1 Apr 2010
freelance, working from home
Recently I’ve been working on a project where I’ve had to commute to Birmingham Business Park and work in the client’s office. Nice project, but it’s made me realise just how much I love working at home.
- I have a brilliant office. Set of double monitors on an adjustable arm (I hate using visual studio on a laptop screen), desk and chair are at the right height, everything I need is to hand. Also it’s just such a nice space.
- Great coffee. I’m a coffee snob and I detest and despise instant coffee and vending machine coffee and starbucks coffee.
- No commute. Every morning for the past few weeks I’ve been faced with the choice between roadworks and speed-cameras or the motorway. At home my office is next door to bedroom and if I get dressed it’s because I want to, not because I have to.
- I’m the boss. My hours. My clients. My projects.
- If I get bored I can just go and annoy the grumpy office cat.
My desk. There’s also a nice view from the window.
It’s obviously late ‘cos I’ve been drinking tea.
And this is the rest of my office. The pictures on the wall are some really nice technical drawings of steam engine indicators, and a rivitting machine
And I’m just doing my end-of-year accounts (my company year ends in March) and I’ve realised that I’ve now been working for myself for four years. Unbelievable. I had to go check my old speadsheets to see if I’d counted the years right. But yep, first invoice sent March 2006.
7 Jun 2007
freelance, time management
Advice on personal productivity from Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape):
… don’t keep a schedule … By not keeping a schedule, I mean: refuse to commit to meetings, appointments, or activities at any set time in any future day.
When someone emails or calls to say, “Let’s meet on Tuesday at 3”, the appropriate response is: “I’m not keeping a schedule for 2007, so I can’t commit to that, but give me a call on Tuesday at 2:45 and if I’m available, I’ll meet with you.”
Of course, this advice comes with lots of caveats, and apparently it doesn’t work for everyone (you don’t say), although it does work for that well-known guru of business productivity, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I’m still boggling.
13 Apr 2007
erognomics
My standard machine is now a laptop, and at home I’m fine. I’ve bought a laptop shelf for my desk and the laptop sits at the correct height and it’s all very ergonomic and I am not having any back problems. (Two years I had a trapped nerve in my back, and it hurt. Physiotherapy and attention to posture and working environment helped, but I’m now very careful.)
The problem comes when I’m in someone else’s office or working away from my desk. The standard laptop working position leaves you hunched over the keyboard like a vulture crouched over road kill, and peering down at the screen. I like the screen at eye level. I need the screen at eye level.
So I need a laptop stand. Piles of books are at best a temporary measure.
Criteria:
- The stand has to get the laptop screen up to the height of an LCP monitor. I’m not interested in anything which raises the laptop a miserly three inches off the table, or any product which describes itself as ‘laptop feet’
- It has to be adjustable.
I’m in charge and I want to be able to control position, and height.
- My laptop is portable. My laptop stand must also be portable.
And when I say portable, I mean it must fit in the rucksack with the laptop and all the cables, add-ons, and dinky gadgets. So I’m not interested in the stylish brushed aluminium design which will “enhance your working environment”
Last week I bought a folding laptop stand. It works. It does what I want. I’m a happy customer.
Hints for the home worker:
Over Christmas I spent some time on the sofa with the cat on my lap and the laptop balanced on the arm of the sofa. Bad idea. My neck hurt for the next two days. If you’re going to stroke a cat and browse the internet, put the cat on the desk with the laptop.
Amendment July 2007
Janet has recommended Bakkerel Huizen
1 Mar 2007
working
I’ve finally gotten round to updating my website, and adding a few of the projects I’ve been working on in the past year.
When I started this business a year ago I put up a thumbnail and a one-line summary for a few sample projects – which I picked primarily on the basis that they had interesting homepages and would make pretty thumbnails. And since then I’ve done very little. The blog gets updated intermittently, the website and list of projects not at all. Well, I’ve been busy, and I get people by referral or word of mouth rather than via the website, so updating content somehow never quite made it to the top of the To-Do list.
But today I’ve made myself a deadline. I’ve written a proposal which our potential client will receive tomorrow. In it there is a line saying “see website for details of previous projects”. So by tomorrow there must be details of some previous projects up on this website. That’s a deadline.
But I’m finding it tough going.
Each page must have a screenshot or two to make it look pretty, and because one picture is worth one thousand words and I really don’t want to write a thousand words, and if I did no one would read them.
Selecting, taking and editing the screenshots takes time. I’ve spent even more time setting up a nice little slide show so people could cycle through’ the multiple screenshots but decided that this didn’t work unless all the images were high-quality and precisely aligned. Nice for photos, slightly less impressive for pictures of blurry text.
The text must be clear and meaningful, and avoid the temptations of evil management speak (e.g. “holistic interactive enterprise internet communication solution”)
It has to summarise the project. Sometimes easy to do (website to advertise business), sometimes rather more difficult (we want a nuggetorium)
It has to explain what I did in a way which is both impressive and convincing (and also true).
And I’m really not enjoying myself
21 Feb 2006
domain, freelance
Trying to decide on a business name is a an incredible distraction, especially when you’re looking for the accompanying domain name. There seem to be three general approaches:
- The acronym or the abbreviation. I could become WebAppDevelopers.com or WADCS.com (although I would have to invent a name to fit that last acronym).
- Names which can be pronounced but doesn’t mean anything (yet). I could become Beyaro.com, Tashlin.com or Noydart.com
- Names made by stringing several words together and hoping for the best. These can be vaguely business-like (e.g. knowledgesolutions.com), or have dubious techie ambitions (e.g. colourfreezone.com, validatedspace.com) or just be plain silly. HappyGreenFerret.com, RealTurtleSoup.com and GorgeousCat.com are all available.
For the moment I’ve knocked this on the head, I’m starting up as BronwenReid. Six months down the line I can revisit this, perhaps if I spend too much time spelling out my name to people on the phone.
17 Feb 2006
freelance, money
At the moment I’m looking at every resource I can find on on freelancing. And Anil Dash has some wonderful advice for freelancers who are wondering how much they should charge for their time.
- Slap the client in face.
- Tell the client your hourly rate.
If the client was more shocked, horrified, offended, hurt, saddened, or wounded by the slap in the face than by the hourly rate, then you are still pricing yourself too low.