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Balancing family and work with Alicja Colon in episode 4 of āGreater Than Avatarsā
Working from home sounds like a dream come true: naps when you need them, snacks when you want them, helping kids with homework when they come home from school. Thatās what paper illustrator, set designer, and photographer Alicja Colon expected when she quit agency life to open...
California is cracking down on the gig economy
California just took a major step in rewriting the rules of the gig economy. The state Assembly passed a bill Wednesday that would make it harder for companies to label workers as independent contractors instead of employees, a common practice that has allowed businesses to skirt...
When Ignoring a Text Is the Polite Thing to Do
It used to be a commonly held belief that every request deserved a response. Not replying to someone who had sent you an invitation, made a request, or asked a question would be seen as a breach of the social contract. Indeed, itās the entire basis of the RSVP, which literally...
Remember the ā10,000 Hoursā Rule for Success? Forget About It
This may have worked well back in the days of the home phone and snail mail, but how many requests would the average person need to respond to in 1990 anyway? These days, however, itās a barrage.
How much money can you actually make writing articles on Medium?
The four numbers you see in the images above: $5,619.43, $7,006.40, $718.06, $5,016.55. Thatās how much some of our writers earned per month from publishing their articles on Medium. In a world where people exploit freelancers to ghostwrite a 1000-word article for as little as...
WordPress Showed Me the Power of Distributed Work. Itās Time to Share What Weāve Learned
My lifeās work is WordPress. But in building my lifeās work, I discovered something just as important: Talent is evenly distributed around the globe, but opportunity is not. With WordPress, I discovered the power of open source software development. I met a group of like-minded...
The Nomad Guide To Creativity
People talk a lot about creativity in the agency and marketing world. Itās generally considered to be a good thing but often conflated with craft, especially in agencies that have a department called ācreative.ā When we speak and consult on creativity, we clarify that we donāt...
Why Becoming a Digital Nomad Didnāt Give me the Freedom I Longed For
Freedom has always been a fundamental value of mine. In my last job, I was a C-level executive at a small startup and maintained a very high degree of autonomy and independence. I was free to choose my own project-related goals, the people I wished to work with on these projects,...
What is your job that allows you to work remotely? And (if you're willing to answer this) how much do you make?
I'm a customer service rep for an mid-size specialist service provider in New Zealand. I work remotely and answer phone calls, manage inboxes and respond to emails/product enquiries, with team video conferences twice weekly. I also manage our email marketing and work with our...
The Benefits and Challenges of a Remote Worker: Q&A with the SafetyWing Team
Being a remote worker is a freeing and fulfilling way to earn a living. However, sometimes, it also presents some serious challenges that leave many remote-based workers feeling drained and unmotivated. A few months back, we had the chance to be introduced to the team behind...
Coffee Shops, Office Space, andā¦ the Future of Remote Work
Iāve always loved working in coffee shops. Maybe itās the allure of being surrounded by people without having to talk to them. Maybe itās the opportunity to strike up conversations with like-minded strangers. Maybe itās just growing up in the Bay Area where people are on their...
A Decade of Remote Work
While still in college (go Broncos!), I teamed up with Alex (@slevenbits) to create a startup. We were young, inexperienced and naive. Our first project was called YippieMail and it was an email aggregator. Simply put, YippieMail could display all your webmail accounts (i.e....
Nearly 50% of Americans have cried at work due to stress
Just how stressed is the average American employee? Enough for half to be brought to tears, according to a new study. Ginger, an on-demand behavioral health system, released its first annual āWorkforce Attitudes Towards Behavioral Health Reportā and found some less-than-inspiring...
Becoming a digital nomad as a couple
Anytime I hear digital nomad "success" stories it's always a single person traveling and working without a care in the world. I'd like to hear from any married couples that have made the digital nomad life work, on anybody willing to give pointers in that regard. A few questions:...
Why books donāt work
Books are easy to take for granted. Not any specific book, I mean: the form of a book. Paper or pixelsāit hardly matters. Words in lines on pages in chapters. And at least for non-fiction books, one implied assumption at the foundation: people absorb knowledge by reading...
Upwork Banned me after 3 years and $50k earned, for being unshaven
So in may of 2016, I started my freelancing carrier on Upwork, after I have quit my job as a computer technician in a local computers and networking equipment store. I have continuous Linux and open source experience since 2003, so this was something I am very confident about....
Where the Good Jobs Are
You dropped out of college, or decided straight out of high school that college was not your thing. Hereās some advice if you are looking for a job: Stay out of Washington. Donāt go to New York. Forget about San Francisco. If you want to make anything near a decent wage, head for...
Traveling is an elitist nightmare
We do not often talk about tourism in industrial terms. Certain particular ills of the industry ā the environmental calamity of exploding air travel; the pressure on rents due to Airbnb, etc. ā feel current and salient, but they are often discussed in a vacuum, or as sui generis...
Money + misdirection: the shadow side of ācharge what youāre worthā pricing culture
If youāre a freelancer or creative entrepreneur, youāve probably seen this before: Youāre zooming around a forum or Facebook group for your professional focus, and someone brings up ā dun dun dunnnn ā pricing. āIām a beginner (about 6 months in), so Iām not sure what to charge...
Working from home is not that great without something to look forward to at the end of the day
Been thinking how a lot of the payoff from leaving the office at the end of the day is simply getting back home. But now that I work "from home" every day, on rainy days that "Going Home" feeling is not there and it drives me a bit mad. I feel cooped up, mostly on rainy days.
How to love your job and avoid burnout
In 2009, two US professors set out to study zookeepers and aquarium workers in an effort to discover what kept them motivated at work. The results pointed to an overwhelming similarity: The keepers gained a deep sense of meaning from their jobs. It didnāt matter that caring for...
I Let a Stranger Watch Me Work for a Day - And Iāve Never Been More Productive
Like 8 million other Americans, I work from home. There are some nice things about doing so, sure, but before you go gushing over my 14-foot commute from my bed to my desk, let me assure you of one cold, hard fact: getting shit done without anyone but your staggeringly beautiful...
Exploding the Myths: Remote Working, Working-From-Home, and all the Predictable ClichĆ©sā¦
Sometimes in the UK when bad weather threatens, and you know that if there is a really cold snap with train cancellations and road closures, then it will be mentioned in the media that many large employers have graciously allowed their people to work from home for a couple of...
1 Year of Remote Freelancing: Lessons Learned
Exactly a year ago, when I was just starting out as an independent freelancer, I read Brad Haynesā post about his first year of freelancing. Now that Iām exactly one year into my own freelancing journey, Iām inspired to share my own thoughts about lessons learned along the way,...
Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good
SAN FRANCISCO ā Bill Langlois has a new best friend. She is a cat named Sox. She lives on a tablet, and she makes him so happy that when he talks about her arrival in his life, he begins to cry. All day long, Sox and Mr. Langlois, who is 68 and lives in a low-income senior...
Everything I know about freelancing
Youāve probably read a lot about freelancing: Feast and famine. Where to find clients. How much to charge. These topics are fundamental, but it seems like most freelancers burn out before they get over these hurdles. Can freelancing be a stable, long-term career?
How remote work may impact our brains and what to do about it
I love working remotely. It created a sense of freedom and choice in my life. And Iāve been doing it all my working life for the last decade or so, even though I took 2.5 years off to live in the woods. At my previous company (Buffer), we became somewhat of a poster child...
The Problems in Remote Working
For over five years Product Hunt has operated as a distributed company. Itās given us access to to the worldās talent and a global perspective within the team. Today we have 18 teammates across 10 countries from India to Canada. I live in San Francisco but am spending most of...
Chapter 1 of Remote Design Thinking
This study was made with the intention of helping companies in the creative industry understand how they can apply design thinking within a geographically distributed team. It investigates why design thinking is an effective framework for innovation and attempts to align the...
Remote Design Thinking with Veronica Fossa, WeFactory
At Hanno, we use remote design thinking to collaborate, ideate and strategise not just internally amongst ourselves but also with clients whom weāre working with on projects. Weāre big advocates of remote design thinking, and so it was only natural that we begin getting curious...
Chapter 2 of Remote Design Thinking
Who has not imagined themselves working from anywhere besides their office? I remember daydreaming about travelling and working on the go rather than repeatedly sitting at the same desk, and I am convinced I am not alone in imagining work from a sunny palm-fringed beach or the...
Designing remote work (part 2)
How to keep improving and learning from our mistakes? At Sketchin we practice team retrospectives, a great way to improve interpersonal dynamics, keep track of and learn from our mistakes, and āmeasureā the mood of each team member. Orion team strives to run a retrospective at...
Designing remote work (part1)
I am sitting at my kitchen table and just finished a conference call with my colleagues who are respectively at home, in our studio in Milan, at a conference in Lisbon. Remote work is one of the hottest trends in the organizational management field, a quite straightforward...
How Our Design Team Collaborates Remotely
Our Design team at Help Scout is distributed across three continents and five time zones ā working remotely, but paired closely with Engineering, Marketing and Content teams located in a further 50+ cities around the globe. From little home studios in suburbia, to coffee shops...