Whether you have only rudimentary web development skills, or are an expert developer, there are quite a few free sites that can help you extend your skills and learn new things. If you’re looking for education specific to, say, markup languages, CSS and the like, W3Schools is a good place to turn for exhaustive free lessons. However, if you’re looking for articles that can extend your development skills and projects in more general and theoretical ways, try Developer.com.
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Are you having a good day today? Remote working can be great, but it can also prove a lonely proposition; some days it can seem like you never leave the house, or as if no one knows or cares whether you’re working or not. For many, remote working actually means remote: The workplace of your employer is hours away; friends and/or other colleagues aren’t much closer. And sometimes it can seem as if the people who are supposed to be working with you are too busy with what’s going on in the office to actually give you what you need to do your job.
That sense of disconnection can be significant, it can be cruel, and it can be very difficult to overcome. If you’ve never had a day like this, lucky you! I’ve had my fair share, and though I’m no psychologist, I thought I’d outline my tactics for shaking off the remote working blues, just in case you ever face the same problem.
Remain Calm
Don’t hit the panic button just because you’re feeling the twin tyrannies of distance and solitude. You’re competent, capable and like everyone else, you suffer the occasional bad day. It’s cool. The fact that you may hate working remotely right now doesn’t mean you’re losing your remote working mojo — not at all! It just means you’re human.
Speak to Someone
I always find a bad day is most swiftly cut down to size if I tell someone about it. IM your best friend and let loose about how annoying it is trying to work with that guy in Marketing who never gives you the information he’s supposed to. Or call your brother and see if he wants to catch up on the weekend.
It may not matter who you get in touch with — usually I find that chatting with someone about something expands my horizons enough to remind me that I really am part of the world after all. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking everyone’s too busy to be distracted by you, either. Those closest will always have time for you, and if they don’t right now, they’ll call you back as soon as they do.
Immerse Yourself
Typically, my bad day is accompanied by a serious lack of motivation. One technique I use to overcome that is to try to immerse myself in an aspect of my job that I really enjoy. So I’ll look at my task list and pick the thing I want to do most, or what looks like it’ll be the most fun. This is a good way to remind myself of what I like about work, and gives me a sense of purpose.
If there’s nothing on your task list that you really want to do, some fresh air and a stroll around the block might make things look a little less bleak.
Arrange a Day in the Office
This may not be appropriate, or even possible, for everyone. But I find that, if I’ve been feeling isolated from work for a while, the promise of a day in the office — to reconnect with colleagues, make progress on particular projects that have hit hurdles, and remind myself how much I hate commuting — can perk me up. If you have friends in (or near) the office, you might even arrange to have lunch with them. You might as well make the most of your time on site!
I know a freelancer who, when he starts to feel isolated at home, either goes to a friend’s studio to work there for the day, or arranges a few client meetings so he has a reason to get out of the house and into the big, wide world. Do you have a cool friend with their own office, or a few clients with whom you could meet?
Be Kind to Yourself
I think the secret to getting through a bad day really lies in being kind to yourself. If I dread sitting down at my solitary old desk and starting my lonely old work, I’ll put on some good music, or take the laptop out to the deck (and the sunshine!) for a while. Perhaps I’ll treat myself to my favorite snack, call a friend to arrange to meet up later, go for a run, or spend a half hour looking at a book, magazine or site that really inspires me. These small indulgences usually make me feel pretty good, and, coupled with some of the points I mentioned above, can help me approach a mindset in which I can face up to the rest of the work day.
I know I’m not the only one to suffer the remote working blues. What do you do when they hit you?
Like many of us, you’re probably getting used to the much-improved version 3.5 of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Of course, one of the primary reasons that many people use Firefox is the large ecosystem of useful extensions available for it. The speed of version 3.5 will automatically give you an efficiency boost if you’ve been using previous versions, but there is one Firefox extension that I highly recommend to speed many kinds of tasks up even more: Mouse Gestures. This is one of the few extensions that causes an eye-popping response in many new users. It’s compatible with 3.5 and easy to get started with, too.
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I love technology, but not when it comes to switching PCs — moving all the data and applications from one Windows machine to another is not always as easy as it could be.
I thought I’d share some tips gleaned from my latest move to a new desktop. My way isn’t necessary the best way, but it may give you some ideas when it comes time for you to make the switch. Here are the steps that I took.
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As a freelancer, I spend most of my time trying to manage information overload. Like Charles, I use spaces to quarantine focused work from other distractions, and I have some tricks for efficient RSS reading, creative uses of RSS to increase efficiency, and filtering techniques to help reduce the time I need to spend consuming information. Despite this obsession with efficiently gathering information, there are also times when I actively seek out information overload.
While a fire hose of notifications and feeds can be too distracting when I’m working on things for client, if I’m looking for inspiration for a new blog post or new venture of some sort, I want to see as much information as possible in the hope that something will catch my eye and provide the inspiration that I need.
Here are a few of my favorite tools for embracing information overload. Please beware that these tools are known to sap productivity and suck up precious hours that can never be regained! Use these techniques at your own risk. Read the rest of this entry »
I use a lot of Google’s applications to stay organized and productive, but I’m especially fond of Gmail. In its standard form, it’s a fine email client that makes it easy to stay on top of that mountain of email, but with a little customization you can use it to become even more efficient. Here are six super ways to send Gmail into productivity overdrive.
1: Enable super stars.
You know how Gmail has the standard Gmail star, enabling you to highlight certain emails in your mailbox? Now you can make it a super star! Enable Superstars within Labs (found in “Settings”). Once enabled, you can select the super stars you’d like to use by dragging and dropping them within the “General” tab under “Settings.”
From time to time, a lone teleworker finds herself working with a team. This could be at the request of the client, or simply because a certain project demands it. In these cases, a strong team dynamic is needed to make the project a success. The ideal team would be highly skilled, efficient, and have complementary working styles. But what are the odds of that? Team members might even have contradictory work processes. At the worst, you might be the only one who is meeting deadlines and sticking to your assigned tasks. What do you do to encourage the same or better efficiency in the other members of your team?
Spend some time discussing the tools and process. Before you get to work, be sure to lay out the process as well as the tools that you will be using. This sets up everyone’s expectations from the outset. Without this discussion, your team might have different ideas about how to tackle the collaborative process. Read the rest of this entry »
We all know how painful it is to coordinate a meeting involving more than a couple of people. Everyone has to check their calendar of events to find a date and time that will work for everyone’s schedule. The more people involved with the meeting, the more difficult it all becomes. If the meeting involves ordering food for everyone, then the plot only thickens. Here are some free tools and services that can help tremendously with coordinating and even conducting meetings, as well as getting everyone fed.
First, Lock ‘Em In
Tungle makes scheduling a convenient time and place so much easier by sharing your available times to anyone via the web. Microsoft Outlook users within the same organization don’t need it, but it comes in handy for those outside of the corporate firewall. Tungle’s interface is great, and there’s also a Tungle.me widget that you can embed on your web site to give people quick access to your calendar and events.
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