WebWorkerDaily » Mike Gunderloy

Build Your Own Planner

Mike Gunderloy — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:00:00 +0000

We’ve discussed the attraction of using paper planners in the past. Even though web workers have access to all sorts of cool to-do list and other planning applications on the web, there are times when getting everything down on paper is the best way to keep track of your day, especially when you’re mobile. Plus (might as well admit it) some of us still have a soft spot in our hearts for the classic Day-Timer and the like.

If you’re in the mood to try paper, one site well worth a visit is D*I*Y Planner. Started by Douglas Johnston and continued by a passionate community of paper-lovers, this is a great source for downloadable templates (in a variety of formats including PDF), all under a Creative Commons license that lets you use them as much as you want.

The D*I*Y Planner site contains a good variety of templates in various sizes, from “hipster PDA” on up to full-sheet. The v3.0 Core Package, for example, has 87 different templates you can print, from personal information to calendars to project brainstorming to trip diary to shopping list and beyond. And if the Core Package doesn’t satisfy you, there are dozens of other templates contributed by users of the site.

Couple these templates with some decent cardstock, a good paper cutter, and a binder (or a binder clip), and you’ve got your own perfect, customizable paper planner. The only drawback is that the site is currently quite slow to serve pages. Fortunately, once you get the downloads you want, this is a one-time cost.

Setting Your Rates: Another Approach

Mike Gunderloy — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:00:00 +0000

We’ve given some advice for setting freelance hourly rates before, including a rough rule of thumb for those leaving more traditional employment (multiple your hourly pay as an employee by 2.5 to 3.0). But a new blog post from Pat Allan offers another way to think about this, and one worth running through if you’re new to freelancing.

There are basically three variables to juggle: your total income for the year, the number of hours you’re going to work, and your hourly rate. If you know what any two of them are, you can figure out the third. So, if the goal is to come up with an hourly rate, you need to determine your target total income and work hours.

Start with your target income. A good starting point (if you’re considering leaving full-time work) is your current annual salary – but that’s not the end of the story. If you want to stay on an economic even keel, you need to add in all of the expenses that your employer currently covers. This might include:

Employer share of taxes

Employer contributions to requirement

Conference registration and travel

Training courses

Medical insurance contributions

Paying lawyers and accountants

Basically, if you become your own employer, you’re responsible for paying for “fringe benefits” (or doing without). You might find that you need to bring in $90,000 per year to have the equivalent of a $60,000 salary.

Now think about how many hours per year you’re going to work. 52 x 40 – That’s 2080 hours, right? Not by a long stretch. Consider:

Time off for vacation and holidays

Time spent attending conferences

Time spent looking for work instead of working

Lunch breaks

Time doing estimates or spec work

A more realistic estimate is probably 40 working weeks per year (if you’re lucky finding work your first year!) and 6 hours per day. If you’re taking weekends off, that means 6 x 5 x 40 = 1200 working hours per year. Do the math, and in this simple example you’d need to set your freelance rate at $75 per hour to match your current salary.

That’s not the end of the story, of course – you need to think about what terms you’re going to bill people on and what the market will bear, among other factors – but it’s a good way to sanity check any plans you have to go freelance.

Open Thread: What’s Your New Year’s Resolution?

Mike Gunderloy — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:00:00 +0000

I’m planning to have a good 2009 – and this is going to be the year that I actually plan that. I’ve managed to muddle through the past couple of years of web working without any major plans, but like many of you, the economy has me worried. So I’ve set myself some quarterly goals of how I want my business to be doing – in terms of income stream and diversification – and my main resolution is to actually keep those goals in front of me and work towards them.

There’s plenty of debate about how useful resolutions are, or whether there’s some more productive way to spend the last or first day of the year. But they’re certainly traditional, and this is a good time to take stock. According to myGoals.com, you can increase you chances of following through by having a written plan – so why not share the resolution with the rest of us, as a first step towards writing it down?

2009 is the year you resolve to …

Ending the Year Right

Mike Gunderloy — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:00:00 +0000

2008 is almost gone, and for most of us, this is a slack week at work – whether we’re self-employed or working for someone else (you may even be on voluntary or enforced vacation in the latter case). Traditionally, that makes it a good time for reflection, as well as catching up on some things you’ve just been too busy to do in recent months. Here are some suggestions as to what you should do this week:

1. Call your accountant. While some things (like HSA contributions) can be done after January 1, there are some serious tax deadlines at midnight on Wednesday. If you’re self-employed or have a complex tax situation, this may be your last chance to make course corrections that will affect your tax bill in April.

2. Back up your data. Of course, you should be backing up your data regularly. But this is a good time to evaluate and, if necessary, fine-tune your backup strategy. Are you backing up everything that counts (what about all that stuff on your fancy-schmancy phone)? Are you taking the most critical backups offsite? Do you know how you’d restore your data in case of disaster?

3. Change your passwords. How’s your password management strategy? Are you still using the same password everywhere, instead of using a password manager? How many people know that password? This is a good time to work through switching to new, strong passwords on the most critical services that you use.

4. Reflect. Did you get everything done that you wanted to this year, personally and professionally? What are your goals for 2009? If you enter the new year with a concrete plan, you raise your chances of success.

What about you? What are you doing to end the year and start the new one on the right foot?

Blogo 1.2 Adds New Options

Mike Gunderloy — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 19:00:00 +0000

A while back we looked at Blogo, a unified blogging and microblogging client. Now they’ve put out version 1.2, which extends Blogo to support new targets and adds some useful options as well. If you’re an OS X user who posts online frequently, it’s worth a look.

One of the big wins for those who really want to fine-tune their blog entries is the addition of an HTML source view to the already-strong visual editor. Combined with the ability to download your blog’s actual template for previews, this makes it possible to have a very good idea of what posts will look like before they’re uploaded. If you’re a WordPress user, you’ll also be happy to see the support for the new comments API.

The built-in microblog viewer sports some polish, such as automatic posting of images to Twitpic and integration with Twitter search. It’s also integrated with ping.fm now, which means you can use Blogo to post to many more microblogs beyond Twitter.

All in all, the new version is a nice holiday upgrade. Purchase price remains $25 with a three-week free trial.

Evernote Adds Universal Sync

Mike Gunderloy — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:00:00 +0000

We’ve looked at note organizer Evernote before, and liked what we saw. Th combination of desktop and web clients, text recognition, and the promise of universal information availability, make it very useful as a general-purpose place to store, well, everything. A new feature, introduced just in time for Christmas, makes it even more useful: universal file synchronization.

Evernote already synchronized copies of its own notes across as many installations as you cared to have – Windows, Web, Mac, or mobile. But attachment synchronization was limited to a few file types that it natively understands, such as images and audio. Now, you can attach any file you like to a note, and have that file transported to every installation, as well as available through the web interface.Attached documents can be edited directly from Evernote, and changes will be synched back to all of your copies (with warnings of conflicting changes). The new feature is available only to Evernote Premium subscribers, who pay $5 per month or $45 per year for the privilege. But if you’re already using some other utility to share files between your various computers, it’s worth looking at whether you can make Evernote both your note-taking and your sharing application.

Using Twitter for Distributed Fundraising

Mike Gunderloy — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:00:00 +0000

There’s been a lot of talk about what Twitter’s own monetization model will turn out to be – even though Twitter itself has been mum on the subject beyond saying that they do have a plan. But meanwhile, some of the communities on Twitter have taken matters into their own hands, and proven that money can flow into good causes based on the social capital that Twitter users build up in just chatting with one another. Whatever else you say about Twitter, it does seem to be bringing out the best in people and opening their wallets.

The most recent of these campaigns that I’ve run across is Well Wishes, an effort by prominent Twitter user Laura “Pistachio” Fitton to raise $25,000 for Charity: Water, two bucks at a time. She’s lined up some matching donations and hooked up with Tipjoy to handle micropayments; if you’re on Twitter, you can get involved simply by tweeting. So far, Well Wishes has raised thousands of dollars in this way.

Nor is this the only success story. Nonprofit consultant Beth Kanter has looked at a number of fundraising efforts on Twitter, from gathering money for heart surgery in India to motivating people to donate blood to raising over $10,000 for a classroom in Tanzania. She brings out a number of valuable lessons, from the need to have a human theme to how to best leverage multiple channels of motivation.

At least two services – Tipjoy and Twitpay (which we wrote about last month) are working on making it easy to collect and aggregate micropayments via Twitter. There’s still a bit too much friction to make things really easy (Twitter could do much more if they’d bring this functionality in-house), but the building blocks are there to run a successful on-line giving campaign.

It seems clear that the increasing rise of person-to-person connectivity is enabling some new models of how things can be done, from fundraising to publicity campaigns. Even if you’re not actively involved in raising money for a good cause, you should be asking yourself how your own web work could benefit from access to a huge network of potentially-motivated people.

Burden Butcher Offers Project Management for Freelancers

Mike Gunderloy — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:00:00 +0000

There are a large number of project management applications and service out there; we’ve looked at many of them in the past. Most of them are explicitly directed at coordinating a team working on projects for a client, and are a poor fit for a single freelancer working alone. That’s the market that Burden Butcher hopes to tap into, with a project management tool explicitly for freelancers.

After creating your account, you’ll be sitting at the Projects list. Creating a new project is streamlined: supply a name, a rate, a client, and optionally a deadline, and you’re ready to go. Choosing a project to work on is simple, as it should be. Each project contains four tabs in a web interface: Canvases, Milestones & Tasks, Time Tracking, and Invoice.

Canvases are similar to wiki pages or writeboard – a place where you can keep relatively unstructured information. You can insert notes, lists, pictures, files, or code snippets and move them around. Canvases can also be shared, either publicly or with a password – a good way to get some information where your clients can see it.

The Milestone & Tasks tab provides a simple checklist of what remains to be done, and ties into the Time Tracking tab by having timers for each task. You can also enter time directly. When you’re done, you can generate an invoice in PDF format with a single click (or customize it by adding additional line items).

Focusing explicitly on the single-user case lets Burden Butcher dispose of a lot of complexity; you won’t find user management here or security beyond password-protecting canvases. This should leave them free to concentrate on adding more features just for freelancers. So far, it’s a good start, and you can get a trial account (3 projects, 25MB storage) for free. Other accounts, adding more projects and storage, range from $12 to $48 per month.

Open Thread: Taking Stock

Mike Gunderloy — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:00:00 +0000

The end of the calendar year is fast approaching, the days are short, and it seems a natural time to look back – and forward. As a web worker, I try to take stock of how I’m doing at least once a year, and think about what I might want to change in the upcoming year.

One useful framework for this is to ask yourself four simple questions:

What’s your service?
Who do you sell to?
What are your opportunities?
What are your challenges?

How you answer these questions goes a long way towards whether you’ll succeed or fail as a web worker. Too narrow a conception, and you won’t find a market; too broad and you may have trouble convincing anyone you’re worth hiring. For me, as the end of 2008 approaches, the answers come out something like this:

My service is providing web applications in a cost-effective manner.
I sell to businesses who appreciate an agile approach and a consultant who understands business as well as code issues.
The big opportunities right now are in rescuing projects in trouble and training teams to meet their potential.
The biggest challenge I face is connecting with clients who need the more abstract services, as opposed to just needing more code.

For me, the end of the year assessment makes it clear that there’s a bit of mismatch between the services I’m actually providing and the places I see opportunities. Fortunately, I’m already working on ideas to correct that in the new year. How about you? Want to contribute your own summary of the year past and your web work looking forward?

BubbleTimer: New Take on Time Tracking

Mike Gunderloy — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:00:00 +0000

There are plenty of time-tracking applications out there; we’ve reviewed more than a few over the years. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no innovation left in the field. Case in point: BubbleTimer, which wants to make tracking your time into an effective time-management tool rather than focusing solely on billable hours.

There are a couple of key features involved in this makeover. First is the utter simplicity of the product: if you ever did those “fill in the bubble with a No. 2 pencil” tests in school, you can use the BubbleTimer timesheet (and without getting graphite dust on your fingers, too). After you set up your activities, you just click to record time in 15-minute intervals.

The second useful thing here is goal tracking. For any activity, you can set a desired maximum or minimum time as a daily goal: “I want to watch TV no more than 90 minutes each day” or “I should be working on the squidbot project at least five hours a day.” As you bubble in your time, the system tracks how you’re doing on these goals; easy popup graphs give you a daily and weekly report on your progress (or lack of it).

You can also print out a more traditional tracking report if you want to use BubbleTimer to track, say, billable hours. But I suspect the product will be less used by those who want to track time back to clients (we mostly already have some solution in place) and more by those who want a watchdog on lifestyle change efforts. To make that even more effective, you can share selected times with others: imagine having your best friend able to see how long you spent watching anime every day.

BubbleTimer is free to try for up to 14 days, and $20 per year after that.

Friday Fun: Gmail Stickers

Mike Gunderloy — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:00:00 +0000

If you’re like most web workers, Google is pretty pervasive in your online life. But how about your physical life – you know, the one full of atoms rather than bits? Well, if you’d like a little bit of Google to stick on your laptop or keyboard, the Gmail team has a deal for you. Just send a stamp (or an IRC, if you’re out of the country) to

Send me some Gmail stickers already
P.O. Box 391420
Mountain View, CA 94039-1420

And you’ll get back a set of vinyl stickers, including a glittery Gmail icon and (probably more useful) a sheet of keyboard stickers showing the various Gmail shortcuts. Who knows how long supplies last, but if you want a stocking stuffer for a geek in your life, go for it.

.tel – Should You Care?

Mike Gunderloy — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:00:00 +0000

Remember the good old days when all you had to worry about was .com? (Well, and .org, .net, and .edu for special cases). Long gone, of course. Today a new top-level domain, .tel, is opening up for sale. The launch is being run by Telnic, though you should be able to buy .tel domains through a variety of registrars.

The twist on .tel is that it’s designed to store information directly in DNS records, rather than being hooked up to a web site. You can see how this works in their simulator; the basic idea is that you store information like your address and your IM contacts right in the DNS record, and anyone can do a lookup on your .tel domain to find them. With specialized applications, this information can be pulled right into your address book.

Today is the opening of the “Sunrise” launch period, when companies with trademarks can pay $400 to lock up their .tel address. In February we’ll have the “Landrush” launch, open to all but at a premium price of $150 per year, followed by general availability in March at about $20 per year.

Is it worth thinking about a .tel domain name for your web working efforts? Right now, I would say no. There’s a distinct chicken-and-egg problem here: having a .tel directory listing will only be useful in proportion to the number of people with specialized software to use it, and there’s not much incentive to install and use the software unless .tel gets pervasive. At the moment, Telnic has applications available for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Outlook, and iPhone in beta. I’ll revisit .tel in late March to see how the early sales have gone, but for now, I’m not spending my money with them.

Time to Think Twice About Free

Mike Gunderloy — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:00:00 +0000

As we covered last week, free services I Want Sandy and Stikkit are closing shortly, joining a growing list of Web 2.0 free-to-consumer startups that have shuttered their sites. It’s not just the little guys that are going out of business, either: Google Lively is set to become the latest failed experiment from the search behemoth later this year.

While just a few data points don’t make up a trend, it does seem likely that we haven’t seen the last closures. Services start up in a burst of optimism, then hit the cold hard wall of needing to pay for servers and bandwidth. The tightening of venture capital and the decline of online advertising have been covered elsewhere: other factors that will make it tough for free eternal-beta Web 2.0 startups to stay in business. But how is the savvy web worker to cope?

It’s clear that “free” doesn’t actually mean “free” when you put it into a larger context of web work. Choosing to use an online service for part of your business workflow carries with it opportunity costs and risk costs. Rather than rushing to put your entire business online, consider these guidelines:

1. Prefer in-house servers for mission-critical applications. Yes, it’s nice to be able to sit down in a cybercafe with instant access to all of your work – until the day when some of it is just missing in action thanks to factors beyond your control. As a software developer, for example, I’m not willing to place client code on a free source control server in the cloud, even though there are several excellent ones out there. Instead, I run my own server, and can access it remotely if I need to. There are tradeoffs, of course, but for this particular data I am willing to assume the administrative costs to eliminate the dangers of free.

2. Prefer portable data. If you do have data that you’re willing to host with a free service, then one of the best things you can do is ensure that you’re not locked in to that particular service in case things change. This implies that you should have easy access to all of your data in some standard format (XML or CSV, for example) in case you ever want to pick up and leave. Beware of services that have no export capabilities or that only let you save data in their own proprietary formats.

3. Prefer backed-up services. All the data portability in the world does you no good if you don’t have the data when you need it. I Want Sandy and Stikkit are doing the right thing and giving a few weeks of warning, but what if you end up on a service that shuts down overnight? We’ve mainly been concerned with backing up desktops into the cloud over the past few years, but I’m increasingly convinced that backing up the cloud to local storage is the sensible thing to do. I expect this to become a key differentiator in the next round of services.

In the current software and economic environment, I’m re-evaluating my dependence on free services, and pulling some things back to less trendy but more reliable client-side applications. How about you?

Tactile CRM Releases Version 2

Mike Gunderloy — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:00:56 +0000

We’re written about Tactile CRM a couple of times in the past – they’re an excellent choice in the starter CRM market, for people who need some sort of customer relations management product but who don’t want to be overwhelmed by complexity. Now they’re released version 2 of the application, adding new features while still staying easy to use.

The new version concentrates on adding pervasive support for tagging, but there are some other changes too. Merging contacts and leads together will further simplify things, and increasing the limits on some of their plans is a welcome move. If you sign up for a free trial account with the code WWD, they’ll enter you in a drawing for a free year’s subscription as well.

Outsourcing Sites: Threat or Opportunity?

Mike Gunderloy — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:00:00 +0000

We’ve looked at freelance outsourcing and crowdsourcing sites in the past – places like 99 Designs for graphics work or Elance for programming and other fields. Generally speaking, it seems that most web workers in our audience view these sites as a threat, encouraging rate cutting and spec work (depending on the site).

But it seems unlikely that the trend of global outsourcing is going to go away any time soon, or that sites which enable it will go out of business. As a result, it’s probably smart for web workers to learn what’s out there, and to figure out how to deal with it. A pair of recent columns from Dan Appleman survey the programming side of this trend. Appleman’s conclusion flies in the face of the accepted wisdom: though he sees the greatest benefit to businesses, he adds “but U.S. workers who are smart, professional and keep their eyes open can find good opportunities as well.”

Appleman’s keys to potential success: understand what you’re bidding on, learn how the system works, be realistic with our pricing, and be patient.

Of course, there are other ways to deal with global outsourcing besides being part of it. Savvy web workers can continue to work on differentiating themselves on skills from the vast global labor pool, and also on marketing those skills. It’s also worth thinking about whether there’s money to be made in being a middleman: taking a job at high rates and farming some of it out to distant freelancers at lower rates, becoming a global project manager.

Open Thread: Web Worker Thanksgiving

Mike Gunderloy — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 19:00:00 +0000

The annual Thanksgiving holiday in the US is coming up next week – and a lot of web workers are preparing to take some downtime away from their computers as a result. Before you go, though, why not take a few minutes to participate in our annual thread of thanks?

There’s been a lot of doom and gloom recently in the news, but for at least some of us, web working remains a bright spot in the landscape. I’m certainly thankful that my own work allows me to skip the daily commute (and not even venture outside on days when the weather is below freezing), and that I have the chance to work with interesting people worldwide on a daily basis.

What about you? What makes you thankful about web work? Share your highlights in the comments!