Not all teleworkers are lucky enough to have a large house. This means that designated office space will be limited. In fact, many teleworkers I know work from a partitioned corner of their kitchen or living room. If you’re in a similar situation, planning your home office can be a challenge. What can you do to have an efficient workspace in a small area?
Spend time planning your space. It’s best to make a visual plan so that each square foot is accounted for. Doing this saves more time and effort over moving furniture around on the spot.
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From time to time, a lone teleworker finds herself working with a team. This could be at the request of the client, or simply because a certain project demands it. In these cases, a strong team dynamic is needed to make the project a success. The ideal team would be highly skilled, efficient, and have complementary working styles. But what are the odds of that? Team members might even have contradictory work processes. At the worst, you might be the only one who is meeting deadlines and sticking to your assigned tasks. What do you do to encourage the same or better efficiency in the other members of your team?
Spend some time discussing the tools and process. Before you get to work, be sure to lay out the process as well as the tools that you will be using. This sets up everyone’s expectations from the outset. Without this discussion, your team might have different ideas about how to tackle the collaborative process. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m a compulsive digital fiddler.
Not often, but it happens. Sometimes I get so intimidated by work that I end up procrastinating online. I started my workday at 6 a.m. last Monday hoping to get the week off to a good start, but I found myself reading a Wikipedia entry on the many versions of “Blade Runner” three hours later.
While these incidents are few and far between, I’d rather avoid them altogether. Every time I catch myself returning to bad habits, I take the following steps to get right back on the wagon: Read the rest of this entry »
Every time I apply for a new job, I’m always excited to start working. Despite this, some prospects don’t always seem to share my enthusiasm. They might seem uninterested and may stall negotiations or contract signing. How can you tell if a prospect isn’t serious about working with you, and what should you do about it?
It’s been a week since their last email. After seeing your web site, some leads will contact you asking for more information, a project quote, or links to your portfolio. But after you give them what they need, you might not hear from them for a few days. Then, before you know it, more than a week has gone by and they still haven’t contacted you. Read the rest of this entry »
Last Wednesday I woke up to find that my Internet connection wasn’t working. While I have an alternative 3G connection, I get charged by the half-hour so a consistent connection that way wasn’t an option. Working with only occasional Internet access was extremely frustrating at first, and it made me realize how dependent I am on the web.
However, after the initial adjustment, I found that I was actually more productive when I wasn’t connected to the Internet. This happens every time my connection goes out, which is more often than I’d like. If this is the case, maybe I should consciously disconnect myself from time to time? Especially since many other bloggers have recommended it. Read the rest of this entry »
Whenever I use social media tools, I find myself communicating in two languages: English and Tagalog. I use the former to talk to international contacts, and the latter for local contacts. It’s not a strict rule, since I prefer to use English, but there are some cases where sending updates in Tagalog is preferable or unavoidable.
For bilingual web workers, social networking can be a juggling act. How can we interact in one language without alienating part of our audience? Read the rest of this entry »
One of the advantages of working from home is the flexible schedule. No matter how many things you need to accomplish, or how many simultaneous projects you have, you can still control when you can perform certain tasks, as well as how long they take. While this is more true of freelancing than it is for employees, it’s this schedule flexibility that makes the prospect of teleworking more attractive.
Whether it’s a do-it-yourself renovation of your home office, a one-month trip, or participating in NaNoWriMo, there’s always the big, personal project that you’re trying to fit in your schedule. How do you make sure that it won’t have much of a negative impact on your work? Read the rest of this entry »
For one of my new projects, I had to sign up for GetResponse, an email marketing service. Since I had to get a subscription anyway, I wondered if there was a way I could use the app to improve my freelance practice. Email newsletters are often used for product promotion, so why not use it to market my services?
While it might seem to be too late for me to hop on the email marketing bandwagon, I see very few options that offer the same effectiveness for reaching my customers, particularly with my client base. Many of my clients aren’t tech savvy, which means they don’t have social-networking accounts, so I can’t contact them using Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Also, I doubt that many of them return to my web site after we’ve started working together.
In order to maximize the effectiveness of my email marketing campaign, I had to plan what kind of messages I would send to my customers. Here’s what I came up with: Read the rest of this entry »
