April 22, 2008

• Working from home is also about scheduling a communications blackout at noon ET every Friday to watch the new episode of Battlestar Galactica. But I couldn't figure out a way to work that gracefully into the post proper. My first post, believe it or not. Path made me do it.
• Nice post. I only work from home when sick (yes, I work when sick) or when one of the kids is off from school. I find it exteremely hard to avoid the distractions and lack of supervision. I'll have a good look at those tips, thanks.
• it is hard for me to divide my life between work and personal when i am working from home full time... i tend to work odd hours and intermingle household chores. i need to keep myself to more of a schedule, but i also seem to be resisting furiously.
• I, for one, made the leap to freelance precisely to avoid working the weekends. Oh yes, monday deadlines. Of course, when you have a day job besides a freelance gig, that's an usual ocurrence. Say ‘no’ as often as you say ‘yes’. Now that's quite difficult, because it's so intimidating; what if clients just start going with the competition, that work 24/7 and for peanuts? Of course, keeping clients sometimes makes one become that kind of providers, and in the long run, quality and reputation suffers.
• This light and airy tribute to working from home misses one or three more somber notes: 1. You are not of a new age of employment/entrepreneurship. You are a freak. See "hermit". 2. Freedom kills. The ability to abandon work for a few moments in order to help Justin with his Workabee Magnets project is the precedent to the proverbial snowball rolling down the hills known as Drudge, BoingBoing, AddictiveGames.com, et al. 3. "Going out for a beer after work" has left your life. "Having just one beer while working" has arrived. You no longer have friends, or if you do, they all "work" and are therefore unaccessible to you. 4. Home office efficiency suddenly becomes directly relational to incredibly cool office supplies. You NEED three flat screen monitors. Wireless mouse? How could you get anything done otherwise? 5. Playing with dogs, chatting with neighbors and participating in 20-minute telephone surveys becomes a welcome break from productivity. As does finding the source of the odd noise in the basement, cleaning out the dead skin cells under the keyboard, and finding the perfect height and back angle for your pneumatically adjustable office chair.
• I keep meaning to read GTD. I've started using Remember the Milk to keep track of things to do, and I'm using SMART goal-setting (Sensible, Measurable, Achieveable, R-something I forget, and Timed). So instead of setting a goal like "Write pedagogy essay by next Friday", I'll write "Read and take notes on two readings for pedagogy essay by Tuesday". When that's completed, I'll maybe say, "Write bulleted list of topics to cover in essay by Wednesday" and so on until I have a finished essay. I think that's the gist of GTD anyway, and the SMART goals are something we use in teaching to decide what to assess for the kids -- it translates well to my own organisation. Remember the Milk also has a gmail widgety thing you can add so your tasks show up on the right-hand side of your email, if you use gmail, and there's other functionality I don't use, like syncing to mobile or PDA, which I imagine would be handy too.
• Also, #2 has done some work from home, but he can only do it if a) the kids are not here and b) he can shut himself in the office and pretend he's at work, so the office becomes his actual workplace and he only comes out for smoko breaks. Of course, that's what he says. Could be he's actually playing Wii all day and running around in his undies.
• Yeay, mechagrue! I've always thought that working from hine would be tough, but rewarding. I've always known that I needed the whip of a strict schedule from the outside. Nice post.
• Um, "hine" is my fingers versuib if "home."
• AAAAArgh.
• Ralph *OBVIOUSLY* knows what he's talking about. After all, he's posting here while he should be working. SLACKER! Amirite?
• This is a great post that hits "home" for me. I've just started freelancing with some success, though hardly what one would call a living. You see, I share my home office with this baby and well, he's pretty much skewed all my priorities in his direction. Anyone have any advice on the whole working-from-home-with-a-baby-to-raise thing?
• I would love to move to the Adirondack Mountains in New York. It is literally a life goal of mine. However, I would have to make a living once there. There apparently is some work in my field that can be done from home, and I would look into that. However, I have my own office now and I have a hard enough time staying on task. If I operated out of my own home, I just don't think I would be nearly productive enough.
• Nickdanger, the most common advice I've heard for working from home with a newborn around is "Don't", heh. You can't set a regular schedule for yourself easily (unless you have a baby that runs like clockwork, and those do exist), so if you have to call or meet other people it's hard to timetable those sorts of things. Of course, if you're not having to communicate with others regularly as part of your job that doesn't matter so much. I imagine it would be hard to set aside a decent length of time, especially if you need time to get into work mode. You need to be able to quickly switch between Dad and Work modes. Maybe that comes with practice.
• I work from home three days and go to the office two days a week. I love working from home. I don't really have any problem motivating myself - my deadlines can do that for me. 1. Set up a separate workspace if at all possible. This should be as far away from the children as you can make it. 2. Get a decent telephone headset if you're likely to spend a lot of time on the phone. 3. Get a blackboard or whiteboard and spend 30 minutes a week planning your work for the next week. Write stuff out where you can see it all the time. 4. If your work is network-based or if you rely heavily on e-mail, get a backup internet connection. 5. If time is really tight and you don't need to be connected, unplug from the internet and e-mail. (This is something I do at the office too). When our second child arrived, I planned a couple of months of part-time working rather than taking full days off. I also made sure my workload was less during the first three months by refusing some projects. I'd rather do two months at 50% than take an entire month off, as suspending everything for a month would make the two weeks after my return very difficult. My goal at the time was to get four hours done per day, and even with a newborn, I think this is possible.
• This is packed with things I need to take on board, but I suspect I will continue my muddled stumbling about.
• Abiezer, GET TO WORK! Or we'll have Ralph come over to your house and "encourage" you to "increase your productivity" by "focusing on what's really important."
• OK mechagrue - no, hang on, pubs are open and the Internet works!
• I worked from home for a year teaching online, and I learned that I had to become very list and deadline oriented... and I also had to learn not to write my lists on the backs of envelopes that would then be thrown away before I'd done the list. I used a little whiteboard (as per roryk) that stuck to my refrigerator. Of course, deadlines are easier when you're teaching because the students have due dates for everything. I use the Yahoo! calendar and the new little widgety thingum that makes all of my appointments (and reminders) show up on my homepage, but I'll definitely check out the remember the milk page.
• OK, work-from-homers, how about some concrete advice on how to get started doing it? I've got all kinds of writing and editing experience, but no real clue how to translate that into freelance work, and everything I find online about it is vague and completely unhelpful. No one ever says, "This is what I did." I need details!
• Have you looked into the freelance writing project sites (http://www.freelancewriting.com/, http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com/, http://www.allwriting.net/)? This is what I did: Worked at a physical office for five years, then told my boss that I was considering relocating and would like to work from home. As most members of my team were already remote from the main office, there wasn't much reason for me to be there.
• I've not come across any websites that has as much oomph as this one book Secrets of a Freelance Writer... One of the big secrets is that the real money isn't in mainstream commercial publishing (articles in newspapers and magazines) but in corporate and government writing. Having said that though, this kind of work might not be what you're interested in...
• The other definitive freelancing book i forgot to mention: The Well-Fed Writer
• I'm interested in whatever pays. Corporate and govt. stuff would be fine -- probably preferable, because coming up with story ideas was never my strong suit even before my brain turned to mush, and I'd really rather have work that doesn't require me to be on the phone with sources a lot since I've got the whole screaming baby thing going on. But again, I just don't know where to start. I've checked out some of the main freelance sites, but never found much that looked promising. Have you ever actually gotten work through one of them?
• My one and only tip re: babies and productivity- Coffee shops. For some reason, when Bryce hits the car seat, he's out like a light and stays that way for oh, about 2 hours. So a couple of times a week I've been packing him up and the computer and heading over to one of my regular coffee shops. It's a frigging miracle solution, I actually get work done while he snoozes away in the seat beside me.
• hillbilly, I'm curious to see if anyone has the answer to that one, too. What I CAN say is that Helium.com does not seem particularly helpful in this regard. You basically have to write the whole entire article on spec - egads, they must be kidding. I too have heard that the corporate route is more lucrative than fiction or magazine writing. But it is a thing shrouded in mystery. (Is this the kind of thing I'd need a "network of personal connections" to understand?)
• Stop calling me Bryce.
• Who's a oogie-woogie Ralphie then?
• Have you ever actually gotten work through one of them? No, but I've also never tried them. The freelancers I know who actually make a living thru their writing gigs treat their writing as a business. (I write but not for a living) That means doing the research on which local businesses and government depts are looking for writing help. It takes a while at first but once they did a few writing assignments, their reputations helped bring them business. As well, many writing gigs are recurrent - the quarterly or annual report, the monthly newsletter etc. I think the reason why more people don't make a living out of it is because the "marketing" work requires skills that introverted writers may be reluctant to get into...
• But it is a thing shrouded in mystery. (Is this the kind of thing I'd need a "network of personal connections" to understand?) Those two books I think might be a good start to throw some light on the mystery. One of my freelancing friends has a Masters in French. She helped write and edit the annual reports put out by one of the government departments in town. She also wrote informational brochures and booklets. (All the bumf that government prints - someone's got to write it!). Anyhow at the peak, she was pulling in $60K/year. She never wrote a word for magazines or newspapers .
• Can I hate her? Because I kind of hate her.
• > Have you ever actually gotten work through one of them? I've never tried, but a colleague has. I'll ask him about it.
• As a professional composer, working from home is virtually mandated. Fortunately, I have a studio separate from my house (and to the point, separate from my kids, god love 'em). Without the separation, I would be very inefficient indeed. I love working from home- it suits my temperament very well as I am a nightowl. Some days I don't start work until 10PM and that suits me just fine. Fortunately, I'm very disciplined and it helps that I love writing music. This arrangement also leaves me plenty of time, when not traveling at least, to spend lots of quality time with my kids. I can't imagine having a 9-5 job and missing watching my kids grow up first hand. And for those times (frequently, I'll admit) when they drive me absolutely nuts, I just say-"Hey kids, gotta pop out to the studio to write another cue". Of course, that's when I post to MoFi or play online Chess- heh heh. My ultimate desire is to move to some remote island (with hi-speed internet of course) and continue to work via FTP. I could almost do this now but for some producers' insistence on occasional face-to-face meetings. I'm hoping this will change in time given the ease that one can effect multi-way video conferencing. I've heard that Scripps Corp. is now requiring their composers to come into their facilities to work (for peanuts too). I could never, ever do that. Give me freedom or give me death! (OK, maybe not death exactly- lots of money might do the trick.)
• My ultimate desire is to move to some remote island (with hi-speed internet of course) and continue to work via FTP. Okay, this is where you all get to hate me. I do live on a remote island, with high-speed internet. (It's not THAT remote, really - a 90-minute drive from Seattle.) I work five times harder than I ever did at an office, and I'm only making about 1/3rd what I used to, but who cares?! If I had one thing to tell everyone who's thinking about making the switch to freelancing, it's that. You'll work five times harder, and make a third less. But who cares?! I would literally cry if I had to go back to an office job. That being said, I'd like to bring up my income. Thanks for the book recommendations, StoryBored, I've got them queued up on my Powell's want list for my next buy!
• A Friend of mine went from being the assistant editor of the alumni magazine of a large university, to writing freelance. She works twice as hard, but says she makes significantly more money, and sells a lot of her articles back to the same magazine. Of course, she probably loses any extra money paying for things like health insurance on her won, but she seems deliriously happy.
• Okay, this is where you all get to hate me OK, I do. But you could save yourself that indignity by finding me and my family a house there. I could then forgive you. Lucky dog!
• ...and continue to work via FTP. I could almost do this now but for some producers' insistence on occasional face-to-face meetings 90% of my freelance jobs involve client emailing or filesharing material (photos, logos, footage), maybe a phonecall to finetune details, and I deliver the final product the same way; no need to lose time in meetings. I like working like that. But there are always the big crunch jobs, or those with specific requirements, that do end up needing facetime. Or physical couriering, now with HD video becoming the new standard. Damn those files are big. And can I add myself to the queue for immigration application to Monkey Fidalgo Island?
• So it's settled- all Monkeys are moving to Fidalgo Island and achieving statehood ala Moosylvania. And I guess mechagrue will be shopping for a new island.
• *also lives on a (not-so-remote) island and commutes to work via FTP and avoids actual personal contact*
• What's Islander's story? Or is he (assuming here) to chicken to tell us where he lives lest a plague of monkeys descend?
• Ah kamus, a plague of monkeys is just what this island could use right now. We're facing an invading horde of retiring Albertan boomers, fat and rich with their oil sands money, looking to build gated golf retirement communities and Cadillac dealerships on every square foot of our formerly peaceful and backward enclave. So yeah, if you'd like to come and join the struggle for the People's Republic of Vancouver Island, you'd be most welcome. We even have municipally funded ironic palm trees.
• Crikey! Sounds horrible. Are they the troubled waters you alluded to earlier?
• Ay, that would be a good part of it.
• kamus, I like it! In fact, I just made it official.
• Err... wrong size, sorry. This is the right link.
• *loads up truck, granny*
• it looks so...so inviting...
• Fidalgo Island real estate listings. It's really affordable here - assuming you're telecommuting, anyway. Not much in the way of a job market, I'm afraid. Telecommuters seeking affordable living in remote areas of Washington state may also want to investigate the Methow Valley. Believe it or not, they have FIOS! And acreage. (Acreage is limited here. This being an island and all. I live on a 5-acre parcel, which is average - a 20-acre parcel would be considered HUGE here.)
• *wishes he had FIOS*