I’m not biased towards Toronto, despite calling it home, but it seems like a lot of good web things are brewing in this city. There’s FreshBooks, one of the leading online invoicing services for freelancers and businesses, and now there’s Sprouter, a new web app that’s still in private beta.
Sprouter, like many web apps these days, takes some significant cues from Twitter. In fact, at first glance, it appears to be pretty much Twitter designed for a specific target audience: entrepreneurs. Read the rest of this entry »
Every year when I make my yearly geek pilgrimage to Austin for SXSW, I struggle with how much time to spend at BarCampAustin vs. SXSW, because they usually overlap. I love attending SXSW, but I am also a BarCamp fan, so the choice is always a difficult one. This year, like most past years, I chose to skip SXSW to spend a day at BarCamp.
Previously on WebWorkerDaily, I talked about the differences in they way that the community conferences are organized and posted an interview with Audrey Eschright, a BarCamp and unconference organizer. This time I was interested in differences in content between traditional conferences and community-organized events.
Since anyone can propose a session at BarCamp, you tend to get more crazy ideas and niche sessions with great information that would never have an audience broad enough to justify a session at most traditional commercial conferences. You also get some terrible sessions and ideas that just don’t make much sense, but the beauty of BarCamp is that you can wander in and out of sessions pretty easily.
Some examples of interesting sessions at BarCampAustin included: How to start an online bacon business in a month, half-baked entrepreneurial theater (where people come up with crazy business ideas), air ships and more. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by Selena Marie
In previous posts, I’ve talked about attending local events and meetups or scheduling new ones if you can’t find any that meet your needs. In this post, I wanted to talk about something bigger than the typical meetup: community-organized events. BarCamps, unconferences, and similar events have been popping up all over the world in increasing frequency. I’m an organizer for the local BarCamp in Portland, and I have attended many of these types of events. I’m planning to attend BarCampAustin this weekend, which is running in parallel with SXSW.
The organization of these events is very different from typical commercial events. While commercial events tend to be organized by professional organizers who are being paid to produce the conference, community organized events are often organized by unpaid volunteers from the community who are passionate about the topic. Both types of events have their strengths and weaknesses and their place in the industry, but both are also very different in both organization and attendance.
Attendance
I have noticed that many organizers and a high percentage of attendees of BarCamps tend to be web workers. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by Scott Kveton
Many of us are social beings who enjoy interacting with other people, and until you leave an office environment, you probably don’t realize how much contact you have with other human beings throughout the day. In an office, you run into people in the hallways, in the lunchroom, and at meetings. It can be easier to have social conversations or even to bounce ideas off of someone when you run into them unexpectedly. When you work remotely, whether you are a telecommuter or a freelancer, it is possible to go the entire day without ever seeing or speaking to anyone. However there are also plenty of ways to replace those interactions with new ones.
Use technology to have conversations with other people. Instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites are the primary ways that I talk to people online throughout the day. I regularly chat with clients, friends, and peers in my industry using several of these tools. I’ll admit to not being much of a phone person, since I prefer to talk to people online or in person, but giving people a quick call to chat about work or anything else can help provide some additional contact with other people.
Have lunch with old friends, peers, clients or other web workers. I spend too many lunches dropping crumbs onto my keyboard because it is just too easy to work through lunch when you work remotely. I make myself schedule a couple of lunches a week. It gets me out of the house, and I always end up having interesting conversations with people.
Join or start a group exercise program. This could be as simple as planning a walk several days a week with someone you know in the neighborhood or joining an exercise class at the gym. Combine physical activity to get your butt out of the chair and social interactions!
Take your work out of the house. I like to spend some time working in coffee shops with other people to break up the time working in my home office. I usually save up some work that can easily be done with some distractions (email, administrative tasks, etc.) while saving the client work that requires focused concentration for my home office.
Attend local industry meetups. Find a couple of groups of people working in your industry and attend a few regular events. As Pamela noted, it’s a great way to meet new people with common work interests. You can also use these events to bounce ideas off of people or get feedback on some of your ideas.
How do you connect with other people while working remotely?
I’ve talked about live blogging events as a way to enhance and promote a real world event, literally as it is happening. But lately, I’ve been asked to host virtual world events simultaneous to real world events. Mike Gunderloy and I also included planning and hosting virtual events in our 10 More New Ways to Make Money back in August. The virtual events I hosted recently were both held in Second Life. Clearly, Second Life is not dead.
So how do you host simultaneous online/virtual events? Very carefully, of course, but here are a few tips to help you straddle both worlds and pull off both events without a hitch.
Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by Josh Bancroft
People tease me that my hobby is starting user groups. I also organize big events for geeks in my spare time just for fun. I’m one of those people who notices the gaps and jumps in to fill them. When I wish Portland had an event, user group, or other gathering that doesn’t currently exist, I feel compelled to start it. I also enjoy meeting with other people to talk about common interests, learn new things, or help others who need a little guidance (the way others have helped me over the years). All of these activities are amazing and fun, but they are side projects that take up valuable time.
While I enjoy all of these activities, I’m starting to experience serious side project bloat resulting in personal overload. I’ve let my side projects take over to the point that I’m having a hard time making room for my paying client work. Part of my reason for starting my own consulting business was to give me more personal flexibility to manage my work and my side projects rather than having my hours managed by an 8 to 5 work day schedule. I have many other web worker friends who have made similar choices, and most of us seem to struggle with balancing our time between paying work and the side projects that are our passions.
There are a few ways to create a better balance between work and side projects. Read the rest of this entry »
As a freelance consultant, I spend my days in front of a computer occasionally shifting around the house to the couch, kitchen table, or porch when I need a change of scenery from my home office. I have a kitchen instead of a lunch room, a phone instead of a conference room, and no water cooler in sight. While the solitary web worker life can get lonely occasionally, most of us have found ways to engage with communities of our peers in less traditional ways outside of an office.
There have been many posts about engaging with coworkers and clients via Twitter, IM, Facebook, and other social networking sites. Those are a great first step to keep in touch with real people throughout the day, but what about those times when you just need to get out of the house?
I’m lucky to live here in Portland where we have a large number of freelancers, consultants, telecommuters, and other remote workers. We frequently get together during the week for coworking sessions at coffee shops where we each work independently, but by meeting in groups, we have people to watch our computers when we go to the bathroom, share quick stories, or get feedback on a tough issue. There are a few coffee shops where my web worker friends regularly congregate, and I can almost guarantee that I’ll see someone I know wander in during my visit. Read the rest of this entry »
It may be a terrible pun, but it is a useful micro-site from the people at Google. The site (and the pun) is “Appy Holidays,” and the aim is to help you manage your hectic holiday schedule.
In the tradition of Fashion Your Firefox, and iPhone Your Life, Appy Holidays collects a selection of Google Apps under a consolidated theme, in this case “manag[ing] the holiday hustle and bustle”.
The Google services featured on the web site include Calendar, Docs, Picasa, and the recently released Gmail-integrated video chat. In fact, the services listed and their suggested uses does present a nice way of getting all of your holiday ducks in a row. Most useful are probably Calendar and Docs, especially if you’re already using these services professionally.
I’m awful at keeping track of deadlines without a planner or calendar, and I already use Google Calendar to keep track of appointments, so it makes sense to add a new calendar devoted exclusively to making sure I don’t miss any of those holiday parties I’ve committed to, or, at the micro-management level, reminding me that the turkey needs to go in by 10:00 if it’s going to be ready when company comes.
Appy Holidays also suggests using Docs for shopping list management, and for labelling and writing holiday letters. They’ve even prepared a special selection of templates so that most of the work is already done for you. If you’re like me, you might also want to keep tabs on your holiday budget using a Docs spreadsheet, since otherwise January might be a very long, scant month indeed. Leftover turkey can only feed you for so long.
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
