When you think about growing a business, you think about how to attract customers. You might build a web site, create marketing materials, and look for ways to get your message to the masses, but have you ever considered ways to repel clients?

Separating the wheat from the chaff is a big part of creating a successful business. As one Inc. magazine article noted, “A person ought to be able to…in five or six seconds have an idea of what you’re selling and whether it applies to them.” Weeding out those who are not well-suited for you and your business is just as important as attracting those who are.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself, to see if you’re weeding out those who are less than ideal for you.

• Is your web site a true (and bold) representation of you?
• Do you clearly identify your ideal client within your web site?
• Do you offer alternatives for those who might be less than ideal for you (e-books, products, referrals, etc.)?
• Do you clearly outline your services, as well as those you do not provide?
• Do you have a detailed frequently asked question section on your website to help prospective clients decide if you’re the best person to serve them?
• Do you have a clearly defined niche market, and do you spend the majority of your time networking in relevant groups?
• Do you have a succinct elevator pitch for when people ask you what you do?

Helping people quickly rule themselves in or out as potential clients for you and being willing to turn away work that’s not a good fit will actually improve your business over the long haul. You’ll be happier and more enthusiastic about the work you do, you’ll have more satisfied clients because of the improved quality in your work, and you’ll be more likely to acquire similar clients going forward.

What methods for screening do you have in place to help you turn away more of the wrong kind of work for your business?

Image from Flickr by visualpanic

Just like most people with web access, my life is well documented. If a future grandchild idly wonders what I did last October 24 in the afternoon, some notebook, blog post, or social networking site will hold the answer.

I decided to take this a step further — what if I made a real effort to note down what I did every minute of my life? What if I recorded all the food I ate, the water I drank, exercises I did, and even my happiness? Not such an impossible feat, given that in this Web 2.0 world there’s an app for everything. So I decided to track my life for at least a week to see how feasible it was to do.

Gathering Tools for Life Tracking

Tracking every aspect of one’s life sounds like a daunting task, so I needed to automate as much of it as possible. I started with ManicTime, a downloadable app that tracks computer usage. Among the stats it gathers are the applications you use and the web sites you visit. You can also tag your timeline to better identify what you were doing at any given time. My tags included “digital fiddling,” “email,” “online reading,” “freelance writing work,” “design work,” and “personal writing.”

While ManicTime is tied to computer usage, I also used it to tag the time I spent away from the computer including “sleep,” “eating,” “chores” and “offline reading.” I simply tracked my offline time via pen and paper and tagged it in ManicTime at the end of the day. This was a handy way for me to compile all my time information in one place, as well as take advantage of ManicTime’s statistical features.

Remembering a previous post by Dawn Foster, I also signed up for DailyBurn to track my nutritional intake as well as my exercise. Its food database was quite extensive, so I rarely had to input nutritional information manually.

Next came the most difficult part: tracking my mood. After a bit of research, I found some specific methods over at Kevin Kelly’s Quantified Self blog. The only disadvantage of the proposed methods was that they were too specific. I wanted something simpler and more automated, so I signed up for Track Your Happiness instead.

Findings and Results

By just the second day of my experiment, I was already learning something. To my surprise, I spend most of my waking hours writing, whether paid (freelance work) or unpaid (personal projects). This came as a surprise because most days I feel like I don’t really do anything, so it’s comforting to know that I spend that much time focused on nothing else but putting one word after another.

Here are some other non-work stats, gathered throughout the entire experiment (daily averages):

• Digital fiddling — 0.54 hours
• Sleep — 7.67 hours
• Family time — 2.67 hours
• Time spent tracking and analyzing these things — 1.10 hours

I was also glad to discover that I always drank more than nine glasses of water per day. My average calorie count wass within the norm (1638 Calories), but I had the tendency to go over my carbohydrate limits per day.

As for my mood, it appears that I’m a generally happy person — except when I talk to children or work on things I neither want nor have to do. The big surprise, I suppose, is that I’m happiest when I’m planning my business.

Tracking Your Life: Should You Do It?

Here’s the thing I have to admit: except for getting my happiness report, I didn’t finish the experiment. I only lasted until the fifth day, and by then, doing all this tracking was taking its toll on me. I saw that as I tried to keep up with jotting down every fleeting moment, I was getting more stressed. Sure, it only took me roughly an hour a day to track and analyze data, but that’s an hour of my life I’d rather spend on something else.

Quantifying your time, nutrition, and mood can be a learning experience — but you need to know your limits. If tracking your life lessens your enjoyment of it, then either change your approach or only track what’s necessary.

What aspects of your life or work do you keep track of? How do you keep track of them?

Image by karen_d from flickr

Although freelancers and corporate employees both have stages of moving on in their careers, it tends to happen more often in freelancing. Clients sometimes lose funding or focus. Other times we’re called in for short-term projects and aren’t hired again. But there are other times when you initiate the change yourself.

Here are some common reasons why we sometimes feel the need to move on:

• Rates. This is especially true for new freelancers who started out with low rates and eventually had to raise them. While clients are mostly understanding of you raising your rates over time, you might encounter the rare few who’ll insist on paying you low rates even after working with them consistently for several years. If the money is no longer worth your time, it’s understandable to want to move on.
• Culture. Sometimes, our attitude towards business changes and becomes different from what our client’s attitudes are. We “grow apart”, so to speak.
• Client. Although it rarely happens, it’s possible that your client changes and treats you differently. When it’s a negative change such as delayed or skipped payments, it’s a clear sign to at least change your strategy.
• Time. Since we can’t create more time, we might drop certain projects if we need extra hours in our workday. Your reasons for needing extra time may include family emergencies, the need for more leisure, or if there are other projects you want to pursue.
• Interest. Whether it’s the project itself or the particular field you’re working in, it’s possible that you just want to try something different.
• Results. It’s also possible you get different results from what you were expecting. A venture might not have been profitable, or you did not meet any of your objectives.

The urge to move on grows stronger when your reasons start adding up. For example, I rarely leave a project because of rates alone. But if unsatisfactory pay is coupled with an extremely needy client who’s suddenly using shady tricks to win new customers, then I move on as early as possible.

Also, you might value some reasons over others. I know of at least two freelancers whose quality time with their children is non-negotiable. Personally I value personal interest and passion over rates, while a friend of mine has it the other way around. Know which aspects of your work you value the most so that you can make decisions based on your own needs.

Once you’ve identified your reasons, there are some things you need to keep in mind before dropping a project completely.

• Explore alternatives first. If you’re hesitant to completely move on from a project, explore your options first. Sometimes your reasons for wanting to move on are just symptoms of fixable problems. Is it possible for you to hire extra help? Can you change the project scope to something more suitable? Find other solutions first before you decide that it’s really time to take the leap.
• Be part of the transition. Unless you were treated unfairly, leaving your client in an instant is never a good idea. You were part of their business and to leave them suddenly is unprofessional. If you can’t recommend a replacement outright, offer to be part of the hiring and training process until your replacement is completely ready. This will save your client from unnecessary expenses and from making any hiring mistakes. Also, you won’t be burning bridges that may be essential to your career later on.
• Know how to say goodbye. Doing this properly depends on your relationship with the client. There’s no cookie-cutter solution. Just be as honest and as fair as you can be. If your reasons for moving on are negative (such as poor working conditions), then it helps to make a mental note of how you can avoid this in the future.

Leaving a client or a project need not be dramatic. As long as you find the right balance between your own needs and theirs, the process is usually clean and straightforward.

What are your usual reasons for outgrowing clients and projects?

Image by ncb from sxc.hu

If you don’t have a professional blog or web site, you may think that you don’t need to worry about content strategy. Think again. Celine gave some great advice in her article “How to Develop a Content Strategy for Your Professional Blog,” but these days our blogs and web sites aren’t the only windows to our professional souls. If you use social media platforms for professional purposes, you should consider having a content strategy for the material you publish on them as well.

What is Content Strategy?

Kristina Halvorson sums it up nicely in her superb article “The Discipline of Content Strategy” on A List Apart:

“Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.”

If you’re tweeting or updating on Facebook or elsewhere, you’ve got creation and publication of content down. But what about all the other keywords in that definition?

Developing a Content Strategy For Your Social Media Presence

Putting together a content strategy for your social media presence can be a real challenge, especially when you mix business with pleasure; my Facebook friends include relatives, old friends, new pals and purely professional contacts, some of whom I’ve never met personally. You can’t please all the people all the time when you have such a mixed audience, and the privacy settings are too global to adequately address this issue. (My only strategy for Facebook is not to publish things that are too personal. Content strategy is as much about what you shouldn’t publish as it is about what you should.)

But Twitter, for example, is a different story. It’s easy to have separate “personal” and “pro” Twitter accounts. And if you have a pro Twitter account, it’s also easy to apply a content strategy to it. The same is true of professional networks like LinkedIn.

Planning and Governance of Useful, Usable Content

Here are some ideas that might help you get started on a strategy:

• Planning: Define your mission (what you want to achieve with your content). Define your audience. Define what you want your content to do for your audience (inform, persuade, entertain). Define the nature of your content (what it should consist of and the tone of the content). Decide how often to produce it. Decide how you will interact with your audience.
• Governance: In this context, I interpret this to mean managing and monitoring your content and its impact, as well as your own role. Are you meeting your audience’s needs? What’s working and what’s not, and why? Is the quality of your content consistently high? Are you responsive and available?
• Useful and usable: Most of the blogs and Twitter accounts of small businesses I see need a content strategy. They tend to be too inwardly focused, all about their own updates and services (boring), or else they are too much about the owner/founder. These businesses generally need to figure out how to provide some real value to their audiences in order to keep them coming back and turn them into real fans, or even evangelists.

Here’s an example: I discovered a nice app the other day called Memory-Life. It’s a site where you can store media and other files in a virtual “box of memories.” (It’s still only available in French, but hopefully not for long. You can see a demo by clicking “Voir la démo.“)

It has a Twitter account, but it could be doing a lot more. Its audience is interested in preserving memories, so in addition to the occasional updates about upgrades and features, it could share links to articles about repairing old photos, or compressing large video files. It could provide creative suggestions, like “Upload pictures of all your grandmother’s jewelry to your box of memories” or “Create your own art gallery with Memory-Life.” It could suggest alternative uses for the app; designers could use it to create inspiration boards, for example.

If you want to connect with and engage an audience, your content has to provoke thought and action. You know you’re adding value if your content is being retweeted, liked and shared. It takes work, but it’s worth it.

You Too Could Be a Content Strategist!

Content strayegy is a relatively new career field. Large corporations are beginning to have in-house content strategists, but there is no reason why this job shouldn’t be done by consultants, which is where you come in. It could be an ideal occupation for a web worker.

If you’d like to learn ore about content strategy, in April, several chapters of the Society for Technical Communication are putting on “Content Strategy Forum 2010,” a two-day conference on content strategy in Paris. The conference is intended for:

“…anyone who develops, manages, or delivers content within their own organization or for their clients: user experience designers, information architects, business analysts, technical writers, web project managers, documentation managers, translators, web marketers, practicing content strategists, and those looking to break into the field.”

Learn more about the conference program and register here (tickets are very affordable).

Here’s some additional recommended reading on content strategy:

• “Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data,” a great article by Rachel Lovinger
• There are several good articles on A List Apart about content strategy.

Have you implemented a content strategy for your social media presence?

Image by the_franz from sxc.hu

I recently had a day started like any other weekday, apart from a little light rain. It ended with an overflowing inbox of client requests and a that awful feeling of being overwhelmed.

I spent the morning on a Windows 7 article that I needed to finish. Several emails came in. “No problem.” I thought, “I can handle them in the afternoon.”  Every Wednesday at noon, I have a weekly status meeting with a client. It forced the article and my eyes to take a break from each other.

At the end of the meeting, my day crashed with a thunderous roar. More email requests had arrived. Like the rain, the work started to pour in. This doesn’t happen often, but it turned this organized planner into a panicky gal. Plus, I managed to lock myself out of an important account, something I never do.

One of my worst habits is checking email too often. I do this because I don’t want my inbox to pile up. I scan my emails frequently and then delete, file, respond or or leave them for later if the message needs more than a few minutes of my time. On this day, many of the messages met the “leave” requirement. So they remained in the inbox where they caused my stress to climb even further.

So what do I do to stop getting overwhelmed like this? Here are the steps that I took to regain control:

• Pick the most urgent task. Complete the task, celebrate accomplishment and get a quick lift.
• Delete email newsletters and updates. You can always catch up on them later, but reducing the number of unread messages is a quick way to reduce the  stress that comes from an overwhelmed inbox.
• Add tasks from emails to the to-do list. Then, prioritize and assign them so I can see what needed doing now and what could wait. This way I can move the emails where they belonged and out of the inbox.
• Skip or postpone events, meetings, appointments, etc. You can always skip or move non-urgent meetings or events to concentrate on urgent matters.I had more meetings than usual that week, so I rescheduled one so I could have more time at the office.
• Let go of social networking. Not forever — just for the day. Though social networking is an essential tool in my business, I let it go that day because I knew it wouldn’t help my productivity or stress levels. Besides, if I had tried, I may not have communicated as well as I do on a normal day. I returned to it the next day.

Although following these steps didn’t completely cure that feeling of being overwhelmed (there were still a lot of email to deal with), it definitely helped to regain a sense of control and order.

How do you handle overwhelming situations?

There are times when things are so hectic that 9 am becomes 5 pm, Monday becomes Friday, and the first day of the month becomes the last before you can even turn around.

The days and weeks run together, and everything seems to be moving at lightening speed. Even though the impulse is to run as fast as you can to keep up, sometimes the best thing you can do is stop, see where you are, and adjust the course of a runaway train.

As a small business owner, it’s possible to have several projects going on at any given point, and unfortunately, there are many occasions where the one that makes the most noise and fuss is the one that gets the majority of available attention. Time goes by, and the most important things get pushed aside for the most desperate.

Getting it all back under control is actually pretty simple. It’s done with a weekly review.

Step 1: Stop

Pressing forward aimlessly just because there’s so much to be done can actually be counter-productive. Taking time to gain big-picture perspective and then purposefully resuming work can help you get more done in less time. Although it can be tempting to simply start fighting the next fire in your path, stop doing everything and commit to getting a better hold on your load.

Step 2: See Where You Are

You can’t evaluate and prioritize without knowing what’s on the radar, so you need to lay it all on the table for sorting. Go through your email, notes, open projects, and someday-maybe list to see what exactly has to be done. Next, make a list of what’s important to you. What is it that you want to do? What do you want to accomplish?

Be realistic about what’s on your plate. Assign deadlines to every project and decide what’s doable and what should be eliminated or delegated. Simply removing some tasks and projects from your to-do list can bring clarity around what’s left to be done.

Step 3: Re-balance Your Load

Now that you know what projects are left to be completed, figure out how to balance the load. Hire a VA to help with menial tasks or things that take you away from your core responsibilities and projects. Batch your work so that you reduce the times you have to switch gears throughout the day or week. Find tools and systems to streamline your work and make you more productive. One example, I do a lot of interviews for the Upstart Smart blog and podcast. Coordinating schedules is very cumbersome and requires a lot of concentration and care to avoid double-booking and overextending myself. By simply using TimeDriver, I’m able to set my availability once and then interviewees can pick the times that work best for their schedules, saving me tons of time and frustration. That one quick adjustment has made my life so much easier.

Step 4: Set Up a Schedule

Block out set times that you’ll devote to the big rocks you need to move each day. Create uninterrupted windows where you can give 100 percent of your attention to making progress on each project. This doesn’t have to be a lifetime commitment. You’re simply deciding how you’ll spend your time for the coming week. You’re intentionally laying out a plan that will help you move things forward. If things mess up or don’t work perfectly, you can adjust the schedule and course again next week.

Step 5: Abide by the Schedule

A plan does you no good if you don’t look at it on a regular basis. Your schedule should stay open every minute of your day so that you refer to it often. If you think you’ll get sidetracked by email or surfing the Internet, be realistic about it. Put that in your schedule, too. Set aside dedicated blocks of time for email or simply checking your RSS feeds. That way, you’ll know that you have time for that coming up, too, but that right now, your focus is on the project at hand.

Step 6: Rinse and Repeat

Each week, set aside dedicated time to evaluate where you are and where you’re going. Figure out your most important projects and tasks for the coming week and hold them in your mind. By clearly identifying them, you can quickly check in with yourself and see if you’re focusing on the right things and moving your business in the direction you want it to go.

How do you ensure that you make progress in your business? What tools and tricks do you use to keep a runaway train on track?

Image from Flickr by by doug88888

Holiday season is just around the corner. Some of us will stay home, some will go away. Some will work every day that’s not a public holiday, or on which our presence is not required elsewhere by friends and family. Others will take days, if not weeks, of time out from work. Some will remain connected at every moment, come hell or high water. Others will switch off, kick back, and only get online to read the news, check personal accounts, or find out if the weather will be fair tomorrow.

Whatever your plans, there’s a lot for the web worker to prepare before the holiday season hits and business in many parts of the world grinds almost to a halt. Here are some of the steps I’m taking to ensure things don’t go pear-shaped over the next month or two.

1. Work Plan

When time is short, I like to prepare a work plan which outlines what I need to do and how much time I have to do it in. I break those tasks down to a daily to-do-list and endeavor to stick to it. I make note of the date on which I can expect work to return to normal, so that I can ensure I’m prepared to hit the ground running when the wheels of commerce start turning again.

Like many freelancers, I’ll also be looking at my task list from a budget perspective this holiday season: How many billable hours will I need to fit in between now and when things pick up again in the new year? And where can I find work to fill any budget gaps?

2. Holiday Plan

You probably already have an idea of how much time you’d like to take off this holiday season, and how much vacation time you’ll be able to take. Once I’ve got an idea of the amount of work I have to do, I can schedule my break time to take in commitments with family and friends. But my vacation timeframe will also be affected by my colleagues’ and clients’ schedules.

We’ve all been through the frustration of working when everyone else is holidaying: you can’t get the inputs you need, you have trouble accessing information or gaining approvals — it can be a real nightmare, not to mention a complete waste of time.

Of course, depending on the types of jobs you have to do, you may find this “quiet time” while everyone else is vacationing to be a blessing for your productivity.

3. Connectivity Plan

Whether you’ll be Twittering pictures of your Thanksgiving turkey as it’s being devoured, or you’re heading for the hills, to a little place with no phone or web access, it’s fair to say that all web workers need some sort of connectivity plan for the holiday season.

For me, that plan will entail periods without connection. But work commitments will necessitate that I’m not away from my computer for more than a few days at a time. I’ll build this into my schedule as well, and try to stick to it on the basis that the break from the everyday will do me good.

Your connectivity plan may, of course, necessitate a packing list if you’re going away and need to take your gear with you, or even a wishlist of equipment you’d be happy to receive as gifts this season…

4. Goal Plan

Depending on your work and workload, you may choose, as I will, to set a rough goal plan for next year now.

Yes, now. I don’t want to sail into the new year and then start wondering what I’m going to do next. As a remote worker, I find that planning past the holiday season helps my motivation, and lets me maintain momentum through the lazy days ahead.

In some ways, it even helps me to relax over the holiday season: since I know I have things to get on with after the break, I don’t spend the time worrying about what’ll happen when the fun stops.

These are the kinds of plans I make against the ravages of the heady holiday season. How about you?

We’ve all read the news stories that identify social implications of a world increasingly conducted electronically, rather than in person. It seems that in an environment where individuals and organizations can manufacture themselves new personas, and nothing’s real until we broadcast it across a network of contacts, many web workers are feeling increasingly isolated.

It’s definitely true that it can be difficult to be heard among the clamor of communication online. The volume of information, insights and self-expression can be overwhelming, but those who work remotely also face the added challenge of physical isolation. Sometimes, it can be difficult to believe that you can have much of an impact when you operate remotely. Within this context, those who thrive in a remote web work environment have a strong sense of self, of perspective and of contribution.

The Opposite of Isolation

The antidote to isolation is participation. Participating provides an opportunity to develop self-awareness and respect, perspective, and of course, a sense of contribution. It’s also fun. But it seems that many of us forget the importance of participation from a personal standpoint. With deadlines, busy lives, exciting goals and work or family commitments, we can unconsciously replace willing participation with obligation. And that’s often a lot less fun.

Whether you choose to participate online — in a social network, work-related committee or team, community, interest or activist group — or offline through a club, charity, class or community group, you’re making a willing choice, which for some of us is a bit of a luxury. And the benefits of that participation can be considerable.

When I first moved to a new country town, and was working remotely, I felt pretty isolated. My colleagues were 100km away, and when I looked out the window, it was at a foreign landscape, apparently devoid of human life. So I became a volunteer for the local firefighting group. Bingo! I met a load of new people, made one or two close, lasting friendships, developed skills I never knew I’d have, and felt a whole lot more involved and less isolated.

Participation is Not a Life Sentence

Not all participation takes great commitment, so you can suit your level of involvement to your changing interests, time commitments, and desires. Joining your work social committee, organizational sustainability team, or taking part in corporate sports are just a few ideas for participating more within your work sphere. The key is to give something a try. No single friendship, workplace, or hobby club could hope to meet the needs of one individual, so diversify, and experiment with your interests in a range of different arenas.

A writer friend of mine who was unable to work had a growing interest in literature and books. He took a course in literature, had some of his work published on a few sites, and was then offered the position of managing editor on one of these. He grew the site, then decided to use social networks and online community tools to create a dialogue around the site, which would enable authors and readers to communicate with each other. By pursuing his interest, he’s made a lot of new friends, valuable contacts and deepened his passion and sense of contribution.

Perhaps over time you’ll find, as my friend did, that you prefer online participation. Alternatively, perhaps you’ll get so involved with your local sports club that you decide to stand for a position on the club committee. You never know where your involvement in a group or community may lead — and if you’re not happy with where it’s going, you can always take a break to try something new.

Have you ever felt isolated as a remote worker? What have you done to change things?

If you read Aliza’s post outlining the five best web working lessons she’s learned so far, you might have noticed a trend: all of those lessons were focused on control.

For the web worker who works remotely, relies on someone else’s technology, and/or needs to coordinate disparate, diverse inputs to some kind of timeframe and standard of quality, control is always going to be an issue.

Accepting the Limits

We’ve all had those times when an erroneous keystroke has undone hours (if not days or even months) of toil. The times when we’ve missed a deadline due to power outage or loss of Internet connectivity. The times when someone or something we needed urgently were simply unobtainable.

The nuances of web work dictate that we need to be able to relinquish our need for total control, because the environment in which we operate will not support such a goal. In some way, every new tool that’s released is designed to give users a feeling of greater control over what they’re doing. But the reality is that no matter how well you’ve bookmarked an article, uploaded a file, or composed that email, if the service, your web connection, or your contacts are offline for any reason, or a necessary device is out of power, it’s no good.

Perhaps rather than adopting the latest carefully-devised productivity philosophy or downloading a new work tool, we should accept that total control is impossible — we should let go of that idea. Then, we should work out the ways in which we might be able to influence our work success within a context of very limited control.

Managing the Uncontrollable

Of course, those cool apps we all subscribe to have their purposes. But there are other approaches we can take to help manage our work processes to take account of the uncontrollable.

• Delegation. Aliza mentions the importance of learning to delegate in her post. Recognizing and accepting the unique capabilities of each of the individuals you work with is the first step in learning to delegate effectively. Leaving them to do the work while you attend to other tasks, on the other hand, may take a little practice.
• Plan for unavailability. Web workers tend to be good preplanners, saving valuable information using decentralized means, backing up their work product, and operating around colleagues’ various commitments, timezone differences, and so on. But it’s also good to plan for the possible unavailability of services, people, and resources at any given time. If this means you need to get things done ahead of time, expand your remote work kit, or confirm and re-confirm the details of meetings, processes, and project plans, so be it. Perhaps, if you feel unconvinced about the reliability of an arrangement (a site, a meeting service, etc.) you’ll make your own contingency plans, just to be on the safe side.
• Accept the limitations of an offsite life. There’s no point getting frustrated that a contact’s not available, or that you left that important file that you need for your ten o’clock meeting in your home office. We need to accept that, as web workers, we must be super-organized and plan ahead. So make sure you have everything you need for a day on the road the night before. Don’t leave it to the last minute before you try to get in touch with a contact who has an input you need for your project. If you’re in a bind, don’t panic (too much). Remember that you’re at a the mercy of the online environment, and you can’t control everything. Then try to think laterally about how you could solve your problem.
• Learn when to step up and take the lead. We all know there are times when teams lack leadership, people place too much faith in the system, and we find ourselves in a train wreck waiting to happen. If you feel uneasy about the way a project’s going, think about what you can do to make yourself more at ease. This doesn’t have to necessitate your taking responsibility for the whole project, or taking control of aspects of the job that are beyond your sphere. But in some cases we can help work tasks happen more smoothly if we accept a little more responsibility. It can be hard to tread the fine line between responsibility and control; the key is to know and accept the point where your responsibility ends.

Are you a control freak? How do you handle the aspects of your web work that are beyond your control?

Last spring, I bought my first Mac laptop to replace my aging Windows laptop. Mac fans may say the result was predictable: My shiny new MacBook quickly became my primary computer while my desktop PC gathered dust.

That change left me with one problem I hadn’t anticipated, though. My office wouldn’t function as well with a laptop as my primary computer. I had to rethink the whole layout. How did just changing from a desktop PC to a smaller MacBook manage to make my office totally dysfunctional?

Utilizing a keyboard tray and a small tower (especially one not stored on the desk), a desktop computer has a relatively small footprint on a desk compared to a laptop computer. In my case, I kept the monitor to use as an external monitor for my new MacBook, so that still used space. The only desktop space I cleared out was the footprint of the slimline CPU tower. The back of my narrow desk was cluttered with items like an external hard drive and my phone. Even with the CPU gone, I could barely wedge my MacBook onto the desk’s surface.

Having a laptop as my primary computer also left me wanting something I’d never wanted in my office before: a sitting area. I like using my laptop as, well, a laptop, when I don’t feel the need for the second monitor or other desk functions. I find it is more ergonomically comfortable, and I concentrate better. A comfy chair and ottoman in my office would mean that I wouldn’t have to use the living room couch with its attendant distractions to work laptop-style.

It took some creativity but I figured out how to relieve the desktop congestion and fit a sitting area in the room.

The first key was angling my desk into a corner and filling the “dead space” that was created behind it with the printer cart to create more desk surface area. (The wireless printer itself moved into my husband’s office.) This let me push the backup hard drive back off of the main desktop, and I can also push the phone and other external devices back there when I need the desk space.

The middle shelf of the cart holds two plastic containers that function as “drawers”, for computer cleaning supplies and office supplies. The bottom shelf holds my power strip and battery back-up unit, keeping them off of the dusty carpet.

Moving the printer cart, along with archiving files and retiring a file cabinet, created enough open space to create my sitting area. A hand-me-down chair along with an Ikea ottoman and lamp created my second, more casual, work area. As I sit there, I have a power strip and my file cabinet to my right. On my left is my reference bookcase.

Some other nice features that the new layout added:

• The second monitor can be turned to be visible from the scrapbook table next to my work desk.
• Switching my desk to the other side of the room’s window improved my view.
• My scrapbook supplies are in my line of vision more often, reminding this workaholic to take a break and relax more often.

Still on my wishlist for my new space is a second MacBook power cord that can be left permanently at my desk while I have the other one for mobile use.

Have you switched to a laptop as your primary computer? What workspace adjustments did you have to make?

Recently, I’ve noticed that more new clients are coming my way with a single request: to help them revive or resurrect a project, web site, or product that has failed in the past. I’m also capable of creating failed projects myself — sometimes I look at my track record and try to fix my worst projects hoping that I can make them better.

How do you know if a project has failed? Although you can have specific quantifiers such as revenue or number of users, the simple way is to ask yourself this: “Did it meet any of its objectives?” If the answer is no, then that means you’ve got a failed project in your hands. Some of these projects can remain buried and forgotten, but there are others that you can’t stop thinking about even years down the road.

What do you do if there’s an old failed project that you want to bring back to life?

Why Try Again?

The first thing I do when I try to resurrect an old project, whether it’s mine or a client’s, is to evaluate why it should be done. The reason is sometimes simple. It could be that when the project started, the people working on it weren’t mature or skilled enough to give it the proper follow-through. Now that they know better, they think it’s time to try again.

This was the case with one of my new clients. When he started his blog, he bought into get-rich-quick schemes and short-term tips on how to boost traffic. As his blog’s advertising income diminished and he saw few returning visitors, he called the project a failure. After looking into his mistakes, he’s determined to try again. It’s the classic case of being passionate about a project but not knowing enough to execute it well.

There may be many reasons to revive a failed project, but there’s one you should avoid. Don’t bring it back to life just because you have nothing better to do. I have to admit that sometimes this is the justification I have, and every time I use it all I get is a new way to fail at an old project. “Well, I need something new to work on…” is not going to cut it if you want to rework an old mistake and turn it into something great.

Evaluate Your Past Efforts

The first things we need to look at are our mistakes. In “The Dip“, Seth Godin lists 7 different reasons why one might fail. This includes the lack of time, money, or enthusiasm. Other reasons include picking the wrong thing to try, getting scared, not being serious enough, or focusing too much on the short term. In the failed projects I’ve evaluated, I can see that all of them failed because of at least one of these reasons.

Many of my failed projects, and even some of my clients’ failed projects, were also the result of a lack of definition. Here are some of its common symptoms:

• Saying “Our target audience is everybody.”
• Adding all the possible features and widgets into the project, even when they are unnecessary.

Apart from looking at these past mistakes, we also need to celebrate our successes. In the midst of all the chaos, what worked for you? What went well before the project failed? By looking back at both our successes and our mistakes, we can be better prepared for our next attempt to make it work.

Starting Over

If you’ve realized that resurrecting your failed project is the best thing to do, there are some things you need to keep in mind:

• Remember to quantify. “What’s measured improves,” as Peter Drucker once wrote. If you can, quantify the hours, cost, and other resources used up by your project. Other necessary statistics such as sales, users, and bug reports should also be recorded. By keeping a close eye on the numbers, we can predict most incoming challenges and plan for them accordingly.
• Things to avoid. Instead of just writing a lengthy to-do list, why not factor in your previous mistakes and remind yourself what you shouldn’t do? It’s easy to fall back on bad habits, especially if new processes take longer to pay off.
• Keep it simple. Whether you’re relaunching an old product, service, community, or blog, start with the simplest version you can possibly think of. This allows your project to remain flexible when there are a lot of unpredictable and volatile factors that may affect your success.

The truth is that it takes a lot of planning, effort and passion to bring an old project back to life. If done right, the attempt is usually worth it.

Have you ever tried to revive a failed project such as a blog, online community or an app? What was your experience like?

Image by eduardtrag from sxc.hu

I spend a lot of time each day communicating with colleagues and clients, by phone, email, on social networks, and via the occasional fax. But when I need to have a short conversation and get an answer right away, instant messaging is hard to beat. Unfortunately, there are several IM protocols, and most of them don’t talk to each other. That’s why I use the multi-protocol IM software Adium on the Mac and Pidgin on the PC. I can also use a web-based alternative like Meebo or the new Imo.im.

VoxOx wants to take multi-system communication several steps further. In addition to the various IM protocols, it supports social networks (Facebook, MySpace and Twitter); SMS texting; faxing; private email; file sharing; video conversations; and voice connections. VoxOx also supports Skype messaging, although you have to have the Skype software running, which sort of defeats its purpose.

When you sign up for the service, you are assigned a telephone number in southern California (other locations are apparently on the way). Incoming calls to that number, and voice conversations between you and other VoxOx users, are free; other calls are charged at rates similar to other VoIP services. VoxOx has just begun offering flat-fee voice and texting plans, at prices it claims are significantly cheaper than Skype’s. VoxOx’s other services are free.

In recent days, VoxOx has released beta 2.0.5. The software has improved since I first tried it a year or so ago, but it is very definitely still a work in progress. Its dark background with white text theme is hard on the eyes and isn’t editable, and its contact manager has no provision for importing from or syncing with other address books.

VoxOx seems to be trying to collect the useful features from Skype, conferencing services, virtual PBX services, instant messaging and file sharing services, and putting them all in one place. It’s a pretty cool idea, and VoxOx is definitely worth trying, but I’m not quite ready to make it part of my daily workflow yet.

Have you used VoxOx? What did you think of it?

In their book “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing,” Al Ries and Jack Trout talk about the “Law of the Category,” which is that “if you can’t be the first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.” I’m coming to understand the importance of this concept, especially when thinking about individuality.

Each of us has our own unique makeup, a combination of genetic predisposition, life experiences, personality, interests, etc. If you think about it, that’s very helpful for creating a “new category” for our lives, businesses, and (ultimately) our success.

Take people like Jenny Lawson (The Bloggess), Gary Vaynerchuk and Tim Ferriss. They’ve each built incredible success around a combination of unique personality and passion. That combination represents their self-created categories, something that each of us has the power to create for ourselves.

Michael Port says, “The greatest strategy for personal and business development on the planet is bold self-expression.” Power that with your passion, whatever it may be, and you have the potential to build something that not only thrives in its own right, but also brings you personal fulfillment.

Where do you start? There are a few steps you can take to help you develop your own unique category.

Have Fewer Outgoing Filters
Many times, we make the mistake of filtering who we are. People like Lawson, Vaynerchuk, and Ferriss do not filter themselves. Lawson says that her blog was created so that she had “an uncensored space to say the f-word and talk about ninjas.” Pretty unfiltered, and she does it without apology. Vaynerchuk drinks wine with Cap’n Crunch, no apology. Ferriss challenges the “deferred-life plan” with his 4-hour workweek and, again, no apology. Do they appeal to everyone? No. Do they care? No. By not filtering themselves, they’re definitely going to turn some people off. But they’re not trying to accommodate the masses, and that’s what makes them so successful.

Have More Incoming Filters
Don’t try to appeal to everyone, and don’t try to work with everyone. In fact, become very selective about who you serve and refer everyone else out. By better filtering what’s coming into your life and business, you’re able to provide a service or product that’s highly suited for your client or customer. In turn, those customers will sing your praises and refer more work that’s well-suited for you.

Be Narrow
Not narrow-minded — be narrowly focused, and the more laser-focused you can be, the more likely you are to actually create a new category for yourself, and when you do, you’ll own it. Do you know another energetic and opinionated wine guy who calls it like he sees it and makes wine approachable for everyday people? No. Gary Vaynerchuk is now in a class by himself, which would be a great place for you to be, too!

Figure Out What Lights You Up
Just because you’re a virtual assistant doesn’t mean you have to do everything a virtual assistant is expected to do. What do you love to do?  What do you have fun and enjoy doing? What could you talk about for hours on end? Somewhere in all that is a passion for work you were meant to do, and if you’ll clearly identify it and then boldly say it and own it, you’ll have the second part of the category-creating combo down.

Build the Framework to Support Your Unique Voice
Once you know who you uniquely are, who you ideally serve, and what you passionately do, every profile, web page, and piece of media you put out there should represent that. “Boldly express it,” as Michael Port would say, and you’ll start attracting the right kind of following, a following of true fans.

Personality + Passion = Your Very Own Category
Your Very Own Category = Success + Excitement for You

What lessons have you learned in “bold self-expression” and how it relates to your success in life and business? In what ways can you start to create your own unique category for your business?

Image from Flickr by HAMED MASOUMI

Recently, I changed my home office setup, and found myself with pretty severe neck pain as a result. I switched to a chair that provided better back support and raised my laptop, adding an external mouse and keyboard to try to alleviate the problem. It did, but not as much as I’d have liked. Now I’m trying regular breaks and exercises to see if that makes a difference.

Interestingly, I never had these problems when I worked in an onsite office: I always managed to adjust my chair to suit my needs, and have my monitor at the right level. Since I spend a lot of time out of my home office anyway, my office setup only has an impact on the sedentary part of my work week; the rest is, as they say, in the lap of the gods.

Do You Have Problems with Your Home Office Ergonomics?

A range of symptoms can indicate that your home office is not as comfortable — or suited to your body type or posture — as it could be. Do you find yourself beset by:

• headaches
• neck pain
• back pain
• tired or sore eyes
• numbness in the hands, legs or specific muscle groups
• tension in joints, often the neck, shoulders, fingers and wrists
• device frustration

This last point can be the tip-off that if you don’t do something soon, you’ll suffer more than a bad mood. If you find the use of one of your devices — your mouse, keyboard, monitor, scanner and so on — is frustrating you, it may be a sign that your body is having to work harder than it’s used to, or than it needs to, in order to get your work done. In short, it can be a sign of unnecessary strain. Perhaps your scanner’s a few inches too far from your chair, or maybe you need a mouse mat to facilitate smooth mouse movement and stop your fingers straining to push the device around your desktop.

They seem like such small points, but when you need to operate these devices for eight hours every day, it’s important to get things right.

DIY Home Office Ergonomics

Yes, you can arrange to have an ergonomics expert come into your home and assess your workspace — some of the more liberal (or is that just sensible?) employers will even foot the bill for this service on behalf of their remote employees.

But you can alter your home ergonomics for the better yourself. There’s a a lot of information out there to help you set up your workspace to meet your ergonomic requirements. I found a handy Office Ergonomics Checklist and a discussion of conventional ergonomics wisdom as compared with current research results. Both of thee resources helped me adjust my workspace to my specific requirements. You could also try changing things up with a standing desk.

Ergonomics On the Go

This is all well and good for those days when we’re at home or in an office, but what about ergonomics for those who are working on the road? It would seem that the basic advice that applies in your fixed workspace should be applied as best as possible on the road:

• sit comfortably with your feet resting on something (the floor? a bag?)
• try to ensure you have lower back support
• set a decent amount of space between your eyes and the monitor; although the “arm’s length” rule isn’t achievable on a laptop, make sure you’re not cramped
• have your screen at a workable level of brightness, and try to avoid having light shining directly on it
• make sure your arms are comfortable — not pushed back against your body or out to the sides
• try resting your elbows or forearms on arm rests if your seat has them
• take regular breaks: stretch your arms and hands, get up and stretch your legs, rest your neck, look around
• try not to work for long, unbroken periods

How about you? How have you improved your home — or remote — office ergonomics?

In an interesting follow-up to Dawn’s post earlier this week, “Is Twitter Replacing the RSS Reader?” — which generated some fairly heated discussion in the comments — Robert Scoble has posted “Why I don’t use Google Reader anymore” in which he describes why he no longer uses Google Reader, preferring instead to rely solely on Twitter (and its new Lists feature) to keep up to date. Scoble uses Twitter’s new Lists feature (which Darrell wrote about earlier this month) to organize his Twitter stream and keep it easily digestible.

Helpfully, Scoble has provided links to four of his Twitter Lists as examples:

• Tech News Brands
• Tech News People
• Venture Capitalists
• My favorite Twitterers

Twitter has only just started to roll out the Lists feature (it’s not enabled on my account, for example) so you might not be able to access them yet.

Personally, I still think that RSS readers are useful, but I know that I don’t check mine as religiously as I used to (maybe just once per day in the morning), as I know that I’ll discover anything really important through Twitter. I don’t think I’m ready to drop Google Reader just yet, though.

How about you? Will Twitter Lists make you consider dumping your RSS reader?

Last Friday, I was attending Portland’s weekly Beer and Blog event, and I stumbled across what later turned out to be an interesting trend. I had two separate, unrelated conversations about an hour apart with people working in the technology industry who once used RSS readers but had mostly abandoned them in favor of using Twitter to find news and interesting blog posts. I talked to a couple of other friends and posted the question on Twitter, which confirmed that many people are using Twitter as an RSS reader replacement.

One of the people that I talked to at Beer and Blog was Jason Mauer, Senior Developer Evangelist for Microsoft and @jasonmauer on Twitter; he says:

“I follow Twitter for the conversation anyway, and have found it’s mostly duplicative to also follow the blog feeds of people I’m already following on Twitter. If they post something, I’ll usually hear about it in a tweet.

Where Twitter really pays off is through the power of social networking — interesting content surfaces naturally from people’s recommendations. I might not know that blogger at all who just wrote a really great post, but I’ll hear about it via retweeting. People I follow deliver content piping hot right to my desk. And unlike RSS, Twitter is two-way — the discussion is right there. I get more bang for the buck spending the precious resource that is attention on Twitter than on an RSS reader, which feels like a chore in comparison.”

Mike McClure, strategy and governance consultant and @mcclure on Twitter, says:

“I use twitter in lieu of an RSS reader for productivity and efficiency reasons. All but one of my news sites make announcements on Twitter anyway, so I don’t need to check yet another news source. If the news is big enough, it’ll be circulated enough that I’ll find out soon enough anyway. I’m an analyst not a reporter, so being first to see the news is less important to me than seeing a broad set of thoughts and opinions about the same news.

For real-time information there’s Twitter, for everything else there’s Google.”

McClure also mentioned that Twitter lists might make it even easier to use Twitter to keep up on news, since you can categorize groups of Twitter accounts to create news lists for even easier access to news feeds on Twitter.

These conversations got me thinking about how my use of RSS readers has changed. I am still an obsessive user of RSS, but the feeds that I check most often aren’t news related. I have feeds for Yahoo Pipes that track mentions of all my various projects, clients and other important information, and I regularly read feeds that have unique content that I wouldn’t otherwise find (web comics, niche blogs, online community content, etc.) However, I read my news feeds or mainstream blog feeds much less often than before. Most of the news that I would get from technology blogs has already been discussed and linked on Twitter by the time I get to it in my RSS reader, so I rarely need to read my news feeds.

The feedback on Twitter (as Twitter doesn’t store tweets indefinitely this link may not work in the future) shows that many people are replacing RSS readers with Twitter, but that doesn’t tell the entire story.

As you can see, quite a few people have reduced their use of RSS readers, but like most trends, it isn’t universal. There are plenty of people — like me — who still use RSS readers for some feeds, but there are other people who have actually increased their RSS reading as a result of Twitter. The increased usage seems to fall into two categories: People who read Twitter in their RSS reader, and people who run across new things that they then add to their RSS reader.

Has Twitter changed the way you use an RSS reader?