Photography: Lee Bennett
Tech types have been predicting the rise of the paperless office for years. When you can pack more information into the average laptop’s hard drive than you can squeeze into a room full of filing cabinets and when you can send documents backwards and forwards without ever licking an envelope, who needs to chop down trees and staple pages? Computer power will soon mark the end of ink and pulp, we’ve been promised… again and again. But could we see the end of the computer first? Just as the ability to squeeze increasing flexibility into laptops and now netbooks has reduced demand for desktops, could the growth of mobile phone technology mean the rise of the computerless company too?
Judging by sheer computing power alone, desktops should be safe. A typical Dell Inspiron desktop comes with a range of processors from Intel Celerons to Core 2 Quads, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage space, which certainly sounds impressive enough.
Nothing focuses the mind faster than an impending delivery date. You’ve accepted the task, done the research and played with the procrastination. Now, with the deadline in sight, you actually have to finish the job and hand over the goods. The change is massive and sudden. Knowing that your reputation and possibly your job is on the line has an amazing effect. Suddenly, a task that looked impossible becomes achievable. YouTube and viral emails still appear tempting but you can block them out. Your productivity goes through the roof. Instead of staring at the wall or pacing around the room, you’re hacking at the keyboard as though it’s stuck to your fingers. Even if you miss the deadline a little, the period between recognizing the urgency and completing the job is one of unparalleled attention and diligence. If only you could work that way all the time. Sprinting like this over a full working life is just about impossible but you can take some of the lessons learned from the effect of a tight deadline and use them to raise your work rate every day.
First, it’s important to understand that deadlines aren’t uniform. They pack different characteristics and each characteristic has a different effect on motivation. The outcome for the worker himself, for example, is one important influence. A deadline for a design that could win you a promotion or land a larger and more satisfying project is likely to be met. A threat from the wife that she’ll throw out anything in the garage that hasn’t been put away by the end of Sunday can be fairly safely ignored. Deadlines aren’t just dates, they’re also carriers of personal punishment and reward.
Missed Deadlines Are Your Fault
Photography: drurydrama (Len Radin)
Being an artist always seems like such a lonely job. They always have to work alone, surrounded by half-completed canvases, overturned paint pots and wobbly easels. At best, they’ll have a model to console themselves with at the end of the day – unless they’re painting a still life – but usually, if a painter talks about his ideas, it’s to himself and to his work in progress. Writers are little better. Although many have been known for their ability to down the odd bottle with friends at the end of an unproductive day, a hack’s best collaborator has always been his moleskin or his typewriter, not a loyal group of friends. But the notion that ideas come best when we’re alone, often in the shower, might well be one of creativity’s biggest myths. In fact, group work can bring out some of the best concepts.
We can see this at the highest end of art. The work of an Impressionist painter always reflects his own ability; it’s produced by just one pair of hands. But the ideas that went into the final picture are the results of long discussion among the painters themselves about what art should be and how to produce it, discussions held in bars and cafes and continued afterwards by letter. None of those ideas – and Impressionism itself – could have been produced by just one artist working alone.
Image by: Austin Kleon
Choosing an organizational system can feel a little like picking your favorite cult. Whatever system you’re weighing up, you’ll always find teams of people ready to tell you how it’s changed their lives, made them more efficient and allowed them to achieve more than they ever thought possible. That’s particularly true when one of the systems you’re considering is Getting Things Done (GTD), David Allen’s “productivity principles for work and life.”
But despite what GTD’s fans will tell you — and they’ll be ready to tell you a lot — David Allen’s methods aren’t the only organizational system in town. Mindmapping can be no less effective in planning what needs to be done, filling in the gaps and creating a workflow that takes you from concept to product. So which is the most effective tool and which method should you be turning to as you’re planning your projects?
Photography: smileygeekgirl
Start working for yourself and distractions suddenly become a great deal more destructive. You might been bothered in the past by a colleague talking too loudly in the next cubicle. The constant drip of emails into your inbox might have been pulling you away from your projects. But when the money you received at the end of the month was always the same regardless of how much you produced, it didn’t really matter how often you went back to the watercooler to escape the noise or how much time you spent looking at lolcats. Become your own boss, and those distractions aren’t just mildly irritating (or even lots of fun), they’re expensive timewasters that reduce your monthly income.
It’s when you calculate the amount of money you’re losing when you let distractions pull you away from work that you realize just how much those trivialities are costing you. If you’re charging $50 an hour, for example, and spend twenty minutes a day looking at friends’ feeds on Facebook and ten minutes a day writing jokey emails, then you just spent $25 for that entertainment. That’s about three times the price of a movie ticket.
Photography: koalazymonkey
What could be easier than making a to-do list? You just write down all of the things you want to do… then get on with doing them. It sounds so simple and yet with a little thought and a strong inclination to procrastinate, creating a list can quickly become a research project all of its own. There is, after all, a difference between the things you have to do and the things you’d like to do. And there are differences too between what you really have to do and what you probably should do… just as there are differences between the things you think you’d enjoy doing and maybe you’ll do one day, and the things you know you’ll enjoy doing and sincerely hope that you’ll do. Which of these kinds of tasks should go on your to-do list, how do you prioritize them and how do you stop your list from becoming so overwhelming that having written down everything you plan to do, all you really want to do is hide under a blanket and do nothing? Lists-making might look simple, but when you’re trying to organize your time, your life and your tasks, it’s vital to know how they work.
The simplest kinds of lists are tiered lists. These allow you to prioritize your tasks so that you can see instantly what needs to be done first. Alan Lakein, author of How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, recommends these kinds of lists in his time management system.
Viral marketing has become the Holy Grail for just about any business with a small budget and big dreams. Let Coca Cola cough up the millions for a 30-second slot during the Superbowl. Let L’Oreal pay through the nose to get the name of its moisturizers seen on the walls of reality TV shows. Savvy small companies can pick up a reach that’s just as broad and even more powerful by sidestepping the expensive conventional channels. Give the public a reason to talk about them and they’ll get to spread the name of their business for next to nothing, helped by an army of happy gossipers. All you need is a place to start.
And an understanding that it’s not that easy. A deliberately planned viral marketing campaign, one that has the aim of improving a company’s sales, needs three elements: content, distribution and response.
Photography: Consumerist
It’s now easier than ever for an entrepreneur to find specialized help with minimal risk. A one-person business can do a pretty good impression of a small company by hiring a creative freelancer – even one on the other side of the planet – without having to pay a regular salary, benefits or get locked into a contract with commitments the growing firm isn’t quite ready to keep. In fact, as anyone who has ever posted a wanted ad on the Internet knows, when it comes to freelance help – even from specialists like Web designers or illustrators — entrepreneurs are spoilt for choice. And with that choice comes challenges. It might be easy enough to find a freelancer but finding one you can rely on requires a whole new bag of skills.
Unreliable freelancers come in a variety of forms. Contact is perhaps the biggest worry for hirers. When the person you’re working with isn’t sitting in the next office, and your biggest communication tool is email, there’s always the danger that your mini-employee has taken your instructions, your mock-ups — and your deposit – and run off to Timbuktu. Or at least relegated dealing with you and your project to the bottom of a to-do list that includes “getting a haircut,” “helping junior with homework,” “building my own company” and “buying a Caribbean island.” Your messages go out but nothing comes back.
Deciding how much to charge is both the first and the toughest issue that freelancers face. Economists will tell you that the correct price is always the highest amount that the market will pay, and business experts will tell you that you can figure that out by looking at your competitors’ price lists. But what no one will tell you is who your competitors are. When you pitch for a job, are you competing with other freelancers in your town? Or with other freelancers anywhere with similar skills? When you’re looking to pitch your own fees, whose prices should you be looking at?
The difference is important. Now that virtual companies can create virtual teams made up of qualified people in parts of the world you might never have heard of, identifying competitors isn’t always easy. It’s tempting, for example, to dismiss entirely a competing bid from a programmer in Mumbai whose price demands are half of yours. If they’re charging so much less, then their qualifications and experience must be that much lower. But if their living expenses are a quarter of yours, then in fact, they’re asking for twice as much – and a client could be paying half the amount you charge for someone twice as good.
How Much Does a Big Mac Cost to You?
Photography: quinn.anya
You should be able to spot a creative type from a mile away. In Mad Men, the AMC show set in a 1960s advertising agency, that’s not so easy. Both the executives and the creative staff wear suits. Both chain smoke as though it were going out of fashion. And both have similarly dull offices where the only creativity-sparkers are bottles of Bourbon and a sofa with a dent shaped like a secretary. Compare that to today’s attitude to creativity. Software firms like Google are famous for stuffing offices with giant rubber balls, lava lamps and idea boards. Sofas have been replaced with beanbags. And not even the CEO wears a suit. Without the right toys and bags of freedom, it seems, those creative employees just aren’t going to be churning out the ideas to keep an innovative company in business. In fact, the need for a child-like environment is just one of a number of myths about creativity that are not only wrong but which can actually hold a firm back.
Here are several more.
Photography: Daniel Y. Go
In an ideal world, the people with the brightest ideas, the most original minds and the most inspired inventions would end their lives with the most amount of money. They might not have been the ones who turned their spark of genius into production lines and mass sales, but they should have been rewarded fairly for the brainwave that defined the products.
Often, it happens. James Dyson, the inventor of the Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow that used a ball instead of a wheel, lived off his wife’s salary as an art teacher for five years while he developed a prototype for a new kind of vacuum cleaner. He now owns a chateau in France and a personal fortune estimated at around £1 billion ($1.6 billion). Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, might not be in the same economic league but his annual salary was reported at “more than £1 million ($1.6 million)” a year… in 2003. He’s probably earning a bit more than that now and, no doubt, gets a free iPod too.
Freelancers face two giant challenges at the beginning of every new job. They need to agree a price for the work they’ve been asked to do; and they need to agree a deadline for the delivery of that work. Although a lot of attention is paid to the first challenge — calculating hourly rates, comparing the prices of competitors, dreaming of the check — it’s the deadline that’s actually the more important challenge and the hardest one to overcome. Pitch your quote too high and the worst that will happen is that you’ll lose that job. Pitch too low, and you’ll lose money… once. Miss a deadline though, and you could find that you lose a client forever.
Even that though looks welcome when you consider some of the consequences of missing deadlines. Of the roughly 35,000 lawsuits that clients file against lawyers each year, the second most common cause of the suit was that the lawyer failed to meet a deadline. A third of all claims result in damages and in one in six of those claims the damages top $100,000. That would be a high price to pay for being late.
Miss a Deadline, Pay $200,000
Every successful business requires two key elements: a good idea; and the good implementation of that idea. Of those two, the idea itself is the simplest. Inspiration tends to come all at once, without effort and often complete. You don’t need to do any more than slap your forehead and ask yourself why you didn’t think of it before. It’s when you come to put your plan into action that the difficulties begin. The challenges are often unexpected, the costs higher than you planned and your forecasts more optimistic than you might have hoped. And that’s true for even the best prepared and the most experienced of entrepreneurs. While knowing what you want to do is important, having the flexibility to adjust is vital.
Carl Geitz decided to create his own Internet business after a successful career that included managing a product management team at Intuit, creators of QuickBooks and TurboTax. It’s the sort of responsible position that looks good on business plans and which he might have expected to have prepared him fully for creating a small online sales company.
Photography: nedrichards
The name of the end product might be decided by ad men, focus groups and marketing people who think tags are for displaying brand names, but while a project is in development, it’s the programmers who get to come up with the working titles. It sounds creative and fun, an opportunity for geeks to undo their ponytails, let their hair down and come up with something cool and funky.
Often they do, especially when the developers are working for free on open source projects. Ubuntu’s creators, for example, tend to opt for two alliterative words, the second of which is an animal. Choices have included “Gutsy Gibbon” (Ubuntu 7.10), “Hardy Heron” (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS), “Dapper Drake” (Ubuntu 6.06 LTS) and “Hoary Hedgehog” (Ubuntu 5.04). Ubuntu 4.10 was probably happy to have been upgraded to a number after being called “Warty Warthog” during development.
Linux’s developers are no less imaginative. While Ubuntu called 7.04 “Feisty Fawn,” Linux used “Feisty Dunnart” to denote Linux Kernel 2.6.2. Other names have included “Colgate” for Red Hat Linux 4.0, “Darth Vader” for College Linux 2.3 and “Puberty” for WOWLinux 6.2.
Photography: burienundressedblog
Create a product that becomes a fad, and you’re in for a sackload of money — for a while at least. For a few months, maybe a year if you’re lucky, you’ll wallow in media attention, see your name in every newspaper, field calls from Jon Stewart and perhaps even Oprah, and look goggle-eyed at your sales figures. And then it will all disappear. As quickly as the fad rocketed into the stratosphere, that’s the same speed at which it will crash into the ground. Suddenly, the phone will stop ringing, no one will want to talk to you, and if you’re making sales, it’s to asset-strippers hoping to make a few bucks off your desk. If you didn’t squirrel away your money during those boom times, you’ll be back where you started – minus one good idea. Create a product that turns into a trend though, and you’ll be set for life.
You won’t just have created an item that lots of people buy now. You’ll have started a fashion that lots of people will continue buying in the future. That means you’ll have to deal with competitors, copycats, pirates and me-too bandwagon-jumpers but because you’ll have been first, you’ll have the advantage. It’s much more demanding than selling a fad but it’s also much more stable and ultimately more rewarding. So what are the differences between fads and trends, and what can you do to turn your product from one to the other?
Last year, we released our twitter ebook as an introduction to using Twitter. We could not have anticipated that our ebook would become one of the most downloaded Twitter ebooks or that Fortune 500 companies would be contacting us to include the ebook in their corporate intranets. But what we DID anticipate is that Twitter would be a strong and viable business and marketing tool. And so we assigned our entire writing and research staff to work towards releasing a Twitter business book. The result is 99 Ways To Make Money Using Twitter is now available on Amazon.
All the Most Effective Twitter Money-Making Strategies in One Place
The challenge in writing and researching a Twitter business book is to look at all the strategies, methods, and ways of making money on Twitter, and to bring them together into a book that is current, yet filled with case studies that will not go out of date. The methods range from one extreme to the other. We found authors who were selling their books with Twitter, and writers who were publishing their books on Twitter. We came across plenty of large firms using Twitter to improve their customer service, and one Twitter entrepreneur who was making almost $1500 a month helping CSS programmers in his spare time on Twitter. We found a bunch of different ways of inserting ads into a Twitter page – some more obtrusive than others – and users who were offering Twitter-based translation services, job listings, garage sales, retail outlets, giveaways, affiliate links, contests, directories, craft products and a whole bunch more.
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.
Photography: Sacca
Meet a geek with a good idea, and you can almost see the swimming pool, palm trees and pina coladas in his eyes. But talk to him and you’ll often find that plans for living the high life are only a few months deep. Once the long hours have been recovered and the mansion bought, most tech-type entrepreneurs want to be known for more than their invention and certainly more than the deepness of their tan. They often want to use their money to change the world too.
That’s not new, of course. Those with more money than they can spend have long been inclined to give it away, often in return for seeing their name on the hospital wall. In Slate 60’s list of the top philanthropic donors of 2008, only Michael Bloomberg at number nine (with a $235 million donation) made money with technology, and you have to drop another two places before you reach Richard Weiland, one of the founders of Microsoft. He donated just over $174 million in 2008. The bulk of the money on Slate’s donor list though came from finance, real estate, investments and other traditional industries and a full eight of last year’s top eleven private donations though came in the form of bequests.
