With this post Dawn Foster joins the WebWorkerDaily team. Dawn is a consultant, community manager, event organizer, blogger, podcaster, and technology enthusiast. By day, she is a mild-mannered consultant who helps companies build online communities and social media strategies, but by night, she is part of Legion of Tech to make the world (or at least Portland, OR) a better place for technology workers. - ED
I plan to spend a week visiting family in Ohio over the holidays. I will have hours on the plane and in airports, and I’ll have even more time in the evenings after the rest of the family is in bed and my body is still on Pacific time. I could spend it curled up and relaxing with some fiction printed on dead trees, but how productive would that be?
With any luck, you might also have a few slow days during the holidays: clients are on vacation, the family is driving you nuts, and you’re caught up on “real work.” What now?
I even have a wish list that I hope will help me turn this into a productive holiday. Read the rest of this entry »
There are plenty of time-tracking applications out there; we’ve reviewed more than a few over the years. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no innovation left in the field. Case in point: BubbleTimer, which wants to make tracking your time into an effective time-management tool rather than focusing solely on billable hours.
There are a couple of key features involved in this makeover. First is the utter simplicity of the product: if you ever did those “fill in the bubble with a No. 2 pencil” tests in school, you can use the BubbleTimer timesheet (and without getting graphite dust on your fingers, too). After you set up your activities, you just click to record time in 15-minute intervals.
Read the rest of this entry »
One of the things I love about online freelancing is the flexibility. I can choose the projects I want to work on and have a customized schedule. It’s this kind of freedom that entice many traditional employees to become freelancers, or at least to work from home.
But there are times when becoming a freelancer seems like a regular 9-to-5 job. This usually happens when we pull all-nighters, do repetitive work, and can’t seem to find peace of mind during a busy week. It’s these times that make freelancing seem so much harder than traditional employment. The good news is that there are ways to minimize the chances of this happening, or to avoid it altogether.
Read the rest of this entry »
There are so many available tools and resources on productivity that it’s bound to make one crazy. I confess that I was one of those productivity addicts who subscribed to all the GTD and lifehacking blogs out there, downloaded all the tools I could find, and signed up for every new Web 2.0 service. I lived almost a year of my life doing that, and it’s a wonder that I didn’t get a heart attack.
If you haven’t found satisfaction with any of the productivity tricks you’ve tried, it’s possible that you’re mistaking some of the myths for facts. These myths could come from something you’ve read, or they could be your own preconceived notions. To get productive, you need to get rid of these myths.
What are they and how do you debunk them?
There is one system to rule them all.
Once you get into David Allen’s Getting Things Done, or other similar productivity systems, it doesn’t mean you have to stick to its rules permanently. There is no perfect system that’s already pre-made for you. You need a bit of time, as well as trial and error, to find something that works.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve noticed that web workers tend to be particular about their communication tools. Twitter is usually for mass sharing, wikis or collab apps are for project discussions, while email is for almost everything else.
We all have our own preferences when it comes to communicating with others. I prefer email for general communication, instant messaging for answering quick questions, and my land line for long, personal conversations.
But not all people understand this - especially if they aren’t web workers. In fact, before I had a system in place, I felt like a doctor who was on call 24 hours a day. The good news is that there are some things we can do to get people to reach us through the channels we prefer.
Read the rest of this entry »
RescueTime, the ridiculously easy time management and analysis application, recently added some great features to its already impressive Web-based service to make it just that much more useful and indispensable in my work routine. The addition of autotagging, group tracking, and improved privacy are the highlights in their most recent release.
We’ve covered RescueTime briefly in the past but for the uninitiated, unlike a typical time-sheet application RescueTime requires no data entry. A small desktop application runs in the background and sends updates to your online profile. By tracking which application you have “in focus,” it knows what you are working on. Using the web application, you then tag and categorize these entries to see how you are spending your time.
Read the rest of this entry »
