Photography: Giorgio Montersino

Summer is the season that does the most to separate the employees from the freelancers. As the wage-slaves walk away from their cubicles and head to the beaches, leaving all thoughts of work behind them, the self-employed are just as likely to be packing their laptops along with their suntan lotion. It’s not the best idea; time away is vital for recharging batteries, rebuilding enthusiasm and rethinking strategies, but when clients need satisfying and you’re your own boss, there’s no getting away from The Man even when you’re on vacation… because The Man is you. Here are six rules for the best ways to combine work with pleasure.

1. Forget About Working on the Beach

It’s the ultimate cliché for freelancers, the image presented by Internet marketers across the Web. You get to work while lying on your lounger, sipping a margarita and soaking up the rays.

And it won’t fly.

Good work requires focus, and you’re not going to find that focus when the water is calling you in and you’re worrying about sand getting sucked into your laptop fan. The beach is not an office, and anything you can do while working on your tan can be done a lot faster — and a lot better — in a more professional environment.

Head back to your hotel room, drag your computer into the lobby or better still, make use of the hotel’s executive lounge or business services room and give your work an hour or two of undivided attention. That will free up undivided hours of fun.

2. Do the Minimum

Even in a business lounge, you’re going to feel the pull of the pool and the drag of the daiquiri. You’re not going to be as productive, as focused or as inspired as you usually feel when you’re in your office and know that you’ve got the entire day to do your work.

So only do what you really have to do, and try to make the work as brainless as possible. Emails are fine, necessary organizational work can pass, reading, editing and analysis can even be enjoyable. But try to do something that requires serious creativity and deep concentration, and there’s a good chance that you’ll be coming up short. Your client would rather wait and receive the best.

3. Use Automated Messages

Even if you’re checking your email daily, it’s reasonable to assume that your response times are going to be slower than usual, especially if you have to hand out a long reply with lots of details.

Give yourself an excuse.

Use the automated message system to let people know that you’re away and will get back to them when you return to work. If they hear back from you sooner they’ll only be impressed by your commitment and dedication to their needs. They’re also less likely to demand a quick turnaround.

4. Don’t Make Any Promises

Coming up with deadlines and time estimates is difficult at the best of times but it’s even harder when you’re having the time of your life. You might have set yourself two hours of work every day you’re on vacation, but there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to keep to that commitment, and you’ll have little idea of how much you’ll actually be able to get done in those two hours when everyone else around you is having fun and you keep looking at the surf visible from your window.

Keep any delivery dates vague, mention that you’re away and promise to hand the work over as soon as you can. Clients tend to be understanding about vacations and downtime — they wouldn’t want their own vacations disturbed — so this is an opportunity to make small promises, pull out your excuse… and then win points by overdelivering.

5. Consider Your Partner

Anything you do for your clients while you’re on vacation will make them happy. But working for your clients means that you’re not spending time with your travel partner, and that’s going to make them unhappy.

The person you’re with needs to be considered too so pick work times that interfere as little as possible with their plans. Even pool times can be tricky: people tend to want company while they’re lying by the water, even if it’s only a pair of extra hands to slap on the oil. But vacations do have their own rhythms and schedules so there’s often a time in the late afternoon, when the sun is sinking and the touring is over, that vacationers tend to settle down with a book or a light snooze before dinner. That can be a good moment to fire up the laptop and shoot out those emails. Talk it over with your partner beforehand though so that he or she knows what to expect and can plan time alone. Work might be hard to avoid but skipping disappointment should be easy.

6. Clear the Desk

The most important rule when it comes to working on vacation  is to plan ahead. You want to be going away with as little as possible to do: just enough to keep things ticking over.  So write blog posts in advance so that you only have to publish them. Do the research early so that you’re not making phone calls from your hotel room. Tell your clients in advance so that they don’t have great expectations.

And assume that when you get back, you’re going to be snowed under for the first few days.

Tell people that you’re taking your laptop on vacation and they’ll tell you you’re mad. That’s a  reaction that only tells you that they’re not self-employed. Work-free vacations might be ideal but for freelancers who make their own income, they’re also almost impossible. Assume that you’ll be working on vacation but work to make sure that when you’re away, you’re also working as little as possible.

Because if anyone deserves a real break, it’s the freelancers and entrepreneurs who take their bosses with them on vacation.

Photography: askpang

If there was a prize available for dedication to the job and the ability to do it in the most trying of conditions then Lee Unkrich would surely have won it. Earlier this year, the Pixar director pasted a photo of himself on Twitter editing Toy Story 3 while sitting on a flight at 36,000 feet. Of course, he cheated. Judging by the snazzy seat back, it looks like Lee wasn’t typing with his knees behind his ears in Cattle Class. He also broke the rules. Not the rules that prevent you from grabbing your bag as the plane touches down and standing by the exit or spending the entire flight in the bathroom, a private cabin where there’s room to stretch your legs, but just about all of the unspoken rules that dictate the right and wrong ways to work on a plane.

The rules are new. They’ve only developed over the last few years as long haul flights have added electricity sockets that make it possible to work without keeping an eye on a computer’s battery level and as some have added Internet access. Now that it’s possible to take an entire office with you in your carry-on baggage and plug it into a plane’s infrastructure, today’s digital, high-flying nomads need to know what they can and can’t do when they’re working in the clouds.

The first thing you can’t do is expect privacy. Take your laptop to a café and you can try to pick a seat with the back to the wall so that nobody is reading over your shoulder. You can certainly expect a table of your own so that no one is sharing your eye-space. Mostly though, you can rely on the fact that the other café customers are too busy with their own lives to show more than a passing interest in yours.

On a plane, passengers have no lives. Their entertainment choices are limited by whatever happens to be on the screen in front of them and their diversions are restricted to the media material they’ve brought with them. With hours to kill, it doesn’t matter whether your job involves creating a new battle strategy for Afghanistan or counting dots on a screen, it’s going to look more interesting than the back of the next seat.

What Happens on the Plane, Stays on the Plane

That limits the kind of work you can do. Putting on the screen anything even remotely confidential is out of bounds — such as a new battle strategy for Afghanistan or the unedited rushes of a brand-new Disney movie. And you can’t write anything about your fellow travelers either. Lee Unkrich went on to tweet that how his neighbor showed little interest in what he was doing, a hint that she was missing a giant opportunity. That was probably just as well. She might have been less than happy to see herself being discussed with tens of thousands of people thousands of miles away. It’s not a good idea to irritate someone you’re stuck next to for seven hours.

If the first rule of working on a plane then is not to work on anything confidential, the second is that what other people are doing on the plane stays on the plane — especially if they’re doing it in the next seat.

The third rule is not to bother anyone, another rule that restricts the kind of work you can do. Making a fitness video using your computer’s web cam is obviously out but so is anything that involves lots of speaker noise, shouts of frustration or pacing around. In fact, if you know you’re going to be working on the plane, it’s not a rule but it is a good idea to book a window seat. Your own ability to take microbreaks will be limited but you won’t be forcing other people to ask you to remove your headphones and lift your computer every time they need to stroll the aisle. That would bother them too. Some working travelers have even been known to take their own thermos flasks of coffee, a choice that means they don’t have to take frequent trips to the galley to load up on fresh beans — an essential lubricant for some when it comes to keeping their main work-muscle greased. (On the other hand, if that coffee means lots of running to the bathroom, then it’s probably best to work without it).

Don’t Do It Unless You Have To

The second most important rule though is to choose the right kind of work for you to do on the plane.

No one, not even the most Donald Trump of bosses, expects an employee to put in the hours while wedged into an Economy Class seat. A flight then is one time when you don’t have to work if you don’t want to, and you don’t have to feel guilty about your choice. You are free to relax with a DVD and to use the seat’s electricity socket to play computer games for seven hours if that makes the journey less painful. If you do think about work, choose something important, that isn’t more irritating than waiting for the flight to end and that needs to be done right away. Adding the final touches to a talk or presentation, for example, makes a good choice. That’s information that’s going to be shared anyway, so it’s unlikely to break any confidentiality rules. It’s likely to be something you’ll need shortly after you arrive so it’s suitably urgent. And it’s not something that requires a huge amount of focus and brain power so it shouldn’t hurt too much. A bit of light-hearted blogging should also work but reading and research make for some of the best uses of flying time.

But the most important rule to follow when working on a plane is not to do it unless you really have to — and unless you don’t mind the rest of the plane thinking that you’re a workaholic who’s too disorganized to take a few hours off. When other passengers see someone working on a plane, as a rule, that’s what they think.

Photography: Samikki

You can find them in every café that has a wireless connection. Hunched over their keyboards, today’s digital nomads have managed to turn every coffee bar into an office and every table with more than one chair into a meeting room. But while they might all be typing in similar places, café workers come in a  number of different flavors. Here are the seven types of café worker you can expect to find in your local latte bar:

1. The Networker

The Networker wants to be friends with everyone. He (or she) will see everyone else with a keyboard as a potential contact and every other café-worker as someone who can help them find a new client, a new partner — or even a proper job. So they’ll smile and be friendly, introduce themselves and chat — and do it all when you’re keenest to get down to work.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for an introduction or want to know what the Geek in the corner does, then the Networker is the person to know.

2. The Nomad

The Nomad is always on the move. She (or he) will turn up, drop their bag, open their laptop and disappear. The computer will sit on the table, humming away but they’ll be nowhere to be seen. After a few hours, they’ll return and either pack up their bag or have a swipe at the mousepad to bring the computer back to life before vanishing again.

It’s as though they expect the computer to do the work for them while they enjoy the day, which — if it were true — would mean that we’d have to call them “The Genius.”

If you’re really lucky, you might even come across the Indebted Nomad. A Nomad sub-species, these don’t just leave their computers on the desk, they also ask other people to watch them. You’re then left wondering whether you’re responsible if someone steals it while you’re getting a refill and find yourself feeling your sense of responsibility battle against your bladder.

3. The Hog

The Nomad takes up one spot on a table and one electricity socket but for the Hog, an entire café isn’t big enough. They’ll take a table for four, even when a table for two is available, plug every gadget ever made by Apple into all of the electricity sockets (before trailing the wire for their laptop halfway across the café), and regard other seats as coatstands, bag racks and additional desks. Most frequently found in Starbucks, where busy baristas are less likely to move them on, Hogs are famous for the dirty looks they give when you ask them very nicely if they wouldn’t mind terribly letting you plug your laptop into a socket before it dies.

The answer is usually, yes, they would mind. Their supercharged iPod Nano is more important.

4. The Socialite

For most café workers, their biggest friend is their laptop — and they don’t need anyone else. If they want conversation, there’s Twitter or, if they’re really desperate, they can ask the waiter for another drink. But when you’re serious about work, you want to keep the word stuff to a minimum.

The Socialite disagrees. For this brand of café dweller, watering holes are places not just to work but to meet, chat and sometimes to meet and chat about work. So while you’re trying to focus on your screen, at the next table four people are planning global corporate domination, sketching out their new development or watching a presentation.

They even have the cheek to give you dirty looks if you try to listen.

5. The Talker

Socialites chatting up a storm at the next table are annoying enough, whether they’re talking business or pleasure. Talkers though are far worse. These café citizens travel alone but are connected to the rest of the world through their mobile phones — which are almost permanently attached to their ears. As soon as a conversation ends and the phone hits the table, it immediately rings again, giving the rest of the café a chance to hear once again their very impressive Lady Gaga ringtone.

It’s not so much that the talk that can be so irritating to other café workers, it’s that they only provide half the conversation. Following a meeting organized by socialites can be interesting. You get to feel like you’re gatecrashing someone else’s board meeting. Trying to listen in on a conversation that only gives you one half of the chat however, is an exercise in frustration. And distraction.

6. The Moaner

One of the trickiest things about working in a café is finding the right café. Some places are filled with shoppers and tired children — you don’t want to try to work over the sound of gossip and screaming. Others are packed with students cramming for exams. They’re usually the worst kinds of Hogs, Talkers and Socialites. The key is to find a café that’s quiet enough to work, where you’ll be generally ignored, and which has enough power points for you not to have to fight someone for electricity.

Some café workers though ignore the search, pick the first café they see and try to change it — by complaining constantly. Moaners ask for the music to be turned down, the air conditioning turned up, the door left open, then closed. They’ll send back their coffee and say the croissant is too cold, ask the children at the next table to keep it down a bit and frighten the daylights out of the waiters. It makes for fun watching but not the best office mate.

7. The Geek

But the worst type of café worker by far is the Geek. Their fingers never leave the keyboard, their screen never flits back to the delights and temptations of the Internet. They’re focused on their work and they’re getting things done. Absolutely undistractable, they’re the superheroes of the café-working world — the people who come to a café and actually work.

Other types of café worker will try to console themselves by telling themselves that the Geek must be on a very tight deadline or that he doesn’t have any kind of home office — or even a home — but the fact, is the Geek is just the kind of focused, driven worker who achieves things, even when working alone in a café.

On the plus side, if they’re alone it’s probably because no one like geeks.

Photography: Ben McLeod

Working from home is a whole new way of working — a revolution in industry, in society, in the way we live. Or is it? While making a living by sitting in a café with a frappucino and a two-way link to the cloud might be something your parents never dreamed of doing, the idea that you can ignore the corporate world and earn from home is actually about as modern as iron horseshoes and knitting needles. In fact, not only are today’s home-based tech workers more traditional than the average cubicle drone, they actually have a long way to go before their numbers come close to those of the good old days despite recent trends.

According to the US Census Office, the number of people who work at home  more than two days a week increased between 1980 and 1990 by 56 percent from 2.2 million to 3.4 million.That’s a remarkable rise and one made all the more impressive by happening before the expansion of the Internet. In the decade following 1990, as communications improved and email replaced memos, the figures increased by a further 22.8 percent to reach 4.2 million people. By 2000, the Census Office reports, 3.3 percent of the working population was able to skip the commute for most of their workweek.

When One in Fourteen Worked from Home

But those are still significantly lower than the numbers in 1960 when almost 4.7 million people were earning their keep from home – a full 7.2 percent of the population. That number halved over the following twenty years, a decline which the Census Office puts down primarily to the closure of family farms and the movement of doctors and other professionals away from home offices and towards large shared practices.

But it wasn’t just the last of the small farmers and home-visiting doctors who were able to call their homes their workspaces in the 1960s. Some of the most important contributions to American culture were being produced in home offices even before the era of free love and one-way commutes to Southeast Asia.

Pay a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s home in Oak Park, Illinois, for example, and you’ll be able to see not just the house in which the creator of the Prairie style lived from 1889-1909 but also the office in which he designed 125 of the country’s most important structures. Nor was his own home just a workplace. It was also an architectural laboratory on which he tested his design concepts and theories. Most home workers work in their house. Frank Lloyd Wright’s house was also his work.

That a creative professional like an architect should be able to avoid an office building is perhaps not surprising. Designers, painters, sculptors and other arty types tend to work alone, relying on their own inspiration to deliver their ideas. They rarely need the kinds of equipment that’s best supplied by large office buildings and having secretaries, assistants, sales staff and watercoolers around might even be distracting. Around 40 percent of artists are believed to work from home studios – or at least they do until children come along and claim the studio as their bedroom.

The Web’s Work from Home Industrial Revolution

According to the 1990 census though, almost half of all home workers were in the service industries, which included business and repair work,  entertainment and recreation, and “other professional and related services.” By 2000, 1.9 million people were providing “professional services” from home – by far the most popular category – but there were also more than 42,000 people preparing food professionally in their own kitchens and over half a million cutting hair, giving massages and  delivering other kinds of personal care. Interestingly, almost 5,000 people in the fishing, hunting and forestry professions worked from home at the start of the millennium too. You have to wonder about the size of their yards.

Even this variety might not be anything new. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the Industrial Revolution was the movement to cities as factories became the shared workspaces of a new urban working class. But what were those new proletarians doing before the opening of the mills and the invention of automated looms that could fill factory floors and lop off children’s fingers? Some, as in early twentieth century America, would have been driving horses on farms but others would have been crafting from home. For women in particular, the loss of hand looms to the spinning jenny meant a shift away from home and family to cotton mills and hard-nosed bosses. For men too, the rise of the assembly line marked the end of the kind of sweating, hammering and hand-crafting of unreliable quality that could be done in a home workshop.

Interestingly, Peter Sweeney, Founder & CTO of semantic technology firm Primal Fusion, has described Web 3.0 as the Internet’s own industrial revolution, a time when the social connections of Web 2.0 gives way to the automated production of content. Wolfram Alpha, he says, is one example of the way in which information can be produced automatically and without the kind of work-at-home handicraft that predated Dickens and which now characterizes the Web’s co-working content producers.

That sounds unlikely. Easy communication is only going to increase the return to home-working and recession hit tech-types who have spent the last few months consulting from home will take some persuading to get back to the traffic jams when the economy does pick up. But today’s home-workers are now primarily tapping keyboards rather than driving tractors. They’re in the cities rather than in the dust fields of Oklahoma (although many of them, like those former agriculturalists, are also now in California). And unlike independent spinners and weavers, they find that they can compete easily with the productivity levels of factory and office-based employees.

Working from home then isn’t a new way of working. It’s a return to an old, traditional – and more enjoyable — way of working, and don’t let the Luddites tell you otherwise.

When Steve Jobs pulled a Macbook Air out of a manila envelope at MacWorld 2008 it was a seminal moment. Not only did the new machine have the usual Apple-sexy design and must-have looks that have been thrilling fanboys even since before the birth of the first iPod. It was also incredibly light yet still feature-heavy. Jobs showed that an office was no longer a place where you can find an envelope; an envelope was now capable of holding an entire office.

It’s a revolution whose effects can be seen in cafés across the country. Wherever coffee is poured, croissants are served and wi-fi is delivered for no additional charge, tables are full of laptops stuffed with professional software and manned by tech types who are writing code, creating designs or typing emails. They might not be doing it on Macbook Airs, but they’re not doing it in company offices either.

They’re also not doing it in company. Today’s freelancers might have little need of a corporate parking space, a suit or a cubicle but everyone needs social interaction, the inevitable bonus — together with office politics and juicy gossip — that comes with the traditional workspace.

Freelancing with Friends

That’s the addition that co-working is supposed to deliver. The practice is believed to have started in early 2006, when roommates Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford invited their freelancing friends to work together at their apartment. Jelly, as they called the meetup, has now become a regular event taking place at venues from Beijing to Bangalore that allow freelancing types to meet, chat and work in a social environment. Independent workers can keep the “free” part of freelancing but still enjoy the banter that makes office working bearable.

One of Jelly’s first attendees was Tony Bacigalupo, a work-at-home project manager for Desktop Solutions.

“Working from home was awesome, until it started to drive me crazy,” he told us. 
“I needed to get out of the house and work alongside other people, and figured there were other people out there in the same position.

“After attending my first event, I was blown away by the great people I worked alongside. I was hooked. Started going to every Jelly I could.”

Jelly only happened once every two weeks. Tony though worked every day so when he learned of a new coworking community which would always be open, he became one of the group’s leaders. CooperBricolage met for a month in an East Village café, but it quickly became clear that there was a need for a dedicated co-working space in Manhattan to supplement the one that had already opened in Brooklyn.

New Work City opened on Varick Street at the beginning of November, 2008, and is now used by between 40 and 50 people a month. Most are members, paying monthly fees that range from $25 for access one day a month to as much as $550 for a key granting access 24/7, storage space, a mailing address and priority use of the conference room. A number of the site’s users are also occasional visitors or people from out of town who pay a $25 daily rate. Most are tech types, developers, designers, consultants, startups and managers who get to enjoy fast wireless Internet and a seat at a desk or shared table.

Membership fell when the site opened just as the economy crashed but newly laid-off workers are also coming to New Work City. Many of them, Tony believes, may choose not to return to the office and full-time employment at all.

Coworking’s Extra Value

The fees then don’t seem to be putting people off even though they make Starbucks’ three dollar coffees — with a table and next door’s Internet access thrown in for nothing — look like good value. New Work City is profitable. No one earns a salary for running the place but the fees bring in more revenue than New Work City spends and Tony is looking at ways to scale up so that it can employ staff.

That suggests a dedicated co-working space does deliver something valuable that’s missing even in a coffee house filled with freelancers.

“Context,” explains Tony. “When working in a cafe, you might be working alongside other people, but you don’t have any good way of connecting with these people. Also, many freelancers and entrepreneurs could use better resources than a typical cafe setup: a faster, more consistent Internet connection, conference room, printing capabilities, a desk, etc.”

Presumably though, those connections also brings distractions. Offices have doors and even cubicles have walls, allowing employees to focus on productivity without being tempted to look at the viral video being watched on the screen next to them. Tony concedes that coworking can indeed bring diversions but points out that the people who come to New Work City are hard-working types who are serious about what they do. They have fun, he argues, but their industriousness is inspiring and that in itself can help productivity.

More importantly, the knowledge possessed — and shared by people at the same table — can open whole new opportunities.

“[D]istractions tend to be of a productive slant — in a given day of coworking, one might easily come home having learned about a new site or project or having discussed a new idea that helps them in a way they didn’t expect,” says Tony. “We call the phenomenon ‘accelerated serendipity.’”

Getting the most out of a coworking space then means doing more than turning up and staying longer than you can sit comfortably in a café with one cup of coffee and something sweet and flaky. It means talking with the other members, helping to plan and run events, contributing to improving the workspace and swapping ideas and knowledge.

It means helping to create a community out of the disparate workers who fill the space.

“Over time, the value of the community becomes really irreplaceable,” says Tony. “For collaboration, sharing knowledge, networking, and even just for social needs, the coworking space brings people together to fill those roles.”

It’s a thought that would once have occurred to only a few people — writers maybe, who need little more than Word, a telephone and an Internet connection to churn out their texts, and graphic designers, who are happy anywhere they have a Mac, an Adobe suite and a place to show off their creative coolness.

All of them at some point would have had that killer thought: “I could be doing this at home.”

They would have realized that actually they don’t need the firm’s computer. They don’t need the company of the co-worker in the cubicle next door, and they certainly don’t need the morning commute.

They could sit at home – or better still in a café – work at their own pace, at the times that suit them best and send over the completed work when they’re done.

It’s a thought that’s apparently been spreading. Freelance sites like eLance and RentaCoder are now packed with tech types who have realized that they too can have a home office, a regular seat at Starbucks and a nocturnal schedule if they want.

It’s the Freedom of Freelancing that Matters

It’s a very different way of working, a method that swaps the security of a fixed monthly salary for the fear of losing a client, but in return delivers pay that’s directly linked to the amount of work completed and the freedom to knock off when you want.

And it’s the freedom that’s the thing. Freedom from the boss. Freedom to plan your day. Freedom to take control over your life without having to ask anyone’s permission first.

So why then did Odysseas Tsatalos and Stratis Karamanlakis, two engineers who wanted to collaborate on a project while one was in the US and the other in Greece, create oDesk?

At first glance, oDesk looks like yet another freelance site, a place where buyers post jobs and providers from Michigan to Mumbai bid to see who’s prepared to do it for the smallest bag of peanuts. It appears to be exactly the sort of service that eLance, with its critical mass of providers, has been squishing faster than Bill Gates has been swatting media player makers.

But it isn’t. It’s different. It’s the freedom of freelancing combined with the control of Big Brother. Providers have to log in before they start work and oDesk records the amount of time they spend online, sending screenshots back to the buyer every ten minutes to prove they’re being productive. Each week, the buyer receives a timelog allowing them to compare the amount billed to the amount of work completed.

“oDesk allows managers to visually track and verify all work performed through its web-based collaboration tools,” explains Gary Swart, CEO of oDesk. “This approach makes remote work relationships as reliable and open as working in the same physical office. The transparency that oDesk brings helps to build trust quickly and it enables better collaboration, much like managing by walking around.”

It sounds like a dream for buyers and a nightmare for providers. And yet, freelancers are lining up to clock in. The site, which was launched in 2004 with support from Benchmark Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Sigma Partners and DAG Ventures, now has around 150,000 providers and posts 2,500 new jobs every week. Much of that work is are tech-related. Software programming, Web development, graphic design, online research, virtual assistance and technical writing are the most popular services requested.

But here’s the thing: according to a totalizer on the home page, those jobs have paid out more than $52 million. The average value of a job posted on oDesk is around $5,000, much higher than the three-figure sums usually exchanged on eLance.

You Can Throw Small Projects over the Wall

That’s not because the buyers are generous sorts, willing to dig deeper than they need to. It’s because the jobs themselves are bigger and more likely to be open-ended. oDesk works because it’s not so much a freelance site that helps independent workers find projects; it’s a service that allows virtual workers to form teams over distance.

“[F]or small projects where requirements are fixed and firm… you can get comfortable throwing work over the wall with the risk of not knowing where things stand, but most oDesk work isn’t like that.” explains Gary. “Most oDesk work is long-term and it often involves close collaboration among people that have never met in person and are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles apart… We enable companies to maintain control and build true online global teams that work much like a local team.”

The hourly pay model means that projects can grow and blend into new work without the complaints of mission creep familiar to freelancers or the hassle of renegotiation. Buyers can be certain they’re only paying for the amount of time actually worked while providers have a reason to keep one eye on the clock and stay productive. Some providers apparently have picked up so much work that they’ve become buyers themselves, building their own virtual teams and outsourcing their work openly so that the client can hire a complete virtual tech company.

There used to be a time when an employee starting with a new company could feel that he had a job for life. That employment model has now gone the way of office ashtrays and female secretaries who take dictation. Loyalty from each side is now only as deep as the next job offer or the next recession. But freelancing – the hi-tech answer to job insecurity — might be changing too. While it’s still possible to work by project, it’s also becoming increasingly possible to work from home while still being temporarily employed by a single company, even if that employer is on the other side of the globe.

It’s a new way to work from home but with the boss just a ten-minute screenshot away, it doesn’t leave much of the “free” in freelancing.

If every cloud has a silver lining, the skies these days should be raining precious metal. The economy has been shrinking for a year, recruitment firms are awash with gilt-edged resumes and barely a week passes without some other major company either firing out P45s or filing for bankruptcy. Even Adobe recently told 600 workers to start shopping around for a new job.

You’d think that being part-owners of a pile of banks would make us all feel a lot richer than this.

These are tense times, times when it pays not just to have your contact book ready to hand and your LinkedIn profile up to date, but time too to have a plan in mind.

Or even better, two plans in mind.

Work from Home while You Build your Dream

One plan should be the goal you’ve always wanted to achieve – the business you’ve always wanted to build, the killer idea you’re fairly sure will buy you a Caribbean island, even the novel you’ve long been planning to write – but never had the time to work towards. If there is a flash of silver in the sky – and it’s not some business being struck by lightning – it’s that if your daily schedule is about to look fairly empty, you’ll soon have the opportunity to do all of those things you’ve always wanted to do.

But businesses, ideas and novels take time to create and in the meantime, you still need a plan that will continue to pay the mortgage and put food on the table for the kids to stick to the wall. That means doing things you might not have chosen to do but which you do because they pay, and because you can do them. And most importantly, you do them because you can do them from home, in your own time, with the understanding that you get to choose whether it’s a temporary thing until something better comes along or a whole new career with the kind of flexibility you’ve always really wanted.

Administrative work, for example, might not be for everyone but when you can do it virtually, it starts to look a lot more attractive. That’s especially true when administration can be stretched to include database management and website maintenance.

From Typing to Blogging

Andrea Pixley’s work day, for example, stretches from just 10am until 2pm and includes administrating pay-per-click accounts and maintaining ecommerce and customer support websites for four owners of small businesses, some of which are also home-based. Andrea, who lives in Columbia, SC, has been a virtual assistant since 2000 and chose to do it as a way of spending more time with her children who were small when she started.

Contact with clients is maintained through Andrea’s office phone, toll-free voicemail, email, fax, instant messaging and a cell phone for emergencies.

“Each client contacts me by the method that works best for them,” she says.

Australian Kathie Thomas has been a virtual assistant for even longer. She opened her home-based business back in 1996 and although she started by providing basic secretarial functions such as typing, data entry and-phone answering, her tasks too now cover roles more akin to tech support than coffee-making and paper-filing.

“As my knowledge of the web grew and developed I got into database management, Internet research, website maintenance and then design, Web hosting, and also blogging,” she told us. “I love blogging!”

Her clients largely consist of business coaches and professional speakers for whom Kathie manages databases, websites, online newsletters and sales.

According to a 2008 survey conducted by the Virtual Assistance Chamber of Commerce, a support group, over a fifth of virtual assistants have a four-year college degree and a further 9 percent have more than four years of college behind them. Hourly fees tend to be in the range of $30-$39 although two of the 500 respondents polled in the survey said that they charged $90 or more, and seven reported annual incomes of more than $100,000.

The advantages for the women who do this work – and it is primarily women; the survey found that almost 98 percent of virtual assistants are female and more than half are aged between 30 and 49 – are clear. They can work from home, according to a schedule that they set and they’re free to choose the number of hours they work too. Asked why she works as a virtual assistant, Kathie replied with one word: “convenience.”

” I love being at home, I love being here for my family. I like my space, my privacy and not having to tell anyone where I’m going if I choose to go out,”  she explained “ I choose the hours I want to work and the type of work I want to do.”

Even camaraderie can be provided through one of the many forums set up to help virtual assistants solve problems, swap ideas and stay in touch.

And the advantage for the client is clear too. Although many companies choose to pay a monthly retainer, they only pay for hours worked not simply for an assistant’s presence in the office. Nor do they have to supply office equipment or, more importantly, pay for their insurance, health care, sick leave or vacation time.

Breaking in doesn’t have to be too difficult either. Almost half of the virtual assistants surveyed said that they had picked up their first client within a month of opening their business and a similar percentage reported referrals as their most effective marketing stream. There’s now a range of different services providing training and accreditation, including AssistU and Kathie’s own course at VATrainer.

The work itself might not be right everyone. It requires attention to detail, a head for administration and a willingness to work for others even while working for yourself. But it does offer one additional benefit.

If your other plan works out, you can easily give up being a virtual assistant… and hire one.

Photography: asmythie

Progress is a wonderful thing. There was a time when computers were the size of office buildings. Soon they were the size of offices. Things began to take off when they could fit comfortably inside an office. Now they contain Office.

Stick your laptop in your bag and your mobile in your pocket and you’ve got everything you need to do business and complete a day’s work.

Short of a chair, a table and an Internet connection.

It’s the need for those three things that has sent mobile workers out searching for places to park their Macs and write their emails. Starbucks might well be the world’s largest purveyor of over-priced coffee-based drinks, but among today’s digital nomads it’s probably best known as the world’s cheapest landlord of temporary office space.

Step into any bean parlor today, and you’ll find table after single-chaired table filled with tech types typing frantically on their keyboards.

But cafes have their disadvantages. You can’t sit in one for more than two hours on a single cup of coffee without looking like a cheapskate, and if you buy a cake as well, they soon become too expensive to use every day.

Worse, at some point after a couple of hours, you’ll need the bathroom which gives you the ultimate dilemma of choosing whether to leave your computer in a public place, asking a stranger to keep an eye on it, chaining it to the table or, even more suspiciously, taking it with you.

And of course, cafes don’t just come with coffee, they also come with people — people who talk, laugh, order drinks and ask you to look after their computers while they go to the bathroom. Cafes are nice for short work bursts and tasks that don’t demand too much concentration, but they’re not offices.

Co-working does provide an office and it provides company too. While that’s not what everyone needs every time they have a project to complete, working alongside other digital nomads can beat the loneliness that comes from being a one-person business. The connections too can often lead in all sorts of interesting directions.

“[A] lot of times because you were working alongside someone you would end up working with them on projects, especially because you are in a more social setting where if something is funky with your website, you’ll inevitably shout out ‘does anyone know why my page isn’t validating?’” Ryanne Hodson, co-founder of co-working site The Hat Factory, has told us. “You get to know people’s skills pretty quick and can recommend them for jobs and vice versa.”

But even co-working costs money and seeing the same people every day can generate the office gossip that being independent was supposed to save you from. Fortunately, there are still a few more options.

Turning the Library into an Office

One is to head for your local library. Unlike a café or a co-working space, you can be reasonably confident of finding silence here.  Most should also provide free wireless Internet and there’s no limit to the length of time you can sit before getting dark looks from a librarian.

You won’t find company here in the way that you can make friends in a café or co-working space and having spent much of your student days trying to avoid the library, it might feel a little strange to spend your working days hanging out in one every day. Worse, because library-working hasn’t really taken off, the people you’ll be working alongside are likely to be retired types and the unemployed. These days though, that second category is likely to include a bunch of familiar faces.

Libraries can be fine when you really want to focus and don’t want to be disturbed, but they’re studious not industrious. They make you feel like a college kid not a budding entrepreneur.

Hang out in Parks

Another alternative then is to make the most of your freedom and head for the wide open spaces. Roll up a blanket, pack some food and squeeze in some Red Bull to stop you falling asleep in the sun and work in the park. You’ll be able to find a spot with a beautiful view, and feel grateful that you have the kind of independent job that means that you’re not only boss-free but wall-free too.

It sounds ideal and it is if you’re planning to read a book, work without a deadline, have the kind of Yoga skills that can make working on the ground in Cobra comfortable or find a Web connection a distraction rather than a necessity.

And if the weather’s good too which, of course, it isn’t always.

For summer projects that don’t have to be produced under pressure, the park can be a pleasant addition to your office options. For other times, you’re going to need somewhere more indoors.

Become a Hotel Guest

A hotel is indoors and offers two kinds of work spaces. Rooms are available for paying guests and are usually the default options for laptop-packing travelers who need to get some work done on the move. They offer privacy and a desk. But they also provide the feeling of working in a bedroom and an Internet connection for an eye-watering fee. It’s clearly not worth paying the nightly rental just to give yourself a space to work for a few hours (even if authors are known to do it sometimes) but if you’re on the road and need somewhere more personal than Starbucks to get your work done,  the room is usually the default option.

The lobby though is open to everyone. As in a café, you’ll have to order something and even a cup of coffee in a swanky hotel is likely to burn a hole in your wallet. But you can stay there for hours, and if you pick the right hotel you should find that it’s full of business types rather than chatty tourists, and it should be quieter than most cafes too.

You’ll need to be in the sort of town that has big business hotels and the expense means that you won’t be able to do it every day, but when you really want to get out of the house while still getting some work done, a hotel lobby may be just the ticket.

Stay at Home

But then again, home does have its attractions. You might not actually want to work in your underwear or even your pajamas but there is something to be said for a commute that you can measure in steps rather than traffic lights.

In practice, digital nomads work in all sorts of different ways. It might be easy to say that social types use co-working spaces, lurkers prefer cafes, and sociopaths hide in the library but different projects and different times demand different kinds of work environments. Unlike salaried types though, freelancers always have a range of different offices to choose from.

It’s been said that if you don’t have a plan to grow your business within the next five years, you’re likely to hit stagnation at some point. Whether you’re a freelancer, contractor or consider yourself an entrepreneur, even if your financial goals are small, it’s worth setting them so that you have something concrete to work towards.

On the other hand, some people are afraid to set big goals either for fear of failure or because they don’t believe they’re capable of achieving them.

Consider for a moment that you want to earn $100K/ year, gross, working only 20 days/ month, for a maximum of 50 weeks/ year. If you’re only earning $40K/year from your business, it might be emotionally difficult to believe $100K is possible, let alone anything more. But if you break that down into a daily rate ($400), the number is not so intimidating.

Tips
Here are some tips for setting your business financial goals.

1. Have a concrete financial goal. For the sake of argument, say it’s to earn $240K/ year in revenue from all sources, active and passive. Can you do it? Absolutely. Will you do it? Maybe. Do you have an emotionally strong reason to reach this financial goal? Is it strong enough to carry you through tough times.

2. Make the goal easier. Break the goal down into stages. For example, $240K/year might be emotionally difficult to accept. Break it down to monthly ($20K), weekly (~$4.6K), or even daily (~$660) earnings.

3. Build multiple streams of income. An earnings rate of $660/day might seem intimidating, might be hard to accept emotionally. That’s because the tendency when you’re starting out is to think, “What job could I do that would earn me that much?” If you think that way, then you’re already defeated already.

If you’re building your own business, then you have to think like a business owner, even if you’re just freelancing or contracting. Successful businesses typically offer more than one product and/or service over time. In a similar vein, you can build your financial goals from multiple streams of income. You’re building your revenue in multiple ways, never reliant on just one.

Key to making multiple streams of income work for you is that you maximize the passive streams. There’s no point in trying earn extra income if you have to work day and night to do so. However, if you spend some extra time initially to build passive streams, they may pay off in the future. There are many online opportunities for building passive income.

Having multiple streams of income, especially passive, gives you several benefits. Firstly, because you’re not reliant on one stream, you’re less likely to be in a situation where you have to take a gig or contract that you don’t like. Secondly, because you lift the feeling of desperation, the positive state this creates carries over to your entire way of running your business, doing your work.

4. Know what you need to do. Understand what your financial goal means mechanically. That is, how many hours of work, how many projects at a certain rate, how many units of sales, etc. Determine this for all your streams based on historical information.

Obviously, some income streams will earn more than others, but it’s far easier to emotionally accept the possibility of achieving your goal of $20K/month if you have multiple sources.

5. Build your timeframe. Step backwards. Use reverse tunneling to move backwards through your goal, to break it into easier to achieve smaller goals. For example, if you want $200K/ month in Dec 2009, what do you need achieve (sales and actions) in Nov 2009? Now what about in Oct 2009? Step backwards in consistent increments (in this one month).

Example
If you’re only earning your income from one source, say freelance writing, then think about how much work you have to produce each and every day to earn $660. Unless you’re one of those fortunate (and skilled) few commanding high rates per project, then that’s an awful lot of planning, researching and writing. Instead, think in terms of a number of services (multiple streams of income) at different rates. Include as many passive income streams as possible.

Types and Sources of Income
Here are few types of income you should consider:

1. hourly rate
2. daily rate
3. project rates
4. monthly income
5. passive income – note that there’s no restriction in terms of earning period, but often passive income is paid out monthly if you’re working online.

Here are some possible income sources, generically speaking:

1. active
   1. salary
   2. freelance
   3. contract
   4. advances
   5. bonuses
2. passive/ semi-passive
   1. advertising revenue
   2. ebook sales
   3. web service subscriptions
   4. royalties
   5. interest
   6. dividends
3. windfalls
4. capital gains

Which combination of income strams you aim for is really up to you, and dependent on the kind of work you’re interested in. It depends on your current situation, your knowledge, available time, and career and financial goals.

It’s important to keep in mind that passive revenue streams do require some initial effort. If you don’t have large blocks of time to devote to building what will become passive streams of income, then you may have to take a piecemeal approach.

An example of passive income is royalties from a book. The advance you get for writing it is active income. If you get asked to write a second edition, the earnings from that are semi-passive.

Semi-passive income refers to streams that require some ongoing effort to maintain. Another example is a subscription-based website. Keeping the site active with either a moderated forum or with fresh new articles, or both, is what will keep people coming back. This will also draw new visitors who might become subscribers. These new people will either supplement your current subscriber base or replace those that leave.

Photography: Annie Mole.

Have you ever thought what the ultimate telecommute might mean to you? Not the kind of telecommute where you work at home, but rather the kind where you travel the world and work wherever you can.

You probably already know the story: working from home not only gives you freedom of work schedule but can save you money in the long-term, from savings on commuting costs. But what if you could go one step further and make the world your home – anywhere you wanted? How adventurous are you? Could you live a long-term work and travel lifestyle? There are people already doing this.

The Internet and other technologies have made web working possible, and now people are pushing the envelope to become Nomadic Webpreneurs – running an online-based business from wherever they can get an Internet connection. Freelance web working, in particular, gives you the freedom to work from anywhere.

[Note: "online-based" does not mean that there's no offline component. It merely means that part of your operations is online, to source out clients or receive payment or to promote yourself.]

Ideal Conditions for Being a Nomadic Entrepreneur

Nomadic professionals have always existed, but technology has made it even easier for many more people to enjoy a work and travel lifestyle. This lifestyle is no longer limited to the jetset, ambassadors and politicians, athletes, authors, various other celebrities, travel writers and the odd business person.

With Internet access becoming so readily available, pretty much anyone can not only become a nomadic web worker but even a nomadic entrepreneur – running a web business online. All you need to satisfy are a few simple conditions:

1. Choose work that you can delivered remotely. Online freelancers have an ideal opportunity, since all of their work tends to be delivered online.

2. Choose suitable countries. Obviously, you’re going to want to pick where you’ll be staying as part of your traveling. You might choose to stay a few months here, a few months there, or put down roots for longer periods. If you find some place that you really enjoy, you might even settle down and become an expat (ex-patriate) – in which case you’re back to just being a work-at-home freelancer. When picking out host countries for your travels, besides picking somewhere safe, consider the following suggestions:

1. Desire. Countries you’ve wanted to visit. Maybe you have relatives or friends somewhere, want to see the sights of a country, or have work opportunities. (If the latter, keep in mind that you might need to get a work VISA.)
2. No VISA requirement. Countries with long-term non-VISA visitation waivers. Many countries let you stay up to six months (180 days) without requiring a VISA (assuming you can convince customs officials you’re not going to be “a burden on the system.” If you’re working solely on your computer, there may not be an issues.If your work requires some stability of location, you could spend 3-6 months at a time per country. (Check your home country’s rules for taxes, health care, etc., as there might be minimum residency requirements to remain eligible for certain services or deductions.)
3. Favorable exchange rate. If you have savings in your home currency and the exchange rate of the country you’re heading for is favorable, then you can go a lot longer than usual with your funds. In other words, you might take some time out to actually sightsee instead of always working.
4. Affordable, accessible Internet. Since without an Internet connection, you can’t be a nomadic webpreneur, this is an important condition to satisfy.
5. Countries with access to PayPal. PayPal is not available everywhere, though there are other online payment processing services. Just make sure that your host country’s banking system gives you access to your money through instant teller machines. Alternatives:
   1. Countries that allow visitors to have a temporary bank account.
   2. A means of depositing client payments into your bank account while out of country. Maybe you can have a friend or relative back home transfer monies into your account (from PayPal, etc.) for you.

3. Have the right tools.
Aside from the prerequisite passport, ID, insurance and various official documents, nomadic web workers and webpreneurs (i.e., Digital Nomads) are enabled by a number of tools and services, most of which are web-based or are gadgets:

1. Gadgets: cell phones, laptops/ notebooks/ netbooks, universal chargers. If you’re adventuring in other countries (not just working), you might want to add a few more items to your gadget list: GPS device, still and/or video camera, media player. Something worth noting is that some hotels are RFiD-enabled. That is, if you have an NFS-enabled cell phone in certain European and Asian countries, the key for your hotel room actually becomes a numeric code that’s downloaded to your cell phone, once you pay for your room.
2. Wi-fi or some ready means of getting an Internet connection.
3. Web services. E.g., web-based applications and services such as payment processors (PayPal) and banking, invoicing, travel planners.
4. Membership in social networks. It does get lonely out there sometimes, especially if you’re traveling alone. Your social network “friends” can keep you up to date on goings on as well as be a sounding board.
5. Co-working offices. If you don’t/ cannot work from where you are living, consider a co-working office. If you can’t find one, then you might have to resort to cafes, libraries, universities/ colleges. Or rent.
6. Cloud services/ applications/ technology. “Cloud technology” refers collectively to applications and web services that allow web workers to run software in a web browser and to store documents “online”. An example is Flickr, which lets you post your images online. Another is Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which gives you desktop application functionality in a web browser. So even if you do not have your laptop with you, as long as you have an Internet connection, you can access your documents.

Profiles of Nomadic Entrepreneurs/ Digital Nomads

While you muse over this approach to work and life, keep in mind that as a digital nomad, you’re not bound to having to travel the world. Some nomads use the lifestyle to see the country they live in, while maintaining a career to pay the bills. However, should you want to start traveling, this lifestyle allows for the possibility for long periods away from home.

If you’re interested in how others are living the Digital Nomad lifestyle, a great motivator is the Nomad Stories category on the Digital Nomads website. Some of these posts have embedded videos where digital nomad personalities talk about how they’ve maintained their lifestyle, made a living, etc. Pay particular attention to the interviews with Treehugger’s founder, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith and New Media expert Julia Allison.

When Craig Newmark started Craigslist, he didn’t intend to create a multi-million dollar media company. He certainly didn’t plan to kick local newspapers right in the classifieds.

His goal was much more modest than that. He wanted to create a kind of online noticeboard where San Francisco techies could let each other know about social events. The site picked up, companies used it to look for employees, and before you knew it Craigslist was offering everything from resumes and real estate to restaurant gear and old Renaults in 550 cities and 50 countries around the world. It was part-owned by eBay and newspapers were begging for mercy.

Not bad for a simply-designed website that began as free public listings and remains gratis for the vast majority of its users.

The same kind of community spirit drives School of Everything, a recently-launched educational service that aims to help the curious find people with knowledge to share. Anyone can join the site, complete a profile that describes their skills – whether those are guitar-playing, personal development or permaculture – and offer to teach people in their area, usually for a fee.

And if you can’t find a local teacher of spoken Sanskrit or Malaysian martial arts right away, you can create a learning profile and the site will notify you when one signs up.

Network Online to Learn Offline

That all sounds very straightforward but the principle behind School of Everything is much more ambitious. Under a section titled “The Big Idea,” the website characterizes the education system as being designed to prepare people for factory work and describes itself as trying to create a new bottom-up approach to teaching in which knowledge is shared in the community instead of being passed down by schools.

“At School of Everything, we believe that learning is personal, and starts not with what you ‘should’ learn but with what you’re interested in. So we’re building a tool to help anyone in the world learn everything, and teach anything, how and when [it] suits them – by putting people in touch with each other, not with institutions,” the website says.

The service itself was created by five friends in the UK who, in co-founder Dougald Hine’s words, were “policy wonks, community activists and Drupal geeks.” In their spare time, they edited an email magazine about DIY culture and used the Internet to organize local events.

“I’d been reading an amazing book from the seventies called ‘Deschooling
Society’ by a guy called Ivan Illich, [co-founder and CEO] Paul [Miller] was talking about experiments like the Free University in Palo Alto in the sixties, and we realized that you could use the Internet to organize those DIY learning networks on a massive scale,” Dougald told us in an email.

The friends rustled up funds from the Young Foundation then completed a £350,000 round of seed funding. They also picked up a New Statesman New Media Award and UK catalyst Award for their website and, more importantly, they’ve so far attracted around 6,500 students and 2,500 teachers who offer information on around 5,000 different subjects. The site is particularly popular with music teachers and driving instructors but languages, photography and crafts like gardening, cooking, knitting and sewing generate plenty of interest too.

With such a broad choice based on open access to anyone who thinks they have knowledge and believes they can teach, one issue is always going to be the quality of the teaching available. Students will soon be able to supply feedback on teachers, and organizations representing accredited teachers will be able to vouch for their members on the site. In the meantime, students will have to rely on their intuition and the teacher’s offer to gauge their seriousness and professionalism.

“We advise people to use the same kind of common sense they would when finding a teacher through a card in a shop window or a poster on a café noticeboard,” Dougald says. “You can usually tell quite a bit by how professionally someone presents themselves on the site — and it’s the teachers who put most effort into their profiles who get most interest from new students.”

Money though is likely to be more of an issue. The School of Everything now has eight full-time staff but no monetization system. It does however plan to offer paid services to businesses and organizations that want their own branded network within the school and to add an optional payment system for teachers from which it would take a small commission from each transfer.

Virtual Classes Offer Flexibility… and Brevity

That could be particularly useful for the 10 percent of teachers on the site who also offer online classes. Dougald himself seems ambivalent about this method of learning, linking the School of Everything with physical networking services like MeetUp and FreeCycle rather than distance learning schools.

“We built the site with offline learning in mind, because we like the idea of using the Internet to do new things in your local area, rather than spending more time in front of a screen,” he explains. “It’s what I call the “Why Don’t You?” web — that was a children’s TV show they used to have in the summer holidays in the UK — the full title was “Why Don’t You (Just Switch off Your Television Set and Go Out and Do Something Less Boring Instead)?”

But that doesn’t mean School of Everything is opposed to online learning, Dougald stresses, and notes that it’s particularly useful for language teaching. In fact, the site is about to launch a service that lets teachers and learners post materials they’ve found helpful, including videos, links, books and notes. They’ve also been experimenting with incorporating Skype Prime into the site so that learners and teachers located far from each other can communicate.

It would be ironic though if the convenience of online teaching meant that even local teachers and students preferred to chat online than meet in person. Stephanie Kable, a 30-year-old French teacher who now lives in Israel, has taught English and French to around fifty students online through Myngle and “a few hundred” through her own language sites www.Live-English.net and www.Live-French.net. Classes, at 30-45 minutes, are shorter online and more focused on results, she says, offer a flexible schedule and are more convenient when neither side needs to travel.

School of Everything might offer a raft of reasons to turn off the computer and kiss goodbye to the desk, but whether you want to teach or learn, it’s still often possible to do it all virtually.

If you see a profile from someone with an old Renault offering to teach you to drive online though, you might want to give it a miss.

Photography: pyramis

“I could be doing this at home.”

It’s a thought that’s becoming increasingly common among office workers. When you can email, phone, teleconference and even video conference, who really does need the pain of the daily commute and the hassle of office politics? Wouldn’t we all be a lot happier making our own schedules, working from our home offices, and sending in the completed work without ever seeing the boss, the gridlock or the line in the staff canteen?

Well, perhaps. Although one recent survey claims that 42 percent of US companies operate some form of telework system, working from home isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There’s the feeling that you’re never away from the office, the discipline required to stay at the keyboard when the television, the bed and the refrigerator are all just a short step away, and the belief, still held by many, that working from home isn’t working at all.

Above all though, there’s the solitude. Colleagues might be irritating, infuriating and often in the way, but they’re also friends, and those are much harder to find when you only need to leave the house to go shopping.

Virtual Working, Real Results

As virtual working – a term used to describe the method of work rather the work itself — has taken off, a new solution has sprung up. Co-working involves groups of telecommuters finding a communal office space and sharing it. The advantages are clear: co-workers get all of the social benefits of working alongside other professionals but none of the drawbacks of dark looks from the boss when they come in at ten or leave after a couple of hours. They also get the technical help and creative inspiration that can come from sharing a space with other skilled types, and the networking can be useful too.

“Working socially in a co-working setting can be really fun and a great way to break out of working alone or just with your partner in your living room every day,” says Ryanne Hodson,  a former children’s television editor and videoblogger. “It’s nice to see and interact with other people and have a schedule.”

It’s an idea that’s taken off. Jelly, a co-working space created by Amit Gupta in New York in early 2006, has already franchised itself across 20 cities around the world. The co-working wiki lists dozens of locations from Krakow in Poland to Campinas in Brazil.

The formats – and the rates – vary. Co-working spaces often consist of a communal office in which everyone works together but may also contain individual rooms where workers can enjoy privacy and avoid distractions while still being able to leave the house and pop out of the door to see familiar faces. The Hat Factory, the co-working space in San Francisco that Ryanne co-founded and worked in for six months before moving out of the city, offers lockers, a full kitchen and a “comfy living room/lounge area” for $200 a month – significantly less than the usual office rent in San Francisco. According to Ryanne, the site would see around 20 people a day when she was there, most of whom were either “tech geeks” or vloggers and filmmakers like herself. A small number of regulars, including Ryanne, functioned as “anchors.” They paid the rent regularly and received keys. Drop-ins would leave a small amount in a tip jar to contribute towards the costs.

Who Makes the Coffee Round Here?

The result wasn’t just the chance to communicate with something livelier than the keyboard. There were professional benefits too.  Sharing a space often developed into sharing knowledge and creating new work as well.

“Because you are in a more social setting… if something is funky with your website, you’ll inevitably shout out ‘Does anyone know why my page isn’t validating?’” explains Ryanne. “You get to know people’s skills pretty quick and can recommend them for jobs and vice versa.

“A lot of times, because you were working alongside someone you would end up working with them on projects.”

One question though is whether co-working spaces offer more than cafés. Both provide coffee and both tend to have wireless connections, which means that laptop-wielding workers have all the office they need. But café-working tends to come with two-hour limits, the most you can reasonably squeeze out of a single cappuccino and tend to be much less sociable than a co-working space which brings in the same faces day after day. And when you’ve paid $200 in advance, you’re much more likely to make the most of it and spend as much time there as possible. Remembering that you’ll need to cough up a few bucks for a cup of something hot and frothy might well put you off leaving the house.

But co-working does break one of the most important of our rules for café-working: the rule against talking to people. Chatting to other telecommuters might be informative, entertaining and occasionally even beneficial but it does get in the way of work. According to Ryanne though, it’s still more productive than trying to do it from home.

“The great thing about co-working is that it didn’t have the distractions that home often does. When you’re taking a break, you go back to work. Sometimes at home, you take a break and never go back to work.”

And there is one more advantage that co-working spaces have over cafes: they’re expanding. Starbucks outlets on the other hand, might soon be harder to find than a telephone booth.

Photography: moriza

Just about all entrepreneurs have the same dream. We all want to see our services and products used by large numbers of happy customers. We all want large incomes. And many of us want to become the owners of big companies too with lots of contented, grateful employees. And if we have to buy lava lamps to make those team members happy… well, that’s just a price we have to pay.

A price we might not be prepared to pay though is the risk involved in borrowing. To expand from a one-man graphic design firm to a small design business with employees and fixed costs is a big step, and it presents something of a Catch 22: you can’t hire employees if you don’t have the work to pay for them but you can’t take on the work that would pay for them if you don’t have the staff to complete the projects.

Traditionally, the way to break that dilemma has always been to ask the bank to lend you some cash. These days, that’s about as much fun as asking your parents. Banks have stopped giving money to people just because they knew how to say “please.”

Hiring without the Salaries

There is an alternative today though, and that’s to remove the fixed costs of renting an office, paying for insurance, stumping up for health care, and so on, and build up a virtual team. Made up of people scattered around the country and even around the world, virtual teams don’t need offices, insurance, water-coolers or any of the other things that get in the way of hiring and building. They work from wherever they may be, sending in the tasks as they’re completed. If you pay them on a per-project basis, they won’t even need salaries.

It’s an approach that increasing numbers of companies are using. A survey taken in 2006 found that 23 percent of workers were either working at least part time from home or could do so, while Deloitte estimates that 100 million people could be doing some of their work without leaving the house by 2010.

But virtual working isn’t a perfect solution. Studies have found that productivity falls when workers switch to telecommuting (although it rises once a new routine has been created and they find there are no colleagues to chat with around the photocopier). Even established virtual workers though can suffer from some inefficiencies caused by distance working.

The most obvious is slow responses. Although some communication between virtual workers and their real employers is done by telephone and Instant Messaging, convenience means that much of it is done through email. It’s the best way to cope with differences in time zones and also in flexible working hours – one of the prime advantages of virtual work. But it also means that the employer doesn’t get an instant response and can’t know whether the work is on schedule. Questions and answers can be a slow process, something that can be particularly frustrating when deadlines are tight and projects need to be completed fast.

The best solution is to try to think ahead. Virtual companies might be more flexible than real ones but because the communications are clumsier, a message that might take a minute or two to convey in an office can take several hours to reach its target when delivered through email. Those delays have to be taken into account when giving timelines to clients or when planning a working schedule. Adding regular real-time chats can also help to smooth over any potential delays before they become surprises.

The Amazing Disappearing Worker

Worse than delays though are disappearances. It’s not unusual for an email to take 24 hours to be read, acted on and replied to. When that becomes two or three days though, either there’s been a breakdown in communications or the virtual worker has done a real bunk. This shouldn’t happen often but it can happen when an employee takes on more work than he can handle – or even if he’s just sick, suffered a technical problem or gone on vacation without telling you. Ideally, you’ll want to have more than one way of getting in touch with your virtual workers – a telephone number is ideal even if you never actually need to use it – but you can also get around this problem by making the deadlines clear and the times to speak regular. As long as everyone knows when the work has to be delivered, where the worker will be before then won’t be important.

Perhaps most important of all though is that you have to be able to trust your virtual team members. You have to trust them to meet deadlines and you have to trust them to deliver work at the quality you need. That means choosing them carefully – not an easy task when so many people think that to work from home, a computer and an Internet connection are more important than skill and knowledge – and it means holding on to them when you find them. You  might not need to pay a salary but you will have to beat the pay offered by competitors who want your talent. Loyalty isn’t always a big thing in virtual teams.

On the other hand, that applies to the employer too and while virtual workers do bring the odd disadvantage, not only can those difficulties be removed, but so can a virtual worker who brings more of them than he should.