In an effort to curtail my disastrous gadget spending habits, I’ve decided to take a look at devices I’ve purchased with the stated intent of increasing my productivity, to see if intentions and reality reflect each other at all. Today, I’m turning my critical gaze on my netbook, which I picked up just over half a year ago.

My particular netbook is the Asus Eee PC 1000HE, but the model doesn’t really matter. It’s a light device with a 10-inch screen, a small keyboard and an all-day eight hour battery. When I bought it, it was freshly released, and was generating quite a bit of buzz among the mobile computing crowd. One of the first things I did with the Eee PC was to install the Windows 7 beta, and it’s still running the release candidate today.

Dream: The Road Warrior

Now that we’ve established what it is I’m working with, we can move on to how it’s working out. At the time of purchase, I wanted a netbook so that I could travel lightly and work from virtually anywhere without requiring a power source or, when I used my 3G USB dongle, a Wi-Fi connection. I also wanted something I could just throw in a bag, without much concern for either the device itself or for the additional space it would take up. I envisioned a future of road-warrior remote working, where the only limit to my mobile productivity was what time the trains stop running.

As many of you probably already guessed, my vision of the future didn’t exactly turn into reality. But just how far off was I? The truth is, very far off.

It didn’t help that Apple released the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with a built-in six hour battery shortly after I purchased the Eee PC. That aluminum beauty quickly replaced my black plastic MacBook, and it would’ve been a shame to hide it away, so more often then not, if I was stepping out, I’d pick the Apple notebook over the Asus. Sure, the Eee PC would’ve saved me some space, but if I really wanted to travel light, I could always just leave all bags at home and depend on my fully capable iPhone.

Looks weren’t my only concern in choosing the MacBook Pro over the netbook for on-the-go work. I also couldn’t get over the cramped keyboard on the smaller device. The Eee PC is widely touted as being among the best in its class in terms of keyboard space and quality, but that doesn’t make it enjoyable to use. It still requires adaptation, which means that when you go back to a full-size keyboard, it can be hard to regain your bearings.

The only real advantage that my Eee PC has over my MacBook Pro is that I don’t really care that much what happens to it, so I’m more likely to use it in high risk situations, or when I think I might get caught outside in inclement weather. The netbook was a great deal less expensive than the full-size laptop, obviously, so its safety weighs less on my mind.

Reality: Couch Potato

Truth is, though, in most cases where I feel more comfortable taking the Eee PC along in my bag, I won’t actually ever have cause to take it out until I get home again. Which leads me to the actual use my netbook now has: Coffee table resident and visitor’s notebook.

It now remains in the living room, on the storage shelf underneath the main surface of my coffee table, just waiting for some much-needed attention. When my girlfriend or anyone else is over, it gets thrown into use as an idle Facebook browser while I use my MacBook Pro and we simultaneously watch TV (who consumes only one kind of media at a time anymore?). Occasionally, when I want to check out a Windows program and write about it in Mac OS X at the same time, I’ll use the Eee PC to run software while working on my iMac.

Was it a worthwhile investment? Probably not. Do I appreciate having it around? Yes, enough not to sell it, by way of which I could probably actually recoup some of the cost of the machine. As productivity boosters go, though, it doesn’t pass the test, and I’ll think twice about buying into whatever the next new subcategory of computer happens to be. Unless it’s the Apple tablet (GigaOM Pro subscription required), which I will (of course) buy in a second regardless of any and all lessons learned.

What gear have you purchased that subsequently hasn’t lived up to the intended use you had for it?

Editor’s note: For more information on netbooks and where they’re headed, check out the report, “The Future of Netbooks,” over on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

While not all web worker are freelancers, a good portion of them are — and a freelance lifestyle is part of the appeal of working from home. The fact is, working as an independent contractor is not all wine and roses. Personally, I wouldn’t have it any other way, but there are some key facts people should consider before leaving more permanent work situations for the freelance world.

I spend a lot of time on this site talking directly or indirectly about why I love freelancing, or what makes it so great, but in the interest of being fair and balanced, I want to take a break from my regularly scheduled gushing to point out some very serious pitfalls about working on your own. Many may seem like common sense, but it’s amazing how often it happens that people forget to consider these downsides when choosing to pursue this lifestyle.

Every Day Off Costs You Money

I remember paid vacation. I remember being irate at the fact that I’d only get two weeks out of the year, at best. And yet now, I’d love for someone to actually pay me money to take two weeks and not do any work. It seems like some kind of fantastical dream.

Now, when I want to take time off, I either have to do a lot of extra work before and after to make up for lost revenue, work while I’m away, or just write the time off as a loss. It’s not only a burden on finances, but it weighs on your mind, too, if you’re the conscientious type. As a result, letting go and truly relaxing can be harder when you’re responsible for every dime you take in.

Convincing People and Banks to Trust Your Money is Harder

Try getting a mortgage when you have to tell the bank that your income is wholly derived from contracts you have with various employers that range from temporary to semi-permanent, but all of which could potentially end without much warning. It’s not easy. Some institutions offer special considerations for freelancers, but for the most part, these deals come with strings attached.

Even negotiating with landlords in high-demand markets is a bit of a challenge. When the landlord or property management company holds all the cards, they choose tenants carefully, and getting an employment letter isn’t always possible for freelancers. Basically, be prepared for every one to second-guess your ability to generate income on a steady basis.

Taxation, Expenses and Insurance Are Completely DIY

If you’re not used to keeping track of your own finances and preparing for tax time completely on your own, it can be a huge surprise when the time does come. Most employers automatically deduct taxation from your wages, but with freelance work, you’re often paid the full amount with the expectation that you will pay taxes when they come due. That means it’s very rare to get a return on your taxes. Instead, you’ll usually end up owing a hefty sum.

Preparing for that is a simple matter of putting aside an amount in excess of what you estimate your taxes owed will be, but that’s easier said then done. Money on hand seems like it’s there to be spent, especially when unexpected costs arise. If you’re not careful, tax time could find you seriously lacking.

Add to that the fact that health insurance is pretty much up to you, and you can see how what seems like a sizable income can quickly become a subsistence wage. Factor in insurance, retirement savings, and tax when you’re calculating your overhead for freelancing before you embark upon a career as an independent.

Weigh the Good and the Bad

If you’re dissatisfied with your day job and thinking about leaving the rat race for freelancing, you may not want to hear about the downsides to making such a choice, but knowing just what you’re in for is key to making a sound decision you can live with. And if you have very good reasons for wanting to go it alone, chances are the cons won’t outweigh the pros anyway. They certainly don’t for me.

Have you considered the cons (as well as the pros) of taking on a freelance career?

Image by toolfan.hess from flickr

As I sit down each day to do my work, the vast majority of which involves writing (articles, web site content, tweets and blog posts), I can’t help but think about the writing rules drilled into me by past English teachers. In most cases, their advice is still very pertinent, and I write better by adhering to it. But there are a few rules that would prove detrimental to my online work if I continued to follow them.

I was taught how to write in a world in which print media still dominated the written word. Much has changed since those pre-Internet days, the practice of writing not least of all. As a result, some things that were once considered big no-nos are now standard practice. Here’s a few old chestnuts you should think about tossing out as you transition to online writing. You may even take joy in doing so, if you’re the rebellious sort.

1. Write What You Know

Even when I was a much younger writer, and a big fan of science fiction writing, I found this rule to be rather limiting. The fact is, now that I’m doing various kinds of online writing that differ greatly depending on the contract, it’s become downright anti-productive.

A much better and more applicable rule for today’s provider of online content is know what you write, as quickly and efficiently as you can. That means doing research to gain a sense of familiarity with your topic, and to quickly find out what kind of tone and tenor is acceptable for the genre. Honestly, your goal as a writer is to be able to fool an expert into thinking the content was created by someone with at least a comfortable grasp and lengthy history with the subject at hand.

2. Don’t Use Contractions

Contractions like “I’ll” and “They’re” may have been completely against all good sense back when you were writing essays for school, but they’re completely acceptable in almost all online writing (see what I just did there?). In fact, when I work as an editor for blog content, I often insert contractions where they belong.

What many people don’t realize when they make the jump from print to online writing is that web content has as much do with spoken English as it does written English, in terms of what’s considered acceptable (see, I did it again!). Contractions more accurately emulate a conversational tone, which is something many blogs, marketing departments and community builders are aiming for with their online publications. If you do not use contractions in your writing, it is liable to sound awkward and stilted to a seasoned Internet media consumer.

3. Revise, Revise, Revise

Revision is terrific, don’t get me wrong (I can see editors all over the world glaring at me menacingly). It’s terrific and necessary, when you have the luxury of time. The fact is, with a lot of Internet writing, you just don’t have that luxury. Taking time to meticulously revise a piece could result in something that was current becoming old news, especially now that Twitter delivers news in real time.

Read over what you’ve written, always, but try to practice producing publication-quality prose on a first draft basis. Part of that means editing as you go, but part of it is just writing with a high degree of frequency. It helps if you can identify your common errors in advance, because that way you’ll be attuned to those areas as you write them, which should make you more likely to catch a mistake as it happens.

Those are the three big rules I break every day. And every time I do, I can still hear my tenth grade English teacher uncapping his red Sharpie. Do what you will, Mr. Marchand, but the Internet demands an entirely new set of rules, and she’s the only English teacher I have to please now.

What writing “rules” do you break regularly?

Because of its recent return to my working methodology, I want to take a moment to single out a very low-tech web working tool for praise. I’m talking about the sketchbook, that handy little tome in which we can capture and generate some of our best ideas. Not to be confused with the writer’s notebook, mind you, which is a great tool, too, but a different kind of beast.

The sketchbook is a free space for your ideas to play, unbound by lines and ruled margins. It’s a laboratory, a playground, a testing facility and a sounding board. And perhaps best of all, it requires no batteries and can go pretty much anywhere you do. Here’s why I love mine so much, and why any web worker would do well to have their own on hand.

Idea Log

You know the feeling of getting hit with innovation lightning? The one you get when you come up with something great, something you’re terrified will fly out of your head before you get to a computer. That kind of idea, to my mind, is best captured by the sketchbook, in as close an approximation to the unprocessed original as absolutely possible.

The nature of our brains is such that as we think about an idea, we tend to process and refine it while we keep it in our heads. I much prefer to capture the really good ideas raw, before I’ve had a chance to rationalize and massage them into something more manageable, but possibly much less potent, too.

With a sketchbook, I find that I can capture the idea in its essence, unhindered by editing and page constraints. I’m a very visual person, so it helps that I can use words and images easily thanks to the clean, blank unlined pages. It also makes it easier to add to or scan later on. Plus, even ideas that turn out to be not-so-great could transform into something really useful just through the absent-minded doodling I do on a regular basis on top of existing sketches and concepts.

Collaborative Tool

Describing what you want to do or want to have done can be very hard. Project disappointments, in fact, are often due to confusion regarding expectations, rather than any real failure on the part of anyone involved in the process.

Having a sketchbook on-hand, depending on your comfort level and relationship with the individual you’re working with, can be a great way to spitball ideas using non-traditional means. Even if design has nothing to do with your project, you can use the space to rough out workflows and processes, draw mind maps and illuminate key project concepts in a way that verbal communication simply doesn’t allow for.

Passing a sketchbook back and forth, and taking turns writing, sketching and thinking out loud has produced some of the best collaborative work I’ve ever produced.

Stress Relief

Doodling has always been one of my favorite pastimes. Ever since my early school days, when I used to idly doodle in the margins of my primary workbooks, I’ve enjoyed sketching and drawing as a means to relax. With all that practice, you’d think I’d be better sketcher than I am.

Skill aside, a sketchbook to which I can turn at any moment to work off a little stress through therapeutic doodling is a must-have for my professional health. It’s always close to hand, it doesn’t cost anything, and it isn’t bad for my health. There are few other stress relievers for which all of the above is also true. Best of all, it’s a leisure activity that I can actually do while I’m working, which is invaluable.

Even if you’ve never tried sketching or doodling before, give it a shot and see how it makes you feel. The key is to master being able to draw with a complete absence of self-conscious thought, so that you truly get lost in the activity.

So do yourself a favor and get a sketchbook. It will become a constant companion, and possibly one of your most trusted advisors.

Do you tote a sketchbook?

I was very eager to get in on the Google Wave beta. So much so that I solicited invites from pretty much anyone who even mentioned it on Twitter for about two solid weeks. Eventually, my constant pestering paid off, and I was rewarded with an invite. After the standard delay period before my invite actually came through, I got to waving.

That was roughly a month ago. In the intervening time, I’ve been using Google Wave with a fair degree of consistency, although my time spent with the beta product from Google has dropped off significantly in recent days. I have a fair number of contacts, mostly professional, and it seems like the perfect tool for me, considering the nature of my work, which at the moment is exclusively based online.

So what did I do with Google Wave during the month I had access to it? The answer, sadly, is not much. Not much that I couldn’t already do better elsewhere, anyway. For whatever reason, I just can’t seem to surf the Wave.

All Muscle, No Finesse

I don’t deny that Google Wave is a powerful tool (for more information on just how powerful it is, see the report “Google Wave Explained” on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro). Nor do I deny that it has the potential to become even more powerful in the future, when it receives wide release. The fact is, though, that it has much more power under the hood than I need at the moment, and it’s lacking ways to tame and redirect that power productively.

Google Wave is particularly confusing to users without a fair degree of tech savvy to begin with, and possibly not worth the ramp-up time required to get users new to the app on board. Of course, later on, if Google opens Wave up to developers, custom installs and simplified UIs might ease the transition, but I’m still not sure it can replace other apps tailored to specific tasks.

Google Wave is an Island

Despite some add-ons and menu bar notifiers I tried out to keep me on top of what was going on in Google Wave, I still found the service far too easy to ignore. I realize that it’s really in a sandbox stage, and probably not meant to be fully interacting with everything else, but for something that’s essentially a social service, it feels boxed and separate from my other tools.

Not only did I feel it was easy to ignore Wave, but I felt it was easy for others to ignore my Waving activity, too. As with any tool, adoption will vary during the launch phase, but I’d say that more than half of the users I tried waving with seemed to eventually tire of the effort and turn their attention elsewhere. Reaching these same people through more traditional means posed no problem, by contrast.

Gadgets, Gadgets Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink

Potentially, Gadgets integration seemed like one of Google Wave’s most potentially useful features. I say “seemed” because it ended up not really being the case, at least not yet, anyway. The Maps gadget is really the only one that I used with any kind of actual purpose. The others are all very nice proofs of concept, but beyond that, they bring little to the table in terms of actually helping me to get work done.

In fact, I think many of the gadgets currently available stand as distractions, clouding the true value of Google Wave for doing web work. That said, I’m also they type of person who never uses Mac’s Dashboard widgets, or a personalized Google homepage, or Windows gadgets.

Many More Waves to Catch

All I really want to convey is that Google Wave might not be the killer app many are making it out to be. It has promise, and it has a long way to go before it gets a public release — we’ll likely see a very different beast when that finally does happen. But as it stands, this particular web worker isn’t exactly enthralled with his Wave experience. That doesn’t mean I’m giving up on it though. It still has way too much geek cred to dismiss outright.

Have you managed to integrate Wave into your web work?

So you’re well into your web working career (hopefully thanks, in part, to the posts featured in our just-released free “Web Work 101″ e-book), and you’ve gotten off to a great start, but after a certain amount of time (it will differ from person to person), things start to lose their zest. The honeymoon is over, so to speak, and it’s time to dig in and build a solid foundation upon which a long lasting career can be built.

To continue the relationship analogy, having a successful and rewarding long-lasting career depends upon more than just initial excitement and chemistry. You have to put work in, think about your goals and make conscious decisions that lead to continuous improvement. Here are some areas to concentrate on.

Focus

If you are starting to feel a little ennui with your decision to do your work remotely, take a look at what you’re doing and make sure the cause is, in fact, the method, and not the nature of the work you’re doing. You might be bored with your focus, not with working online.

You have a couple of options to gauge which is the case, and to find out if you can’t give your web working life a much-needed shot in the arm. First, you could try adding additional work to your existing load that isn’t something you’d normally pursue, but think you might enjoy. Introducing small work packets along with your usual things shouldn’t cause too much strain, and will allow you an exit strategy should you require it.

The other option is to stop doing your existing type of work entirely, and throw yourself fully into something new. This has the disadvantage of being risky, and also of possibly seeming like it fixed the problem when in fact it hasn’t, since you’re just experiencing the thrill of the novel once again.

Motivation

Another reason your web working career might be losing its luster is that you’re not sure what it is that’s driving you to continue. One of the benefits of working for a large company at an office is that HR departments take on motivation as part of their responsibility, and, at good workplaces, take the pulse of their employees and create incentive programs accordingly.

Motivation can be the biggest challenge facing a web worker. Working for bonuses isn’t always an option, nor is working for advancement, in the traditional sense. The best way to get yourself in gear is to identify what it was that drove you to pursue working online to begin with, and see if you can’t find ways to amplify that incentive, or to set goals for furthering it down the road.

Expectations

Finally, you may be experiencing frustration with your web working career because your results aren’t living up to your expectations. Maybe you aren’t making as much as you anticipated, or maybe you aren’t finding that you have as much free time as you thought you would as a result of working remotely.

If so, regaining your passion for your career might be as simple (or as difficult) as reassessing your situation and changing your expectations in order to bring them more in line with the reality you’re experiencing. Any new endeavor will probably seem much more lucrative than it turns out to be, and even when you know your starting salary at a more traditional job, you often don’t take into account taxes, pension, and other deductions. Try to focus more on the positive results you are seeing than on the ones you thought you’d see.

If you’ve hit a wall in your web working career, don’t panic; it’s a good sign. It means you got off on the right foot, and managed to hang in there long enough to become more or less established. As with a successful long term relationship, it’s only natural to get cold feet. Step back, take a breather, reevaluate your situation and continue on. You won’t regret it.

Is your web working honeymoon over? What are you doing to get the spark back?

Photo credit: Neil T

Lately, my inbox has been filling up with notices. Notices about the impending renewal date of my web-based server space, and the domain names attached to said space. Which means, as the emails ominously remind me, that once it lapses, neither I nor anyone else will be able to get at that data. I know I’m meant to be terrified of this possibility, but I just can’t muster an appropriate degree of fear.

I thought about it long and hard, but in then end, there were just too many reasons against keeping my own server space in operation, and too many reasons for storing and publishing my data, portfolio, and contact information elsewhere. Here’s what convinced me to stop the madness and save a little money in the process.

1. Discoverability. Because I am not myself anywhere near an expert on SEO, and because I’ve been entirely uncomfortable with shoving links to my content down the throats of people in my network, any content I might post on my own domain goes largely unnoticed. Sure, I have the occasional link via profiles on sites like this one, but let’s be honest, how many of us click through to those, and even having done so, how often do we follow further links off-site from there?
2. Maintenance required. When it comes to your own site, you take responsibility for the look and feel, the user experience, and the content. The look alone requires pruning, refinement and the occasional overhaul to keep it feeling fresh and current. Keeping content up-to-date might be as easy as updating other social networking site pages, but more often than not, it’s actually a lot more work than making sure your Facebook or LinkedIn profile is accurate and current.
3. Low Rate of Return. The monetary investment involved in setting up a web site is not inconsiderable. Even if you’re only paying between $100 and $200 a year for server space and domain name registration, are you really seeing that money come back to you as a result of having your own web site? Think about the professional connections you make that turn into profitable relationships. Do they come mostly from your own site (if your business isn’t operated solely from your site, of course), or from connections made via the social web and other sources?
4. Distraction Factor. A web site of your own might be doing more than just costing you money. If you’re spending a lot of time trying to boost your visitor count, set up advertising, and basically justify its existence in some way, you could be spending your time in a much better and more productive way pursuing additional contracts, working on high priority projects you’ve been procrastinating about, or even just improving your work/life balance.
5. Reputation. If you do have a web site, and it languishes in disregard, as mine does currently, than it might be even worse than just distracting or wasteful. Stale, dated content with your name on it automatically becomes part of your personal brand, whether or not you’re actively trying to cultivate one. If someone is looking you up online, and they come across your web site before anything else, whatever good things they heard about you via word of mouth could be tainted or even completely erased by the impression your site gives of someone who is either lazy or out of touch.

A web site is admittedly a nice thing to have if you’re a web-based professional. But if your business isn’t dependent upon it (which it would most likely be if you were a web site designer, for example), then that’s all it is: a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have. If you can let it go, maybe you should. You’ll save yourself time, money and possibly even face in the bargain.

Do you have your own web site? Do you use it? How often does it bring you business/real value?

Even in the best of times, a freelance web worker’s income can be spotty and irregular at times. Unlike salaried employees, contractors are subject to sudden and frequent variations in the amount of revenue they can generate at any given time. Those variances can be mitigated, however, by buttressing your revenue through a few out of the ordinary sources.

Before you get your hopes up, let me warn you that this post isn’t going to turn into an episode of “Weeds.” Instead, it’ll provide some much more tame (but workable) suggestions about how to make a little passive income on the side while you continue your main pursuit of a career on the web.

Write and Publish an e-Book

It may seem like a daunting task to write and distribute a full-length e-book, but look around. Just about everyone who works with social media seems to have managed to release at least one e-book. The reason it appears to be such a popular endeavor for those working in the social web is the multiplicity of angles there are on the subject. Your own specialized area is probably ripe with topics that would merit covering in a book-length work.

You may not even have to actually write a book to create a book. Check your existing IP to see if you have enough material to publish. It could be an archive of blog posts, or something much more technical, but if you think an audience may exist for it, go ahead and publish it. Actually creating an e-book and posting it for purchase requires almost no overhead, so any revenue you generate is profit, even it it’s only a small amount.

There are various services online that will publish and distribute your e-book. Take a look around and find one that’s right for you.

Rent Out Your Extra Space

This is definitely not a problem I have personally, but some web workers may find that they have tons of room at their home/office that they just aren’t doing anything with. You could fill that gaping hole with cats and/or flea market bric-a-brac, or you could offer it up to other, more space-challenged individuals in exchange for cash.

You can find renters yourself via an ad on craigslist or Kijiji, or you could use Sparefoot, a new web site specifically designed for the purpose. On Sparefoot, you can create an account and list for rent any space you’re not using, including rooms in your house, a garage, parking spot, empty lot, shed or whatever other square footage you might have.

On the other hand, if you’re like me and find your belongings need more nooks and crannies to be crammed into than you have available, Sparefoot also provides great search tools for finding space to rent. That doesn’t generate any income, but it might pay dividends in terms of peace of mind.

Rent Out Your Car

I suspect people will be far less inclined to rent out the use of their car than they would be to rent out extra space, but as long as you do it intelligently there’s no reason it can’t become a profitable way to get some income out of that depreciating investment sitting in your driveway.

I live in a major metropolitan area, so I don’t actually own a car myself. I used to, for the better part of my life, when I lived in a much quieter, less densely populated area. As a result, I got used to the immediacy of private transport. Not that I don’t like public transit, but sometimes you just want to be able to pick up and go somewhere, on your own schedule instead of on someone else’s.

That’s why I occasionally give a friend of mine $25 to rent the use of his car during the day (he uses transit to commute to work, and generally only needs the car on weekends), plus the cost of giving it back to him with a full tank. He doesn’t feel like the cost of maintaining a car in the city is wasted, and I get to experience the freedom of car ownership once in a while.

There are countless ways to generate so-called “passive revenue,” but those I’ve mentioned above are specifically tailored to people who work from home. They generally don’t require too much extra effort on your part, and they take advantage of your position as someone who doesn’t have to commute to an office for work, or who can be on site as a facility manager at your home during most hours of the day.

Do you have any other suggestions for generating additional revenue? What are some creative solutions you’ve come across for supplementing your income?

Photo credit: Monochrome

You may come to web work through no choice of your own, either because you’ve been moved into a remote working position at your current job, or because your current gig is ending and finding a replacement full-time salaried job isn’t the easiest thing to do in this economic climate. If it is your choice, though, there are steps you can take well in advance to make your chosen path that much easier to follow.

It wasn’t that long ago that I was working full-time at a consulting firm, dressing in a suit and going in to a physical office five or six days a week. I knew about two months in advance that I would be leaving for sure to pursue working remotely from home as a freelancer. Unlike when you make the transition from one regular job to another, leaving to work for yourself actually requires a lot of preparation.

Test the Waters

Planning to work online from home is all well and good, but if you don’t actually have any work lined up, then you won’t really be doing much besides full-time web browsing.

Having an idea of what type of work you want to do when you start is a good beginning, but it isn’t enough. Because working remotely from home generally allows you considerable flexibility with your working hours, it’s a good idea to actually start before you take the plunge and go for it full-time.

Doing so will not only set you up with work for when you actually do start web working as a career, but it should also let you find out if you’re making the right move. In most cases, when you leave a day job, there aren’t any takebacks. Web work is one of the few situations where you can actually organize a trial period. Take advantage of that.

Pave the Way

Working online as a freelancer has a lot to do with the quality of your work, but it’s also half, or maybe even two-thirds self-promotion. That means significant attention must be paid to identity management, or personal branding, or whatever you want to call it.

Laying down that groundwork well ahead of time means you won’t be started with a blank slate once you hit the open waters of the web, a situation comparable to entering the job market fresh out of school.

That groundwork can consist of well-developed and complete social networking profiles, clips and publications at outlets, including your own personal blog, and relevant conference attendance and participation. If you’ve dabbled in online work part-time, something I mentioned was a good idea above, you’ll also be well prepared to show what you’ve done.

Evaluate Your Finances and Lifestyle

Transitioning to online work can be a lot like starting your own business, because in many ways, that’s exactly what you’re doing. Part of that means expecting and preparing for an unprofitable period while you get your footing. Even if you do line things up and you actually don’t experience any lag time between your old job and your new career, having the peace of mind that comes with making sure your finances can take a hit will help during dry spells.

You should also take a good look at your lifestyle and think about your goals in pursuing a remote career. If you want to do it to make your schedule more flexible and balanced, take some time off work and see if flexibility and balance is actually something you value. It may be that routine suits you best, which might change the type of web work you target.

Also beware the lure of distraction. I found it best to actually minimize the number of things that might cause my attention to stray during the day by keeping the video game consoles in the closet and eschewing a cable subscription altogether.

As with most things, with web working preparation is the key to success. It may be tempting to jump headfirst into something that seems new and exciting, but if you put it off for as long as possible and concentrate on getting your ducks in a row, you’ll be richly rewarded in your new life.

If you’re thinking about taking the plunge into web work, what steps are you taking to prepare yourself?

Photo credit: gill wildman

In my Labor Day post, I talked about the importance of web workers advocating for ourselves, and why it is necessary. One of the topics for advocacy that is on everyone’s mind right now (at least in the U.S.) is healthcare, or more particularly health insurance. This topic is of special interest to the segment of web workers who are self-employed or work freelance.

What exactly is the current state of health insurance for the freelance worker in the United States? There are two key issues to consider: access and affordability.

If you are young and healthy by insurance company standards, you can try to buy an individual or family insurance policy. These policies are purchased as individual contracts from an insurance company, as compared to becoming a group member of an insurance pool that is contracted by an employer or other entity. Anne previously provided some tips about shopping for these policies.

There are a few ways that freelancers can get into health insurance buying groups to get lower rates. Some trade groups, local chambers of commerce, and advocacy groups such as the National Association for the Self-Employed offer discounts on purchasing insurance policies as a member benefit. These programs come with the restriction that people wanting to sign up must meet the health standards of the health insurance company to be eligible for the insurance. One notable exception is a program run by the Freelancer’s Union, which is only offered in the state of New York, and which accepts everyone who meet the group’s membership standards.

If you are self-employed because you own a small business, you may be able to get group rates (and tax benefits) by forming your own small group. You’ll need two or more people who are employees of the business to form a group in most states.

To purchase an individual health insurance policy, applicants have to go through a process called medical underwriting. The insurance company uses this screening process to evaluate the financial risk that you (and anyone else that will be on your policy) pose to them. After filling out your application and health history, the insurance company decides if it can insure you at all, and, if so, what rates it can offer you based on your financial risk.

A wide range of medical conditions can cause an applicant to flunk medical underwriting and be denied insurance coverage altogether. Other conditions can result in insurance rates being set ridiculously high; out of reach for most people. Medical underwriting is fairly standard across the industry, thus creating a class of people who are completely uninsurable in the private insurance market.

Some states have created government programs called high-risk insurance pools that sell insurance to people ineligible to purchase insurance through the open market because of underwriting rejection. These pools are expensive, though: members pay premiums that are usually capped at between 150-200 percent of the average market rate.  The programs are usually subsidized by the state’s taxpayers. Around 30 states offer these pools, but the quality of the offerings of the programs vary widely.

Once you have health insurance, then you face the next challenge: keeping that insurance when you need it most. Individual insurance policy holders don’t have the protection of an employer group contract requiring the insurance company to insure them (called mandatory enrollment) to keep an insurance company from canceling their policies. This means that if you are a private insurance policy holder and you actually start needing your insurance, you may find the company using a process called rescission on you.

In health insurance, rescission happens when an insurance company wants to rid itself of a policy holder that is costing it money in large claims. The entire life history of insurance claims of everyone on the policy are examined in detail, looking for any pre-existing diagnosis that wasn’t reported on the policyholder’s application. It then uses this lack of disclosure of any condition, no matter how minor or unrelated to the current claims that are costing it money, to declare the policy void. Any diagnosis code for a chronic condition or risk factor ever recorded on a claim form by a doctor’s office could be grounds for voiding a policy if that condition wasn’t included on the policy’s application form. Forgetting to disclose your spouse’s deviated septum could be used as grounds to cancel your family’s policy if you need expensive cancer treatment.

There a few exceptions to all of these underwriting procedures and rescission concerns: if you live in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maine or Vermont, your state prohibits medical underwriting, according to ehealthinsurance.com.

I’ve personally experienced the effects of medical underwriting. I have multiple health conditions that are considered completely uninsurable by health insurance companies. Several times, when I have been cold-called by insurance agents who got my business registration information, I have literally been hung up on in mid-sentence the moment the agent heard the word “lupus” come out of my mouth. They knew they couldn’t sell me a policy so I was a waste of time and they moved on to the next prospect without even a polite sign-off.

Because of all of the things I described above, access to and the cost of health insurance should be a serious concern contemplated by anyone considering freelancing. It can prevent web workers from even being able to consider becoming self-employed, or force them back into working for someone else, because of the change in health status of themselves or a family member. For people who are already self-employed, maintaining health insurance is probably an ongoing concern. Last year, Mike reported that FreelanceSwitch research showed that only 31 percent of web workers in North America had health insurance.

Being young and supposedly healthy isn’t a reason to not worry about insurance. I was a young, healthy 18-year-old, right up until the day a blood test to determine if I had “freshman mono” diagnosed a serious blood disorder that is part of my lupus. Many Twitter users are familiar with the hashtag #blamedrewscancer. This meme sprang up after Drew Olanoff was diagnosed in May with Hodgkins Lymphoma and has become a LIVESTRONG fundraiser. Lightning can strike any of us in the form of a health crisis at any time. That is what insurance is for; if you can get it, and if you can afford it.

Do you have health insurance?

Whether freelancing, or in the corporate world, we all have to contend with deadlines. Deadlines generally come off sounding like shlock horror villains: they inch closer, approach, loom and grow larger. I’ve worked in settings where deadlines were paramount, and followed rigorously, and in situations where they meant surprisingly little.

In this post I’m going to discuss deadline management. Successfully managing deadlines is part knowing why specific deadlines exist in the first place, part knowing which are soft and which are firm, and a big part relationship management. Striking the right balance depends on the situation at hand, but generally speaking, deadlines fall into one of three categories and should be managed accordingly.

First Type: The Faildate

Depending on the institution you’re dealing with, and the level of consultant or employee they’re used to working with, a deadline might actually be a test to see if your work is up to their standards. As a consultant taking on a first contract with a high profile client, for example, a deadline could be the point at which you’re no longer considered for future work. And that’s if you meet them, not exceed them.

To beat these kinds of deadlines, you actually have to beat them. Coming in early is the real key to success, but of course your product can’t suffer as a result. You’ll know when these kinds of deadlines are in play if you do adequate research before signing on with a new client or employer in order to find out about their corporate climate.

Sometimes these types of clients will also want frequent, regular status updates, either weekly or bi-weekly, but even if they don’t, it’s a good idea to micro-manage these deadlines by breaking them down into sub-tasks on a fairly small scale. Hourly goal setting might even be appropriate. Good tools for this kind of work include GTD apps that send you notifications on a schedule you set (Things or Remember the Milk are recommended).

Second Type: Firm, But Flexible

This sounds contradictory, but it isn’t. This will cover the vast majority of deadlines you’ll encounter. These are deadlines that are set as firm, and that should be met if at all possible, but that are susceptible to change depending on circumstances and when in conflict with other deadlines.

The key to successfully negotiating these deadlines is finding out why they exist in the first place. If, for example, a deadline exists for the group you’re working with because without that piece of work, another group is just sitting around waiting, then that deadline takes priority. If it exists because it’s based on a reasonable, pre-project estimate of how much time a task should take, then consider it flexible and move on.

Zen is a nice tool to use to track these kinds of deadlines, because it allows you to create custom groups for your different tasks, so you can make your own priority categories depending on the deadline source.

Third Type: Staledate

The final type of deadline isn’t really a deadline at all. It’s the date at which something ceases to really be a concern, and passes into a client or employer’s distant memory. Be careful, because no one you work for will likely admit that these kinds of deadlines exist, so identifying them won’t be easy.

The best way to go about finding your staledate deadlines is by watching ones from the second category you’ve flagged as low priority. Other signs a deadline may actually indicate when you can drop something entirely include a lack of ability to quantify what would result from meeting said deadline, a lack of client stakeholders associated with it, and lax reporting requirements.

Keep tabs on these as you normally would other dates in your usual PM tools, but don’t worry too much about following through until someone important starts asking questions.

Deadlines don’t have to be the movie monsters we make them out to be. Sometimes they’re just a way of saying “we would like this done within a reasonable period of time,” or even “we don’t care about this at all, but we have to pretend to until time X because the policy says so.” If you listen to your deadlines and monitor them properly, the won’t loom so much as pass uneventfully.

How do you manage deadlines?

Image by Flickr user wili_hybrid.

A few recent experiences on the road left me feeling like I was doing my 21st century job in very 20th century hotel rooms. It got me thinking about what my wish list would be for the web worker hotel room of the future.

Power

The typical hotel room is currently vastly lacking in power. Usually there are two desk-level outlets, a pair of vanity outlets, and a couple of inaccessible outlets behind the nightstand. Typically, none of them have transformer-friendly positions or spacing.

Here’s where I would put power in the business traveler’s hotel room of the future:

• Desk. I’d put four outlets, spaced to accommodate transformers.
• Nightstand. I’d embed transformer-friendly outlets in the top for overnight charging of cellphones and similar devices.
• Wall. Outlets would be placed near any seating area or surface that could hold charging items.

Many business hotels have beautiful common areas such as atriums that would be wonderful alternatives to being trapped in your room, working all evening if only they had power points. Many of these areas currently advertise they are Wi-Fi equipped. How about wiring these areas for power as well?

Internet

Just as important as power is Internet connectivity. “More, better, faster” is my mantra for the business traveler’s hotel room of the future, because most current hotel Internet access is designed to handle only basic tasks such as checking email or surfing the web. Current hotel systems usually quickly choke on bandwidth-heavy tasks such as video or graphic file transfers, or VoIP calls.

The hotel of the future should have Internet access that is:

• WiFi
• Secure
• Truly high speed
• Smartphone-accessible

And Internet access should be included in the base room rate. Hotels don’t treat water and power as optional add-ons. Internet should be treated as a basic utility as well.

Gadgets

Now I want to get a little fancier than just basic services. I want some gadgets!

• Monitor. I get tired of squinting at my portable but sometimes too small 13” MacBook screen all day when I’m on the road. A monitor on the room’s desk that I could plug into would be a nice amenity.
• Notebook Safe. I do sometimes leave my hotel room without my laptop, such as for an evening’s entertainment. Leaving it unsecured in a hotel room makes me nervous, though. A notebook-sized safe (currently, a rare room amenity) would make me feel more secure.
• Accessible TV Inputs. A few forward-thinking hotels have installed flat-panel TVs that have front-facing jack panels for easier guest access. This is great for viewing media from an iPod or practicing presentations, and should be a standard business hotel feature.
• iPod-compatible clock radios. A few higher-end hotels are installing units such as the iHome for their guests. It’s both a nice home-like touch and a practical way to charge your unit.
• Surge Protectors. Quality surge protectors from a generally trusted company would be a great amenity in a room, just like hairdryers and irons are frequently offered.
• Equipment Rental. The tradional business center is rapidly losing its usefulness. How about renting equipment to travelers like MiFi units, portable scanners and Flip cameras instead?

What would make your web worker life on the road easier? What is your hotel of the future wish list?

The barriers to working from home are usually human, according to Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who presents remote working as a solution for “business growth, working families, and a green future.” Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor, cites leadership as an important factor in successful remote working, saying, “People need clear goals, deadlines and performance metrics. Team members need trust and the ability to rely on and fill in for one another.”

This got me thinking about the leadership and teams I’ve worked with remotely. Most of my remote working experience has been in small teams or solo — there has been little of what I think of as traditional leadership.

Of course, the dislocation that exists when you have multiple team members working in different locations has the potential to create disaster if you have a team of people who don’t know each other, or poor leadership. When your team is spread across different locations or timezones, the usual pitfalls — miscommunication being the primary issue — can quickly conspire against us humble team members. And, yes, mayhem can ensue.

There’s No “I” in Team
Most of the times I’ve worked remotely or worked with a remote team member, we’ve comprised a team with other colleagues, but without a defined team leader. In my experience, two key factors saved these situations from becoming directionless wastes of time:

A close team. An established team whose members work well together has usually developed a working dynamic that all the players know. So the players already have “roles” as such — they know when they need to speak up, or take on a responsibility, and how others are likely to perform at particular tasks.

Fostering close team work is a good way to get things done when some or all members of the team are remote. Creating or providing opportunities for free, uninhibited group (not just one-on-one) interaction — teleconferences, group chat, and so on — is crucial.

Proactive collaboration. If you’re working in a team with no clear leadership, being proactive about teamwork, and doing what you can as an individual to support the team, can go a long way to keeping your project on time, on budget and on the rails.

Perhaps you’ll volunteer to minute your daily work-in-progress meetings or send around detailed agendas for each weekly catch up to ensure that everyone’s up to speed and aware of any issues before you meet. Maybe you’ll invite a team member to maintain the project plan. Perhaps you’ll offer to meet regularly with a third party and report back to the group so that everyone’s in the loop about the third party’s activities. Possibly you’ll be the one to recommend solutions that allow team members to contribute easily to jobs like brainstorming, task list management, and so on.

In short, the emergent team culture is what matters in a leaderless team. And as individuals within that team, we can readily affect that culture.

Following a Leader
On the few occasions when I’ve worked remotely with a leader, the situation has been different to the all-in team scenario in two key ways.

Division of labor. When I’ve worked with a leader, even when that person performed team work tasks like the rest of us, they spent a large portion of their time administering the team: managing timelines, writing agendas and scheduling meetings. They also checked in with team members to remind us of deadlines and deliverables, ascertain our progress or solve problems.

I’ve found that the best leaders in a remote scenario are extremely thorough and methodical, and they love documenting (however simply) the decisions that are reached over email, chat, voice calls, text messages — whatever.

Cherishing contact. In some cases, the presence of a leader in a team can actually reduce the frequency or depth of contact between other team members, especially if that leader divides up and farms out the work among the team members. In these situations, regular work-in-progress meetings can become your only get-togethers. Obviously this creates a very different dynamic from that which can evolve in the proactive leaderless team. A good leader will still put in place all those tools and techniques that allow spontaneous collaboration between team members, so that the team doesn’t miss out on the value that this kind of collaboration can deliver.

I hope that the more I work remotely, the more experiences I’ll have with good remote leadership. But I’m interested to hear your thoughts on whether remote teams need designated leaders, what makes for a good remote leader, and how you can support a leaderless team to be as successful as possible.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s just me, but I think it’s fair to say that a widely-experienced byproduct of social media engagement is social media disengagement. I’ve encountered it in BBS’s, forums, message boards, with IM clients, on MySpace, Facebook, and now, most recently, on Twitter. I was exasperated with FriendFeed before I even gave it a proper try, though it looks like I’ll have a second chance now that Facebook’s acquired it and will probably be integrating some of its features. It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with any of the services themselves, it’s just that my attention span is fleeting and their novelty wears off quickly.

When the honeymoon is over, I’m left with a well-developed network of connections, but little desire to interact with said connections, or even to find out about updates and changes to features of the service in question. At some point, it’s probably a good idea to throw off the obligations of the old in favor of the new flavor of the month, but disengaging with a social media site before it’s the right time to put it out to pasture could result in hurt friendships, burnt bridges and missed opportunities.

To counter the effects of the social media blahs, I’ve decided to change my habits, instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Here’s a look at what I’m doing to keep things interesting.

Focus on Following, Not Followers

In the end, you have far more control over what you pay attention to on Twitter or Facebook than on who pays attention to you. It’s far better to embrace that fact then to try to grow your networks artificially in the hopes of building up your numbers. The bulk of the connections you make that way won’t be quality anyway, and will only serve to increase the static that leads, ultimately, to disengagement.

Some, like Robert Scoble, have employed the tactic of mass unfollowing everyone on Twitter (he used to practice 100 percent reciprocity via an auto-following tool) and starting again from scratch. My “following count” isn’t so high that such drastic measures are necessary, so instead I’ve been monitoring my Twitter stream and paring the number of people I follow down slowly as I come across tweets that don’t add value or are just downright obnoxious.

The result is that I’ve lost some followers, sure, but I means that I can actually read my Twitter feed, instead of just scanning through for the 15 or so tweets I actually care about amid a sea of hundreds. Just the fact that I don’t have to waste my time filtering a service designed to help me choose what information I follow in the first place has made Twitter that much more appealing once again.

Focus on Directed Conversation

We’ve probably all seen the Twitter parodies, and some of us may recall similar takes on Facebook’s status updates. The idea at the heart of all of these satirical takes is that it’s ridiculous to broadcast random observations and/or what you’re doing at any given moment into the ether.

We laugh at it and go about using the services, but parody is generally funny because it exaggerates what is essentially true. Broadcasting the mundane and the inane is ridiculous, and it gets old very fast.

Many people recommend you not use Twitter or Facebook like an IM client, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have conversations. In fact, lately I’ve been thinking of both social networks like a searchable, publicly available instant messaging application. Even when making plans to meet for a business lunch, I often use public replies instead of direct messages, because that way there’s always the chance that someone else can join in. Social media can become a proper conduit for social gatherings once again.

Keep it Light

It’s easy to get hung up on getting the most out of social media, since it seems like you can’t spend time online anymore without coming across someone proclaiming this or that service the key to continued business success. Realize, though, that there is such a thing as trying too hard, especially when it involves trying to play by the “rules” and looking for ways to maximize the revenue-generating power of your social media efforts. The fact is, these things weren’t designed first and foremost as business tools, and using them that way will only burn you out before your 140 characters are up.

How has your own social media usage change since you first started? Do you experience ennui or fatigue with networking tools?

Image from Flickr by luc legay

For the past four days, as far as my social network, email and IM contacts were concerned, I disappeared completely. No, I didn’t unplug all my devices or sit in the dark with my power cut off, or even have to exert any willpower. I simply took a trip, up beyond the range of my cell phone carrier’s data network, to northern Ontario’s cottage country. The cottage my family visits there is not only beyond cell phone range, it also has no cable, no satellite and no local dial-up service available.

It’s an anachronism, but a welcome one for a web worker looking for a true vacation. Not that I didn’t work. Because I love (some) work, so it doesn’t feel like an imposition when I bring it with me on vacation from time to time. And what better setting for getting some web work done than at a remote location surrounded by nature and devoid of any Internet access?

Honestly, I did some of my best work while completely disconnected from the world I work in. It’s true that for a lot of what I do, maintaining currency is key. I’d say about 80 percent of my work is focused on current events, and as such, I could only focus on the remaining 20 percent while disconnected. But concentrating on that generally neglected sub-category meant that I was that much more efficient and attentive when dealing with it.

Tools and Methods

Oddly, my tools of choice for getting things done in such a rustic setting were ones normally associated with the web. First, there was my recently acquired 12-inch PowerBook, perfectly suited for the task because it wouldn’t suffer much from exposure to the elements, and because its screen is so much more appropriate for outdoor work than the glare-factory that is my 13-inch MacBook Pro’s optical glass screen.

Since writing was what I wanted to get done on this trip, I also employed Google Docs. But wait, Google Docs without an Internet connection? Yes, courtesy of Gears and a Fluid site-specific browser (SSB) instance, I can use Docs wherever and whenever I want as a fully functional standalone application. Web apps without the web are a beautiful thing.

As for methods, I just planned on waking up earlier than I normally would during a vacation and using the time during which the rest of the family was fast asleep to knock out some work, free of distractions. I ended up doing that. Owing to almost continuous rain, I also used big chunks of the afternoon on work, too. The setting and the absence of a sense of urgency made it seem like I wasn’t working at all, though.

True Focus

Being unplugged, for me, was the closest I’ve come to achieving true singletasking. The reason being, there’s far less to distract you from the task at hand once you don’t have Twitter trying to steal focus every two minutes (or however often your client happens to refresh), or the omnipresent temptation of Facebook, YouTube and countless other sites, lurking just a new tab away.

At first, I was understandably edgy, since it was such an abrupt switch from being completely, utterly connected 24 hours a day to not even being able to check my email without driving 20 minutes to the nearest town. But once I got over the initial shock, the benefits were immediately apparent. I finished a 1,200-word article in only two hours, total, a process which would’ve taken me well over four under normal circumstances.

Takeaways

Perhaps the only way to cure our great Internet addiction is to go completely off-grid. But not everyone has the opportunity to escape civilization and, by extension, the long tendrils of the Internet. However, everyone can learn a lesson or two about how to simplify their work habits from my experience, both about how to work and what to work with.

For example, one of the key lessons I took away from my experience is to use the right tool for the job. If I can do something without undue inconvenience on a simple PowerBook and Fluid instance setup, then there’s absolutely no reason for me to break out three screens, a surround sound speaker set up, a Wacom tablet, etc. Work with what you have, obviously, but if you don’t need it, don’t use it.

Last but not least, I learned that the Internet, surprisingly, is not the key ingredient in successful web work. Working remotely means just that, a freedom from the traditional ties between workplace and employee. I was looking for that freedom when I chose a career that allowed me to work from home, but eventually I became so dependent on connectivity that I may as well have been going to an office every day. From now on, an occasional forced exile from the web is going to be a vital part of how I do my job.

Do you ever disconnect completely? If so, do you notice productivity gains from doing so?

I don’t know about you, but one of the hardest things for me about navigating these tough economic times is keeping my gadget spending in check. I have a problem, or more accurately, many problems, and they are all shiny, new and electronic. It’d be nice to say that I have enough willpower to forgo these things when the budget isn’t there, but that’s not at all true. I still have to scratch that itch, so I’ve come up with some ways to do so on the cheap.

Closet Excavation

It may not be quite as satisfying as unboxing something brand-new, or buying a big ticket item at retail, but digging around in your closet for old, nearly forgotten hardware and gadgets can actually be pretty satisfying. Especially if you haven’t looked at them in many years, since you’ll often be surprised with what recent software updates or new peripherals can help you do with older devices.

For instance, I recently reclaimed an old Palm T|X that was languishing unused in my brother’s bedside drawer. I’d passed the device onto him when I picked up the first iPod Touch, but he’d stopped using it long ago when he got his first iPhone.

Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, it’s still a great solution for quick document writing and editing on the road, and it actually has the added benefit of preventing distraction. I’d almost compare the experience to working with a typewriter, whereas any computer is more like working with a typewriter in a movie theater while a movie’s playing with a jukebox going in the background. Not to mention the fact that the device is still a great universal remote.

Trade for Tech

People who work from home tend to accumulate a lot of stuff. It piles up, falls in and out of service, and eventually just takes up space. You could sell it, but often the depreciation on electronics makes that an unappealing prospect to me. A nice alternative that usually leaves me (and the people I’m dealing with) much more satisfied is to try to work out barter deals to trade things you’re not using for things you’d like to try out.

I’ve done trade deals a few times, and nabbed an eMac and a nice starter film SLR out of the deal. Most recently, I traded an acoustic guitar I had (no, I don’t play guitar, and yes, I did buy it new for some stupid reason) for a 1.33GHz 12-inch PowerBook G4. It’s seen better days, but everything still works well, including the optical drive, which is a rare find for this particular vintage of Mac. A trip to the Apple Store and my local independent computer supply store later, and I’ve maxed out the RAM (to 1.25GB) and have a brand-new battery that will get me four hours and change with smart battery management practices.

Having the Powerbook means that I don’t need my Eee PC anymore. Don’t get me wrong, the battery is great on that thing, and it handles video streaming somewhat better than the PowerBook, but I just cannot get back to using Windows as my primary OS for any length of time. The upshot is that I now have a relatively new Eee PC 1000HE to use for further bartering. I’m hoping to pick up a newer-model Time Capsule, with dual-band networking.

Start a Gadget Exchange Program

Chances are, if you have a lot of gadgets, someone in your circle of friends also has a lot of electronic toys lying around which aren’t strictly useful all of the time. What better way for both (or all, if there’s more than two) of you to get a chance to try out new tools without the high cost than by organizing a gadget exchange?

Of course, there are numerous problems with such an arrangement, which is why you should make sure ahead of time that you trust the people you’re trading with implicitly, and that everyone will treat each other’s gear with respect and compensate one another for any damages that may result. It’ll still work out to be a lot cheaper than all of you impulse buying every new thing that comes out, and is a lot less wasteful, too.

Save Money

The bottom line is, the less you spend on gear, the more money you save. Believe me, if I could, I would just grab everything electronics manufacturers slap a “new” sticker on. Sadly, that’s not a realistic possibility. It’s far better to concentrate on finding “new to me” things to experiment with, and occasionally making a choice investment when one of those things actually does enhance my productivity.

Have you tried a gadget exchange program with your friends? Did is satisfy your urges to acquire shiny, new gadgets?