Web Worker Daily

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Many of us have left the world of cubicles behind as our jobs increasingly move into the online realm, where physical presence becomes just an occasional part of our work lives rather than a daily grind of commuting in traffic and cubicle dwelling for 40 hours a week. I see more and more people joining the remote web worker ranks every day, and I’m not the only one seeing this trend. According to Seth Godin in a recent TIME article, “The Last Days of Cubicle Life“:

“Most of the best jobs will be for people who manage customers, who organize fans, who do digital community management. We’ll continue to need brilliant designers, energetic brainstormers and rigorous lab technicians. More and more, though, the need to actually show up at an office that consists of an anonymous hallway and a farm of cubicles or closed doors is just going to fade away. It’s too expensive, and it’s too slow.”

Photo by Ste3ve

Godin also points out that this will be a stressful time as many people struggle to find essential, valuable work that is less likely to be outsourced to other locations. This isn’t really a new feature of the work landscape. Peter Drucker was talking about the focus on knowledge workers from the 1950s, and outsourcing has also been a concern for many years.

While outsourcing isn’t new, the rapid increase in the number of remote workers is. According to WorldatWork, “the number of employee telecommuters in the U.S. increased 39 percent, from 12.4 million in 2006 to 17.2 million in 2008.” Businesses are actively seeking to embrace remote working as it lowers overheads — see Simon’s post on GigaOM Pro, “Enabling the Web Working Revolution” (subscription required). Anecdotally, I seem to see more and more people working remotely from home offices and coffee shops.

What does all of this mean for us? As a culture in the U.S., we have moved away from a traditional worker mindset where 9-to-5 office jobs were intended to last for decades and many aspects of our lives were tied up with our employer (pensions, health insurance, etc.). Now we need to embrace a freelancer mindset, with a focus on the work rather than the employer.  This puts many additional burdens on the worker: health care and retirement, for example. Work may last only days, weeks or months, rather than years, and we need to be able to demonstrate our value regardless of whether we are working remotely or in a cubicle. We need to be flexible and ready to embrace new jobs, new work, new technologies and new business models at any time.

I always try to keep an eye on the future by looking for new opportunities and clients. I also make sure that I’m keeping my skills fresh by learning about new technologies and continuing to tweak the services that I offer for clients as the business environment changes.

What do you do to prepare for changes in your work life?

As web workers we often like to think of ourselves as being on the cutting edge of technology. Our clients often depend on us to be just that.

But it’s easy to get so caught up in keeping current that we forget to keep the focus on productivity, where it should rightly remain. We can have all the tools and gadgets under the sun, but that won’t necessarily make us effective resources for our clients.

The problem really came home to me recently when I realized I was eagerly awaiting my new Eee PC so that I could get out and explore some co-working with friends. It struck me as painfully similar to the time when I was eagerly awaiting my new Wacom Cintiq 12WX so that I could begin doing freelance illustration in earnest. And that was similar to the time that I was eagerly awaiting the release of Adobe CS4, so that I could finally purchase the Classroom in a Book series and begin supplementing my self-taught proficiency.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I was clearly waiting and anticipating much more than I was doing and producing. A quest for the best tools had become an excuse to indulge that most dangerous of professional vices: procrastination. Drastic measures were in order. Hence the following rules: Read the rest of this entry »

I came across this very interesting BusinessWeek article by Stephen Baker last week, which discusses how willing we are to do free work online, without even trying to receive monetary compensation for our efforts. Instead, he argues, we’re looking for different kinds of payback.

The non-monetary rewards most people who do these kinds of things, which include answering questions on Yahoo! Answers and finding weird buys to post to ThisNext.com, consist of things that we valued before we valued money, including praise and admiration.

For businesses and institutions hoping to use this massive emerging voluntary force to drive their own goals, the difficulty lies in determining just what it is that’s motivating people, and developing a rewards system accordingly. The difficulty is that much of the reward seems to be community-based, i.e., you contribute because you want to earn the respect of your peers, and to become an authority of sorts on whatever subject you happen to be interested in.

The article got me thinking about web working, and how much work I “give away”, as opposed to how much I receive compensation for.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I explain Twitter to the uninitiated, I tend to describe it as my virtual water cooler. It helps me keep a finger on what is happening outside of my office by letting me listen in on what others are saying. Aliza just wrote about ways to use it for work, and it can indeed be a part of a productivity suite. To me though, much of the chatter is the equivalent of overhearing a phone conversation from the cubicle next to me.

Despite my ever expanding list of folks I follow, I know I am only seeing a portion of what is being said. So I am rather intrigued by a new project called Connect the Tweets. Connect the Tweets collects the top trending items on Twitter and attempts to put them into perspective and context. What is this and why is it trending? These are then posted on the site or more conveniently, distributed back out via Twitter by @cttweets.

It’s a simple concept with a simple implementation that creates a Twitter ticker of sorts. By distilling the massive number of simultaneous conversations happening into useful nuggets, it helps me filter out some of the noise while still allowing me to discover and the conversations that are of interest and importance to me. While Twitter’s own search also presents the top trends, I appreciate that the way that Connect the Tweets turns this discovery process into an effortless one for me.

How do you follow Twitter trends?

At WWD, we’ve long recognized that there are many types of web workers: though the stereotypical web worker may be the always-on-the-go, device-laden, “digital bedouin,” there are millions of others in home offices and cubicles who couldn’t do their job without constant internet use. The latest survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Networked Workers,” shows just how pervasive web work has become. It’s becoming clear that web work, by our expansive definition, is business as usual for many in the workplace – and that, as its growth expands, many of the issues on our agenda are becoming increasingly important.

The bottom-line number from this particular survey is simple: 62% of all employed American adults can be considered “networked workers” (Pew’s term) who use the internet or email at work. In fact, 27% of employed adults report that they use the internet “constantly” at work, with the heaviest internet users being government, educational, and non-profit workers, as well as professionals, managers, and executives.

Read the rest of this entry »