Doing More With Less Since 1972
Facts:
First, let me clarify. When I say, “working from home”, I don’t mean the occasional Friday or snow day. I’m talking about working from your house, day-in-day-out. Telecommuting full time is definitely not for everyone. I tried it during the dot com days with limited success myself, but I learned a lot during that time about how to pull it off and some pitfalls to avoid. Since it seems like working remotely is a growing trend, I thought I’d document some tips I’ve learned for new telecommuters to help them make the transition from working in the office to working in the virtual office.
I can’t stress this enough, so I’ll say it again…in bold–You do not work from home.
You work from work. If you have the mindset that you are working from home, you’re already walking on thin ice. The problem with this mindset is that you will inevitably either bring home to work (not good), or bring work to home (even worse). One of the biggest difficulties I had working from home in the late 90s was that some days I had a very difficult time “going to work”. Other days, it seemed impossible to “come home from work”. There are a few things you can do to make the transition easier and keep the separation between work and home more clear:
Whenever you are doing something outside the absolute norm, there are going to be people who are skeptical. I once worked for a company that had a strict 8:00 am – 5:00 pm attendance policy. When they moved to flexible scheduling for salaried employees (as approved by management), lots of people in management refused to allow their people to participate, even if it meant something as small as taking 30 minutes instead of an hour for lunch and leaving at 4:30 instead of 5:00. Does that sound like a good way to keep responsible, reliable professionals around?
Skepticism of working remotely is fair up to a point. Know this is the situation you are signing up for, and do your best to change minds. Remember, you are being given a large amount of trust in your ability to manage your time effectively, so it’s reasonable to accept more responsibility for doing just that. Some people will never have their minds changed, but do your best to make sure that’s because of them, not you.
Every now and then (but not too often), work from home the same way other people do. Does this mean relaxing by the pool with lemonade in hand and doing just enough to keep your screensaver from activating? Uh…no. But it can mean an evening performing some less thought intensive tasks with your feet up on an ottoman while someone else in your house is engaged in a Desperate Housewives marathon. You’ll have no problem focusing on work if that’s your only other option.
You can work-from-home from home if you’re single or have the house to yourself during the day, but it’s tough to really work in your living spaces during the day if you have kids. My preference is to head to a coffee shop for a Friday afternoon every now and then when I’m caught up and things are expected to be smooth for the rest of the day. Right before a long holiday weekend when everyone else has mentally checked out is the perfect time. It’s a nice change of pace from sitting in the same spot every day and gives you the chance to feel like you are a part of normal society, even if it’s just for a few hours.
Just like at the regular office, sometimes things pop up that throw a kink into your perfect plan. You’re going to get sick, but there isn’t any “I don’t want to infect everyone else,” so you have to do your best to fight through it and still get some rest. Sometimes you’ll need to handle an errand during your office hours, just like an in-office job, and you’ll have to step out to take care of it. The best you can do is to try and imagine how you would handle any unexpected occurrences if you weren’t a telecommuter and try to handle them the exact same way.
I’m sure others have some great strategies to adjust to telecommuting and handling the challenges it brings. If you can overcome the things that make working remotely difficult (solitude, distractions, mindset, etc.) it is a great way to work! Again, it’s not a good fit for everyone or every company, but it’s worth giving it a shot if your employer is game to letting you give it a shot and you think you can do it successfully.
Here’s where I break it down to levels beyond scientific.
Some people love her. Some people hate her. Me…I’m completely indifferent.
What I can’t figure out is why anyone, whether they love her or hate her, puts any serious stock in what she says or does.
It seems to me she’s the Paris Hilton (famous for being famous) of politics. Group A hates her because Group B loves her, and Group B loves her because because Group A hates her. Take the love and hate away, and what is her real relevance?
Just an indifferent perspective.
NOTE (2.7.2014): What you will find below is one strategy. I don’t think it’s the best strategy. In fact, three years after originally writing this, I don’t even think it’s a very good strategy.
This is not the way I currently train for 70.3s. I’ve gained mucho experience and knowledge in the last three years, and you can read most of that in the articles listed here.
There are much more effective ways to train, even with time constraints. And I’ve realized that setting time goals for a 70.3 is maybe not the smartest thing to do, at least for me. A time range is reasonable, but race day is full of unexpected events and factors you can’t control. Read on, but at your own peril.
Ok. I’ve noticed a lot of people are landing here looking for the answer to that one simple question…”What is the best way to train for a half iron distance race (70.3 miles) and finish in under six hours?”
I wrote a longer, more detailed post about one strategy to do this a while back. But if you’re looking for a simple (and logical) approach, I’m going to summarize it here. I’d advise going back and reading the whole post, which contains a little more detail. Keep in mind, I’m not a certified triathlon coach. I have absolutely no credentials other than the fact that I’ve actually done it while weighing over 200 lbs, eating higher quantity and lower quality of food than I should, and skipping a workout here and there.
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Here’s my strategy: Prioritize the race (and your training) in the order of time spent in the race itself. That means concentrate on bike first, then run, then swim.
The bike is going to be about half of the race, right? So make biking the main focus of your training. That means you are probably not going to get a PR for your half marathon during this race. So be it. If you wanted to PR a half marathon you’d be training for that exclusively anyway, right?
Running will probably benefit from having a really solid base before you start training for the race. Build that up in the off-season, and you can put the running portion of the training on auto-pilot. It probably isn’t necessary to rack up a ton of miles running, but it’s a good idea to be mentally prepared for 13.1 by making sure you still hit a long run every week, preferably on tired cycling legs. For me, I did that along with a 10% brick of my rides, and it worked out. Again, I was a long way from PRing the 1/2 marathon in my race, but I’d banked so many minutes on the bike that I had a huge cushion.
Swim–fuhgetaboutit. If you can swim the distance, you will be fine. No need to spend hours in the pool so you can shave off 3 minutes of swim time when you could spend those hours biking (or resting). If anything, spend your swim time in the open water so you are comfortable with it.
Keep in mind, the point here isn’t to “do your best” or “run the perfect race”. If you want to do that, you should hire a coach, measure everything you eat, take vitamins, etc. Not knocking anyone who wants to do that either, but that’s a different (and very worthy) goal than just trying to arrive at 5:59:59.
The worst thing about living in Florida is that leaving the house to go to the grocery store means you have a good chance of running into a dude who looks like a retired professional rassler.
The best thing about living in Florida is that leaving the house to go to the grocery store means you have a good chance of running into a dude who really is a retired professional rassler.
Do yourself a favor and invest some time reading Mark T. Mitchell’s memories of working on a Montana ranch. As a country, we need a whole lot more of this and a whole lot less of anything that isn’t this.
I didn’t have a job anything like Mr. Mitchell did at 14, but I did a lot of farm work before I ever held a steady job, starting with pulling suckers off tobacco plants at 12. I had the same anxious feeling the first time my uncle told me to drive the tractor back to the barn while he drove the truck. Luckily it worked pretty much like a riding mower, so I didn’t mess up too badly.
All the things my brother and I had to do around the house seemed like slave labor at the time since we didn’t really have a choice in the matter, But we were lucky that when opportunities came to do some work for folding money, work wasn’t a foreign concept. It just made chores around our house seem more like slave labor. 🙂
Every one of those jobs “helping somebody out” for a day or two did infinitely more good for me in the long term than it did for the people I was working for in the short term.
I’m really surprised some wingnut out there hasn’t hypothesized the whole WikiLeaks fiasco was orchestrated by the current administration in an effort to weaken both the United States and Hillary Clinton at the same time. Maybe some conspirotist out there has come up with that, but I haven’t heard it so far.
Of course, that’s ridiculous. It would take a very high level of competency to pull something like that off. Then again, the wackos on the other side didn’t have any trouble painting G.W. Bush as both an idiot and an evil mastermind capable of single-handedly raising gas prices, so I guess it’s not too far out there.
After reading this article on the USPS losing $8.5 B (yes, that’s $500 million AFTER THE DECIMAL PLACE!). With all the hyperbole over evil corporations, at least their management has to answer to shareholders…at least they have to answer to someone. I was talking about it with a couple of people on Twitter:
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Obviously, they aren’t huge fans. Come on…what’s a few billion amongst friends? But then I saw these articles about the Swedes storing emails and texts and our own government getting ready to grace us with an Internet Czar and a light bulb went off…
USPS Stimulus package!
Just set up (yet another) federal agency to track and log every single piece of electronic communication. This will have the (un)intended consequence of forcing…err…encouraging people to go back to sending coded messages through the USPS and hoping they are delivered within a few days. Think of how many USPS jobs this could save or create!
The newly announced monetization of debt…ERRRRR…devaluation of the currency…ERRRRR…quantitative easing announced by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday has many Americans confused and baffled. What does this really mean for us? After all “facts and science and argument does [sic] not seem to be winning the day” with the collection of hilljacks that is the American people.
Maybe what we really need is an easy to understand analogy to explain in terms that we can relate to.
Let’s say the money supply is a big pile of rich, high-grade manure we are using to to fertilize our gardens. Now, imagine that a big stud horse (the Fed) comes along and, with increasing frequency and volume, adds to our supply of manure. I guess the theory is that we’ll respond by just planting more crops. But how long would it take for us to stop calling this big stinking pile of crap “fertilizer” and start calling it “a big stinking pile of crap”?
Over time, the manure’s value to us would be greatly diminished, and we’ll be lucky if we can load a bunch of it up in wheel barrow and trade it for a loaf of bread from our neighbor. Meanwhile, no one knows who owns the damned horse that keeps adding crap to the pile.
Oversimplified? Maybe so. But it’s pushing the limit of what our government educated brains can handle. Best to leave it to the horse to decide what is best.
There’s a possibility we could be looking at two years scripted by Quentin Tarantino. Maybe the standard finger pointing that we’re used to seeing is about to be replaced by something far more complicated.
Democrats have lost a lot of their Blue Dog numbers. I’ve actually read some people spinning this as the people in their districts were frustrated that they weren’t taking a “progressive enough” stance. If you really believe that, go pop some popcorn and enjoy what’s about to happen amongst Democrats as their leadership tries to pull them even further to the left. That would be disastrous for the Left and good for the country, so I’m not going to discourage it at all.
And, unless they get co-opted by the “Trent-Lott-Carl-Rove” Republicans, we’re probably going to see some infighting on that side of the aisle too. Again, probably bad for Republicans, but good for the country. Marco Rubio’s speech was dead on–last night wasn’t an embrace of the Republican Party, just a second chance.
If things don’t change, we could *gulp* be looking at a serious third party next time around. And if the establishment Democrats and Republicans aren’t careful, they may actually be that third party–on the outside looking in.
I’m generally happiest with a federal government that’s not doing much of anything. The less they try to create jobs (that’s a function of government?), bail people out, spend our money on our behalf, impose morality (love the irony), prop up favored industries, etc. the better off we all are. This usually happens when we are lucky enough to have opposing parties in the executive and legislative branches. Maybe now we’ll have so much debate of ideas going on that only the really good ones that have been properly vetted can float to the top.
“Yolanda, it’s cool baby. It’s cool! We’re still just talkin’. Come on point the gun at me. Point the gun at me.”
Twister MC has some good advice on what to do about your passwords and protecting your accounts with multiple passwords, but…
Remembering multiple passwords suck, especially the harder they are, but it’s important that you take your security into your own hands.
There’s an easy way around that–come up with your own “password algorithm” and remember that instead of the actual passwords.
Here’s an example: Begin all of your passwords with the last 8 (or fewer) letters of the name of the street you live on spelled backwards with all vowels substituted with alternate symbols or letters (a=@, e=3, i=!, o=0, u=V), followed by the number of letters in the domain name you are creating the password for, followed by all of the vowels in the domain name. So if you live on Maple St.:
Google password = 3lp@M6ooe
Yahoo password = 3lp@M5aoo
Facebook password = 3lp@M8aeoo
Then, all you have to remember is the rule for creating passwords, not the passwords themselves, and they’ll be different for every site. This has kept me from having to go through the “Forgot My Password” process countless times!
You can come up with an infinite number of ways to structure your password algorithm that is easy for you to remember, and you can make them as simple or complex as you like. The only problem comes from some sites that don’t allow special characters (boo) or have a maximum password length that can’t handle your algorithm.
Today’s event hosted by Microsoft and Facebook highlighted some changes coming to Bing that will factor in your social group opinions, Facebook “Likes”, into your search results. That’s great, and it’s definitely a step in the right direction, but…
Just because your FB friends like something doesn’t mean it’s something you would like. Being friends with someone doesn’t necessarily mean you respect their opinion on sushi or books. How about a option to tell FB whether or not you want an individuals opinions factored in to your search results? It sounds like they are going to algorithmically figure out who the experts are, but FB’s whole model with photos and groups is sort of built on the idea that humans can organize this data much better than a computer.
And don’t look now, but Facebook has just given all of those people who’ve been calling for a “Dislike” button for all these years a platform to stand on. The “Like” button is great for steering me towards products and services I should buy, but what about steering me away from products I should avoid? If I’m looking at a vacuum cleaner and one of my trusted friends bought one last year and hated it, shouldn’t that factor into my decision to purchase it as equally as the opinion of my friend who bought and loved it?
Again, a huge step in the right direction, so I’m not hating on what they are trying to do. This is going to push Google to really step it up. If Google Me (or whatever it is called) doesn’t catch on, Big G could be put on the ropes a little with this innovation.
Side note: I got a kick out of Zuck calling Microsoft the underdog. I’m sure Bill Gates appreciated that compliment.
Ok, not really in this instance, but a couple of years ago I wrote a little post on why I give full articles in my feed. I think that, at least for the time it was written, this was a reasonable and logical notion.
Things are different now.
At the time, RSS was the best thing going. For many of us, it still is. I love RSS and Google Reader and still rely on them pretty heavily to keep up with the sites and blogs I follow. But the rules of the game have definitely changed in the last couple of years. I’ve noticed much more traffic being driven by Twitter and Facebook than feed readers ever did. I think the question to ask now is whether your audience and the market as a whole are more likely to follow your blog with RSS or with Facebook or Twitter.
Obviously, there’s no way to get a full feed on a Tweet, so that’s not an issue. But the way Facebook handles blog integration through the Notes application means you probably don’t want to give full feeds there either. If you do, you aren’t leaving any reason at all for anyone to visit your site. Post on Facebook, comment on Facebook, and stay on Facebook–that’s what I’d do.
I’m going back to summaries only in my feed. I think the best strategy these days may be to write a good headline, get an interesting thought or two in the first couple of sentences (thanks for the practice Twitter), and pull people in to your site that way. I also found a nice little plugin that integrates Facebook comments straight to your blog.
Interested to see how this little experiment plays out. I can always switch back later.
If you go door-to-door campaigning, or if you have people going door-to-door for you, it’s probably not a good idea to wear mirrored sunglasses.
You may be knocking on doors in an area that is safe for your candidate, simply reminding people to get out and vote on election day, but even if those people agree with (most) of your positions, there’s a chance they’ll be distracted and put a little bit off-balance by the fact that you aren’t looking them in the eye and telling them exactly what you (or your candidate) stand for.
And if the people you are talking to disagree with you, you’re going to look downright shady–confirming every paranoid and ridiculous opinion they’d formed about you.
Politics isn’t a poker game. In politics, it’s reasonable for people to expect you to look them in the eye and lie instead of hiding behind mirrored glasses.
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