weekly schedules to draw pictures, do a mind map of your week, or take random notes.

Manage recurring events

If you have many recurring weekly or monthly appointments (a weekly team telecon, kids’ soccer practice each Tuesday and Thursday, monthly status reports), you might like the WeekDate calendar. It uses a layered design so you can write monthly or weekly appointments just once yet see them with each week’s schedule. It’s available in a portable planner version or a monthly wall calendar.

Make a daily sticky note

I love the SmartDate Daily Adhesive Notes from russell+hazel. For $12, you get three 50-sheet pads of Post-It style notes with hourly time slots for scheduling and room for a to do list at the bottom. Use these to make a daily plan from your digital calendar — stick it right where you can see exactly what you need to do each day.

Related Posts

• Rock Your Google Calendar in 18 Ways
• Open Thread: What Calendar Do You Use?
• 5 Reasons to Use a Paper To Do List
• Where Paper Is Still King
• 6 More Reasons to Use a Paper To Do List

The key to using Google Docs (GDocs) document editing effectively is to understand that it’s a web word processor rather than an outright replacement for full-featured desktop word processors like Microsoft Word. GDocs includes features that make it easy to produce content for the web — it understands HTML (though not as well as it should), makes it easy to put in links inside and across documents, allows you to publish online, and encourages collaboration with features like version control and real-time multi-person editing.

If you go to the Google Docs home page, you can create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and folders to organize it all. This article focuses only on the word processing aspects of Google Docs — and looks at features that make it easier for you to get in a web word processing state of mind.

Edit the HTML directly. From the “Edit” page of your document, click on the “Edit HTML” link to the right of the “Revisions” tab. You’ll view the raw HTML of the document — and I mean raw. It’s not at all easy to read, lacking as it is in whitespace. If you want to do anything more than minor tweaks, you might want to take it to your favorite HTML editor to do so.

Use HTML-style headings. Use Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, and Ctrl-3 to create header styles 1, 2, and 3 that will be marked with the HTML header codes h1, h2, and h3 when you publish the document as a web page. Unfortunately, you can’t create your own default styles for headers such as H1 and H2 at this point without creating some custom CSS code.

Create internal document links. GDocs calls these “bookmarks” but you may be more familiar with them as HTML anchors. These are useful for creating tables of contents with links that take you directly to subsections of the documents or for creating frequently asked questions lists, for example. Use the “Change” dropdown menu option “Manage bookmarks…” to create places in the document where you want to link to. Then, to create a link to that location in the document, select the text that will be linked, use Ctrl-K to bring up the “Insert Link” dialog, choose the Bookmark radio button, and select the bookmark that is the destination.

Link to other Google Documents. If you want to reference another GDoc you’ve written, select the text to link, use Ctrl-K to bring up the “Insert Link” dialog, choose the “Document” radio button, and select the document you want to link to.

Publish blog posts. Go to the “Publish” tab in the upper righthand corner of the “Edit” page of your document and click “set your blog site settings.” Now you can specify your blog location, blog name, username, and password. Then just click “Post to blog” to publish directly from GDocs to your blog.

Check the readability. Writing for a web audience may mean ensuring your text isn’t too hard to understand. Use the “Word Count” option on the “File” menu to get a wealth of statistics beyond just the number of words to help you tune your writing to your audience. You’ll see number of characters, paragraphs, and sentences; approximate number of pages; and average sentences per paragraph. You also get three measures of how readable it is; the easiest to use are the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Automated Readability Index that output the approximate grade level someone needs to comprehend what you’ve written.

Share your document with the world. Go to the “Publish” tab on the upper right hand side and press the “Publish document” button. You’ll get a not-very-pretty URL that you can hand out to people for viewing. You can stop publishing any time and also set it to automatically republish every time changes are made, if you like.

Get an RSS feed of document changes. If you are working on a document with other people, you might want an automated way of seeing when changes have been made. Use the “Share” tab of the document’s “Edit” screen where you can
select “View RSS feed of document changes.” That link will let you subscribe to the RSS feed of your document edits in your RSS reader of choice.

Quickly insert comments. You can edit documents in real time, using GTalk to chat as you go, but more likely you’ll be editing at different times. To leave messages right in the text for your co-collaborators, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-M to insert a yellow-highlighted comment marked with author name and date. Comments will not show up in published or printed versions of the document.

Roll back to a previous version. You don’t have to save a history of revisions because GDocs does it automatically, behind the scenes, kind of like a wiki. Click on the “Revisions” tab in the upper left hand set of tabs and you’ll see a list of revisions made, the author who made them, and a brief description of changes. To compare versions, select the ones you want to compare, and click “Compare Checked.” To revert to an earlier version, click on its linked name (e.g., “Revision 12″). You will be taken to a page showing that version where you can click on “Revert to this one” to set the document to that version.

Have you switched to Google Docs for your web word processing? Share your experiences in the comments.

Related articles

• Open Thread: What Word Processor or Text Editor Do You Use?
• 10 Ways to Use Google Docs Productively
• Google Apps Takes on Microsoft Office Live
• 10 Free Minimalist Word Processors

If you’re a digital bedouin who works out of WiFi cafés, you get to drink yummy drinks while you aim for inbox zero. But make grande mochas a habit and you might start looking pretty grande yourself. Starbucks wants to help with a new set of low-fat, low-calorie drinks. Are you buying? Or do you already have a favorite drink?

So far, Starbucks’ new offering doesn’t sound too promising. Baristas are none too thrilled with the so-called “skinny” platform that means a drink with sugar-free syrup, nonfat milk, and no whipped cream. And customers may not like it either, if early reviews are any indication.

Monica Eng of the Chicago Tribune’s The Stew blog tried the new skinny mocha-flavored latte and was not impressed:

Although the drink sported a nice fluffy head of skim foam, the drink underneath was thin, weak and infused with a weird chemical flavor. The whole thing was reminiscent of something you would have gotten out of a 1980s-style coffee machine and then complained about.

Ostensibly, somewhere in the drink there is a shot of Starbucks “Signature espresso” and perhaps some real cocoa powder but you wouldn’t know it in this whisper of a drink that makes you feel like you are depriving and poisoning yourself at the same time. The big selling point is that the drink will only cost you 90 calories in a small–saving you about 100 calories a whack, Starbucks says. No thanks. Not worth the suffering to our palate.

I’m tired of lattes and mochas, so when I’m at my favorite work-away-from-home joint I go for a mug of Silver Doodle cinnamon, caramel, and chocolate-flavored coffee with a shot of half and half. I make up for the extra fat and calories in the half and half by typing really fast.

What’s your standard drink order when you’re working in a café? Or do you like to mix it up and try different things?

Related

• Open Thread: The First Cup – Tea or Coffee
• SMS-Based Starbucks Locator, A Double Shot
• Open Thread: What’s a Bedouin?
• The New Office Space: Coffee Shops

As more people work out of their home part- or full-time, they’re looking for offices or dedicated workspaces in their houses, according to The New York Times:

But by 2006, according to data collected by the Dieringer Research Group, a marketing research company in Brookfield, Wis., more than 28 million Americans were working from home at least part time — an increase of 10 percent from just the year before, and 40 percent from 2002. The American Home Furnishings Alliance reports that 7 in 10 Americans now have offices or designated workstations in their homes, a 112 percent increase since 2000. And a recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders found that home offices ranked as the fourth most important feature in a new upscale home, just ahead of security.

Some of those home offices are pretty fancy:

The office, which Mr. Cappello said cost $300,000 to $350,000, holds three dozen antique chess sets, several hundred globes, 1,800 handmade canes from around the world and thousands of antique books. The paneling came from a castle in the south of France, and the Empire-period fireplace, he said, was built for one of Napoleon’s residences. A billiard table from 1849 and a large partners’ desk anchor opposite ends of the room, and 19th-century military and animal paintings adorn the walls, along with two big plasma screens, “for watching football games with my buddies,” he said.

Most would content themselves with far less luxury than that, but having a well-appointed, well-organized home office sure makes working at home easier and more pleasant.

What if you don’t have a dedicated workspace at home? You can make do.

Related

• Six Things to Make Your Office Productive and Peaceful
• You Can Work from Home: A Free No-Nonsense Guide
• Tip of the Week: You Don’t Need a Separate Home Office