While it isn’t unusual for a web worker to cut out, say, IM or Twitter–something that seems to demand more immediate attention–I took a different approach: I stopped reading my RSS Feeds on Google Reader, the popular online feed reader.

Why did I choose to cut out this activity? The amount of time it was taking me to go through Google Reader kept increasing with a decreasing amount of content I didn’t get from somewhere else–namely my social networks and email. The number of quality links was substantially higher than I was getting through RSS.

I want to be clear: RSS feeds and RSS readers are wonderful tools. I still use an RSS reader for inside-the-firewall information. I will likely return to using Google Reader at some point in the near future, but I will start with a clean slate.

What about you? Have you killed your RSS reader? Have you completely started over? How do you manage the ever-growing number of items in your RSS reader? Let me know in the comments.

If you’re a frequent traveler, i.e. a global nomad, you’ve likely got a set of tools–both hardware and software–that you use when you travel. If you’re relatively new to the whole travel game (you do it infrequently, or you just want an occasional change-of-pace from working at home or your office) try to practice working remotely–without the expensive plane trip.

What does it mean to “practice?” Go someplace local you don’t normally go and attempt to work as if you were hundreds or thousands of miles away. Depending on whether or not you have a mobile broadband solution, you might need to scout the area first to ensure that there are adequate connectivity options.

To give a personal example, I’ve spent a couple of days a week doing my work at the local YMCA. I had combined a trip with my workouts and my son’s sports clinics, which gave me about an hour and a half of time to attempt to work. While the local YMCA has an open WiFi access point, it is very erratic, working some days, and not others. One day, I worked around this by tethering to one of my mobile phones. Another day, I used an EVDO card that I discovered did not work inside the Y all that well. To get better reception, I’ve gone so far as to work in my car where the EVDO signal was much better.

While all of this trying different ways of working seems like a waste of time, it’s actually very important if you truly want to work anywhere. You never know what ways of working are going to work in a given location until you get there and find out for yourself. Being able to practice your nomadic skills close to your main work location is a low-risk way to ensure you’ll be able to do it for real, when going home is not an option.

Part of that process involves removing the excess stuff from your home to make it appear spacious and inviting to potential buyers. This, unfortunately, includes work-related stuff. For some people, work-related material may be a laptop and some paperwork. For me, however, it’s a good portion of the contents of my office! And that’s just the start of uncertainty.

In addition, once the house is actually listed, I will have to be able to vacate the premises at a moment’s notice so potential buyers can come through the house. I suppose it’s a bit like when you work in a coffee shop and the proprietor shoos you away because you’re using the bandwidth and not buying enough coffee. Except in this case, I will be going to find the coffee shop. Fortunately, there’s a Starbucks nearby and my employer pays for T-Mobile Hotspot access.

This kind of unstable home-working situation is, in most cases, likely to be temporary. That being said, here are a few tips for coping with this situation:

1. Know what you can do in what circumstances. Given that you could be interrupted at any point in time and have to move your work location, understand what in your current workload can be done and be prepared to shift to those things when necessary.
2. Try to work only with tools that can be packed up and ready to go at a moment’s notice. That means using your laptop, cell phones, and other portable devices.
3. Have your laptop bag ready to go at a moment’s notice. Have it pre-packed with the essentials–chargers for your laptop and mobile phone, portable peripherals, a power strip–Monster makes this great travel one–and anything else you might need. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to stuff your laptop in there and be ready to go.
4. Consider taking some time off. It’s likely you’ll need some to actually do the move anyway, but if you can, why not take off a little more?

Have you tried working at home while your house is being sold? What kinds of issues did you run into doing this? Post your thoughts and questions in the comments.

• $0.50/min minimum all charge
• Skype takes 30% of whatever you charge
• You have to wait at least 120 days to get paid.

These usurious rates really limit the potential uses of this, particularly when you consider that most calls are peer-to-peer and they aren’t really doing anything except payment processing. If they drop their cut to, say, 3% (that’s all PayPal charges for credit card processing), drop the minimum call charge limits, and reduce the amount of time it takes to actually get paid, I could see this really taking off in some of the less affluent countries.

Assuming Skype reduces their cut of the action, pays people in a timely manner, and improves the Skype Prime service, there are a few places where Skype Prime could be used to make some money: 1. Skype becomes a way to “pay” for shareware software. Call the author, he “charges” you for the call, he sends you the activation code in Skype and/or file transfer the unlocked version. Now it’d be nice if Skype opened up their API a little more to make it practical to automate this kind of thing. It could become it’s own eCommerce platform for automated software (or license key) delivery. Would fall right into the kinds of things eBay does.

1. Think eBay seller and eBay buyer. Buyer wants a visual confirmation of the item they order, so they call he eBay seller. eBay seller shows them the item “live,” the seller pays “okay, you can pay now thru Skype.” Buyer clicks, and everyone’s paid. No muss, no fuss. This one could be done without Skype Prime, e.g. pay through PayPal, check your email, and get confirmation over the phone of receiving the payment.

2. The usual technical support scenarios by independent consultants. Charge per-incident or per-minute for support. Add something like Webdialogs Untye to the mix for the “let me look over your shoulder” experience.

3. The obvious horoscope/phone sex angles, the top use of 900 numbers. I don’t see the terms of service being a deterrent for anyone setting these kinds of services up. Even if these kinds of services were against the TOS, it would be difficult to enforce them anyway.

4. As part of a video dating service. If you want to hook up with a potential mate, it’s going to cost you. The trick here is that a “third party” would have to control the charging, not to mention some changes would have to be made to ensure anonymity of the participants.

Do you have any clever ways you can think of using Skype Prime to make some money? Post your ideas in the comments.

Thanks to both the efforts of Skype and a series of third party application developers, there are a number of things you can do within Skype that would be insanely useful for Web Workers.

SkypeIn — Be Reached From Anywhere

SkypeIn allows you to purchase a telephone number in 14 different countries. People call this number, hopefully as a local call, and ring through to your Skype. For example, my SkypeIn number is in San Jose, CA although I am in Port Orchard, WA. I could easily have a Finland or UK number if I so choose, either instead of or in addition to.

My one complaint with Skype’s tool to select a number, particularly in the US, is that it is not possible to get more granular than an area code. The 360 area code that I live in covers a huge area, most of which would not be considered a local call in my area. There are plenty of other area codes where this will be an issue. You may have to confirm with the relevant local phone company whether or not a particular number is local or not.

Call Forwarding

If you’re not at your computer when a call comes in, you can have the incoming Skype call forwarded to a PSTN number. This is handy so you don’t miss a call, but does cost you a connection fee plus per-minute charges against your SkypeOut credits for each call.

The handy thing about this feature is that it does not require your computer to be on. If you are not online when an incoming call comes in, the network automatically routes the call. It does allow you to individually control the forwarding on each SkypeIn number, yet receive the calls on one account.

What you have to do is create a second account. Buy a SkypeIn number for that new Skype account (use PayPal, else be prepared with different credit cards for each account). Set up call forwarding on that account to either your Skype account, a PSTN number, or a combination of the two. It does mean loading up multiple accounts with SkypeOut minutes, though, but it is necessary if you want to control forwarding of individual numbers.

Share Your Desktop

One of Skype 3.0’s featured “Extras” is a program called Unyte. It is a desktop sharing program that works in conjunction with Skype. The host machine, currently limited to a Windows PC, can with a few clicks, share a desktop with any PC capable of running Java 1.5 in the browser. The end user clicks a link in the chat session and can see the host desktop. The free version of Unyte allows unlimited 1-to-1 desktop sharing. Many-to-1 desktop sharing (up to 25 users), shared control, annotation, and application sharing are supported in the $30 a year version.

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p align=”left”>Use Skype to Remotely Access Your PC or Mac From a Mobile Phone

Skype itself does not allow you to do this, but a plugin called Soonr does. Soonr is an agent that runs on your PC or Macintosh that, in conjunction with the Skype client, provides you the ability to initiate a Skype call from your mobile handset, IM your Skype contacts, and access specific files and directories on your computer. On the Mac, you can also use Spotlight to find exactly what you are looking for.

The nice thing about Soonr is that you do can use any web browser on a mobile phone to access both Skype functionalty and files on your desktop computer. No special software is needed on the handset, which is a bonus.

If you are interested in only the mobile IM/Skype functionality and don’t care so much for the desktop access, have a look at EQO, which gives you a richer IM and Skype experience. However, it also requires loading software on your handset, thus an Internet-enabled data plan is needed to use EQO.

Nanny Cam

Skype, along with a web cam, can be used to check in at the homestead without anyone actually being there. This requires two Skype accounts and one webcam. On a computer at home, you will set up Skype with a different than normal user and a webcam. Add your normal Skype account to this account’s buddy lust. Then go to the Preferences and set the following settings:

• Privacy > Allow calls from: Only people from my Contacts
• Calls > Incoming Calls: Auto-answer calls
• Video > Camera: Your camera
• Video > Enable Skype Video
• Video > When I am in a call: Start my video automatically
• Video > Automatically receive video from: No one

Now when you want to check out what’s going on at home, fire up your Skype and call your home user. You can see what your webcam sees.

How do you use Skype in Your Web Work?

These are five possible uses of Skype, but let’s hear from you. What are some ways you use Skype in your daily web work? Leave your comments below.

1. Once I’m done with the list, I tend to throw them away.
2. I frequently need more information about the task than I am able to write down on a piece of paper.
3. I am a web person, and I want to be able to access my to do list from anywhere.

There are certainly better tools for this. However, after thinking about it, a blog seems like a perfect tool for this:

1. Blogs tend to keep everything. In chronological order. With categories, depending on the software.
2. Blogs are fairly free-form. You can put as much information as you need. You can also put things like hyperlinks, embed pictures, and even YouTube videos (depending on the blog software you use).
3. Blogs can be accessed from anywhere.

The nice thing about using blogs is that they are free. There are a number of different places that offer free blogs. Two places I recommend are wordpress.com and Vox. The main reason I recommend these two is that they both have a very critical feature for maintaining a To-Do list: They support the concept of private posts. That is important assuming you don’t want to let everyone else know what you need to do. Of course, you may use an existing blog for this purpose as well so long as it has the ability to mark posts as private so that only you can see them.

Once you have an appropriate blog ready to go, start a new post and type in your To-Do list however you want. You can make it as pretty as you want. Or you can just type in freeform lines like I do. Do it how you’d like. Just make sure when you save it that, you mark the post private if you don’t want the world to see.

On WordPress blogs, when editing your post, go down to Post Status and set it to Private. On Vox, when editing the post, go down to the “On my Vox blog” section and set “Viewable by” to “you (draft).”

Once you’ve got your list, you can go back and edit it (for example, to cross-off items on the list), delete items (if you want), or simply copy the list and create a new To-Do list for the next day.

To view the To-Do list from anywhere, simply access the blog’s URL from whatever web browser you have available. If you marked the To-Do list as private, then you will need to log into the site in order to see your To-Do lists.

This is one way to handle a To-Do list. There may be better purpose-built tooks for the task, but this works for me at least. Share your thoughts about this or other ways you manage your To-Do lists in the comments section below.

As someone who has telecommuted full time for almost a decade, I can say that my career has probably been “stunted” as a result of telecommuting. There are certain opportunities I missed out on or were simply not available to me as a result of not being in the office full time. I have also missed out on a lot of distractions as a result, such as office politics.

There is this “myth” that one has to “advance” in their career. What does that mean, really? For a lot of people, it means moving from an individual contributor to a manager and then on up the the management chain. Telecommuting does make it more difficult to jump into management. Unless, of course, you are managing remote people, which is even more difficult than managing local people.

There are plenty of reasons one might want to telecommute. All of the reasons ultimately boil down to wanting to improve work-life balance. Advancing your carrer seems to go against the grain of improving work-life balance. That isn’t to say you can’t advance as a telecommuter, but it does present an additional barrier to overcome.

For me, personally, what matters isn’t the upward mobility, but the lateral mobility, i.e. the ability to change tasks. It’s not about really about “advancing,” it’s about continuing to do something I am excited about doing. Whether I am low man on the totem pole or the CEO, I really don’t care as long as I enjoy my job and I make enough money to pay the bills.

Do you telecommute? How has telecommuting affected your career, good or bad? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Assuming you don’t flee for a location with power and heat, your only realistic option is to get a generator. A number of companies make them and they come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They run on gas, diesel, or natural gas. Depending on how much stuff you want to run during a power outage, you could be looking at anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars.  The more watts the generator generates, the more expensive it is. You will need to add up the wattage rating of every lightbulb, appliance, and other device you will run in order to determine the right size of generator.

Your generator should be on a flat surface in a well-ventilated area outside your home and/or garage. You can either run an extension cord from your generator into your house to power the few things you want powered or you can hook the generator into your electrical system. This will require special wiring and you should consult a local electrician for assistance with this. If your generator requires natural gas, you will also need a hook up into your natural gas supply.

Even if you have a source of power during an outage, you may still have phone and Internet access problems. My phone service with Qwest was spotty due to the fact the pair gain to the central office was being kept alive by a generator truck parked in the neighborhood. DSL was unavailable as the remote terminal was not getting power. Several mobile phone towers were damaged during the storm, making both data and voice services weaker and less reliable. I didn’t try the cable modem service during the power outage, but it too could have very well been out.

Even if you have the means to continue working under less than ideal conditions, should you? No work is that important that you have to jeopardize your safety to get it done. Your safety is your top priority. Most people will forgive you if you miss a deadline or can’t make an appointment as a result of an act of nature.

Many web workers are nomadic in nature. If working conditions at a particular place aren’t conducive to working, just go find somewhere else to work. However, that’s not always desirable–or even practical.

One situation that comes up frequently, especially here in the Pacific Northwest during the winter, is the loss of power. Depending on when the power outage occurs and what you have to get done, you can either call it a day or suck it up and get to work. Yes, it’s quite possible to get web work done in a power outage–if you have the right stuff beforehand. There are four basic requirements for spending the day working without AC power:

1. Some kind of phone, be it a corded landline or mobile phone. Both are preferable.
2. A laptop (or multiple laptops) with spare batteries.
3. Some form of Internet connectivity.
4. Non-perishable food you can get to without opening your fridge.

A phone seems like a given for any web worker, but it’s especially important in a power outage. Given how popular cordless phones are these days, you should always keep a hard-wired handset along with your other emergency supplies. If you’re landline free, or even if you’re not, make sure you have a mobile phone with a fully charged battery. I actually keep several charged at all times for this exact reason.

A laptop also seems like a given for most web workers. What might not be obvious is the need for extra batteries. Most laptops only last a couple of hours on a full charge. Extra batteries give you extra runtime in a power outage. And when that fails, there’s always extra laptops. I happen to have a number of laptops at my house that I use for various work-related tasks and they come in handy during a power outage. I am able to access the majority of the tools I need to work from any computer, so moving from one computer to the next is not terribly difficult.

Of course, a phone and a laptop means little if you have no way to get online. Fortunately, I just received a Verizon EVDO card from work. Prior to the power outage, I tested the EVDO card to ensure that it would work from my house. Sure, I get occasional dropouts and the speed and latency varies a bit, but it works well enough that I can get stuff done.

In the US, Verizon, Sprint, and Cingular all offer wireless broadband services. They aren’t available everywhere, so do your homework and figure out which card will work best for you. Outside of the major metros, you may have to settle for dialup speeds either using an analog modem or tethering your computer to a mobile phone. Again, test all this stuff out before you need it.

You can replace a phone, laptop, and Internet connectivity with a higher-end smart phones. They frequently include support for email and web browsing and utilize some sort of high-speed data network. I won’t cover specific models here, but rest assured that several smart phones have been reviewed on Web Worker Daily. While the form factor of some of these devices can be a bit awkward to deal with, in a pinch, they frequently can get the job done. Like laptops, phones that use data services will drain their batteries quickly. Keeping an extra battery charged for this phone is a good thing.

And finally, you need to eat. It’s difficult to get any work done under any conditions if your basic needs aren’t being met. Make sure you have non-perishable items that are readily accessible. Last thing you want to do is open your fridge several times, causing the little bit of cold air to get let out. You don’t want that perishable stuff to go bad, do you?

Obviously, being able to work without power is not for everyone. It’s not practical for some jobs or some locations. It’s also not exactly cheap to prepare for this situation, either. However, with the right resources and preparation, it can be done.