Twitter followers have become the status symbol of 2009, but how valuable are they, really? I think we’re placing too much importance on the numbers and paying far too little attention to the actual reasons why followers can be valuable to us.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t want to have a lot of followers. I’m saying that you don’t want to have a lot of the wrong followers. There is nothing to be gained by accumulating “empty” followers. Why? Because they are not listening to you! Your core followers — those you who actually listen to you and interact with you — are the real value of Twitter, and that’s why you should never, ever automate your Twitter account to increase follower count. Read the rest of this entry »
A friend of mine told me today that he just can’t work from home. He simply cannot do it. This guy enjoys his work, he likes his team, he’s great at what he does, and he feels a sense of responsibility to his employer. It made me wonder: What makes him incapable of working from home, when others have no problem at all? What is it that we remote workers have, that others don’t?
1. Discipline
You knew this was going to be first up, and it’s probably the single biggest factor in remote working success. Discipline isn’t just about staying focused when it’s a nice day outside and no one really knows what you’re doing. It’s also about keeping reasonable and appropriate working hours, and keeping commitments outside of work as well as within. Generally, I think of discipline as the thing that lets you hold up your end of the deal you made with your employer, as well as the one you made with yourself.
I tend to think of my time as being fairly compartmentalized: When it’s work time, I do work, and that’s pretty much all I do and think about. And though I do sometimes think about work outside designated hours, I never actually look at work-related stuff in my downtime. It’s a sort of knack I’ve developed. Being able to become absorbed by work can be very handy for the remote worker — so long as you can snap out of it at knock-off time. 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 »
Editor’s note: With this post we wecome Doriano Carta to the WWD team. Doriano, better known as “Paisano” on Twitter and everywhere else online, has written for several blogs including Mashable, SarahLacy.com, PistachioConsulting and Chris Brogan’s Dadomatic.com where he is also the Editor-in-Chief.
How much are you willing to pay for your favorite web apps and services? That’s the key question to which every app developer wants an answer. It seems as if the provider of every once-free service is now pondering ways to make money and extract revenue from their members, which makes sense when you consider that they are, after all, businesses.
Remember that old adage, you get what you pay for? Will we continue to see more of our favorite free services following this model of offering stripped down freemium accounts along with feature-rich premium plans? Will online advertising ever allow these sites to generate enough revenue to avoid going this route?
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: box.net, dropbox, evernote, flickr, free, hulu, jott, paid, Services, subscription, twitter
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It seems so alluring — you, your computer, your home office, and all the silence/Bach/Led Zeppelin you can handle. A potted palm! A lava lamp! This is the home office ideal, right? Right.
But what happens when you put someone else in the picture? What if, right next to the potted palm in your home office, your partner or work-from-home housemate materialized?
With more and more people working remotely at least some of the time, this is a very real question that many of us face. What should you consider if you’re about to embark on a multi-person home workplace?
There are definitely pros as well as cons. First up, let’s look at the cons. These are the main sticking points I’ve encountered when working from home with another in close proximity. Read the rest of this entry »
We freelance web workers multitask like it was going out of style. Question is, is it actually going out of style? Some people think so, and they look to singletasking as the next trend in how we work.
Singletasking is just what it sounds like: approaching and tackling one task at a time, sequentially, instead of trying to do a whole bunch of things at once, as has become de rigeur in our modern multitasking age. If you’re like me, the thought is probably at least a little refreshing, and maybe more than a little appealing right off the bat.
The principle is sound. Take on one task at a time, and don’t begin another until the one you’ve already started is complete. It sounds simple, but you know as well as I do that actually implementing that kind of thing in real life will take a lot more effort than you might first think. For one, it means ignoring any urge to procrastinate, and making sure that you prioritize very carefully in advance, lest you realize too late that what you thought was most urgent actually could’ve taken a back seat to something else. Read the rest of this entry »
In college, and grad school, I mostly hung with a crowd in which everybody shared the same interests, hobbies and field of study. I know that a lot of college faculties are beginning to move towards a more interdisciplinary approach, because it more accurately reflects what students can expect their post-school life to be like. College professors tend to be somewhat protective of their disciplines, however, so progress is moving faster in some areas and at some schools than others. The result is that a lot of people in the workforce have a pretty narrow view of what the word “colleague” means. It’s important to broaden that definition and cultivate relationships with people in other fields. Here’s why.
Who Do You Consider a Colleague?
Especially for freelance web workers, defining a “colleague” can be a complicated matter. Is your stakeholder a colleague? How about the project sponsor for the contract you’re working on? More likely, you consider people doing similar work in similar fields to you colleagues, over and above people that you work with directly, who are responsible for entirely different aspects of a given project. Read the rest of this entry »
Many of us have left the world of cubicles behind as our jobs increasingly move into the online realm, where physical presence becomes just an occasional part of our work lives rather than a daily grind of commuting in traffic and cubicle dwelling for 40 hours a week. I see more and more people joining the remote web worker ranks every day, and I’m not the only one seeing this trend. According to Seth Godin in a recent TIME article, “The Last Days of Cubicle Life“:
“Most of the best jobs will be for people who manage customers, who organize fans, who do digital community management. We’ll continue to need brilliant designers, energetic brainstormers and rigorous lab technicians. More and more, though, the need to actually show up at an office that consists of an anonymous hallway and a farm of cubicles or closed doors is just going to fade away. It’s too expensive, and it’s too slow.”
Photo by Ste3ve
Godin also points out that this will be a stressful time as many people struggle to find essential, valuable work that is less likely to be outsourced to other locations. This isn’t really a new feature of the work landscape. Peter Drucker was talking about the focus on knowledge workers from the 1950s, and outsourcing has also been a concern for many years.
While outsourcing isn’t new, the rapid increase in the number of remote workers is. According to WorldatWork, “the number of employee telecommuters in the U.S. increased 39 percent, from 12.4 million in 2006 to 17.2 million in 2008.” Businesses are actively seeking to embrace remote working as it lowers overheads — see Simon’s post on GigaOM Pro, “Enabling the Web Working Revolution” (subscription required). Anecdotally, I seem to see more and more people working remotely from home offices and coffee shops.
What does all of this mean for us? As a culture in the U.S., we have moved away from a traditional worker mindset where 9-to-5 office jobs were intended to last for decades and many aspects of our lives were tied up with our employer (pensions, health insurance, etc.). Now we need to embrace a freelancer mindset, with a focus on the work rather than the employer. This puts many additional burdens on the worker: health care and retirement, for example. Work may last only days, weeks or months, rather than years, and we need to be able to demonstrate our value regardless of whether we are working remotely or in a cubicle. We need to be flexible and ready to embrace new jobs, new work, new technologies and new business models at any time.
I always try to keep an eye on the future by looking for new opportunities and clients. I also make sure that I’m keeping my skills fresh by learning about new technologies and continuing to tweak the services that I offer for clients as the business environment changes.
What do you do to prepare for changes in your work life?
