by

Eyeballs up, productivity up

No matter your employment status, there are a few things you should be aware of when you are taking on freelancing projects. They can take over your life, especially if you get into the “every minute I’m not working is money lost,” mindset.

Rather than binge on work and lose all semblance of a normal life, then crash and burn and miss deadlines (and feel like a Failed Adult) try a few tricks to train your brain to work more efficiently.

For example, if you have a smartphone, you might want to try shutting off notifications on your phone, and removing those entertainment apps. Why? So you can actually look up from your damned phone every once in a while and see the world around you, disconnect, and live in the present. Keeping your eyes constantly on a screen, even if you’re “playing” keeps your brain turned on.  Get off the damned Internet and look around you.

I’m guilty of the worst kind of Failed Adult moment, regarding smartphones. One day, while visiting with my family (something that happens pretty rarely, these days), I realized that every time I put down my phone, my little baby niece would come running to give it to me like it was some kind of life support. How sad, I thought, that she felt this gadget was more important than her small self, and how wretched of me to pay any attention to it while this little person was giving me all of her attention. I was only going to have a few hours with her, but I had that phone with me 24/7. Don’t be that asshole like me. Get off your phone.

Get some sunshine. Seriously. Go outside and play. Don’t come back until it’s dark. Our generation is engaging in the most severe Vitamin D deficiency experiment of all time by working mostly indoors and spending the majority of the day sitting at desks. From what science has discovered (so far), the supplements are mostly bullshit, and you cannot put the sun into a pill. Go outside, and put your smartphone away. Get off your phone.

Use your phone to call people instead of email, and whenever possible, go meet them face-to-face. Don’t get out of the habit of socializing with people professionally. You’ll get answers faster, gauge tone, and get to know the person you’re working with better. All of this will save you some precious time, and possibly inspire your creative output.

Sleep well and eat well. Abusing your body isn’t going to do you any favors, but it will make your inevitable crash more prolonged and wretched. Take care of yourself and your brain will work better.

Make some things rigid schedules and leave the rest up to life. Even drunk ol’ Hemmingway, and drug-ridden Bukowski managed to wake their sorry asses up—every day—at some ungodly hour of the morning to write. Every. Day. (Or so the legends say.) Sticking to some routines will guarantee you will get SOMETHING done every day, and will allow you to build your schedule more logically to accommodate fun things like seeing your friends and significant others.

Try some of these and see how they work for you. If they don’t, feel free to suggest what you do instead that’s better. I am always up for learning new tricks.

 

by

Change management, (and what the hell that means to your current, unchanged management).

One of the trendiest buzzwords in industry today is “change management.” You may find terms like “change agent” and other annoying derivations cropping up on LinkedIn profiles across the land; like the “synergistic team players” of yore.

Buzzwords are stupid, and when they become passé, you seem dated for using them (see: synergy). Especially when you’re dealing with that perky little change agent who’s been looking around your office lately and deciding what color they’d like to paint your walls, and how they’re going to fit their standing desk and yoga mat in such a tiny space.

People are comfortable with routines. There’s plenty of research to back this, so I won’t waste the time, but I will repeat, routines, repetition, they’re safe, comforting and reliable. So when you come in, chock full of your brilliant ideas for change, and get hired as a manager with the ambition to blaze up the corporate ladder, you should possibly check yourself before you wreck yourself, as a 90s rapper would say.

They don’t say that anymore. Pity, that.

Back to you though, change leader. You’re probably confident, young, cocky and correct about needing to change some shit to fix what’s broken. Not one person is going to listen to you if you go in with that attitude, unfortunately. The old guard will see you as a threat at worst, and a nuisance at best, and your lovingly crafted PowerPoint presentations will be eyerolled at, and then ignored. You might also be blamed for any failures to change things, because, uh, YOU’RE the change captain, and nothing’s changed.

In reality, you get to be the change leader when you inspire change—and it ACTUALLY HAPPENS. Since there are more of them, and they’re in charge, you should spend a lot of time talking them through what you want to do. Start with small tweaks then move on to the bigger ones. The low-hanging fruit is a safe bet because it will show you know what you’re doing—and while you’re building that trust, will also start socializing the old guard to the bigger change projects you want to take on.

Life’s a bitch, but you can avoid becoming life’s bitch in this circumstance by recognizing what the old guard is bringing to the table, and use them to affect the change you’re seeking within your company. Very zen and shit, I know.

by

The myth of the work-life balance, and the ethics of contracting while employed (AKA: Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road)

*WARNING–Post contains inflammatory language, controversial opinions.*

Simply put, no company gives a shit about the “work-life balance” of its salaried employees, when it comes down to brass tacks. Your “life” is always lacking in the balance, as far as work is concerned, for them. They may dress it up in fancy terms, but realistically, they don’t want you  out of their sight, and they want boots on the ground for an emergency. And everything is an emergency.

If you want to stay in a secure and full-time salaried job, then you’d better fall in line, soldier. It’s nothing new to corporate America, but it’s no longer fashionable for companies to be seen as merciless taskmasters, so they try not to put that image out there. Some actually follow through and give their employees a better shot. Most don’t, because they don’t see the profit in it, and your health and wellbeing aren’t huge factors in their bottom line, because they can replace you with someone willing to put up with it. Always.

 It’s almost never ethical (and it’s NEVER professional) to do your freelance work while you are at your main gig, so how will you make it work, without being a shady bastard?

Also, it needs to be said…working from home = less creative output. Even though you could all be Skyping along merrily, NOTHING beats being in a meeting room/stopping by the office of your colleagues to come up with an idea to make something work. So, unless your job is data entry, chances are you’ll always have to come in to the office.

An example of this is in recent news. Yahoo’s newly appointed head decided to end the option for working from home for all of the company’s employees. A good decision for the company, since they felt people were “abusing” the privilege. Not so for the employees, who probably enjoyed their lives more and maybe worked less. For working parents who still can’t afford the exorbitant costs of childcare, this new rule will wreck unimaginable havoc on their lives…even as the Yahoo CEO builds a private nursery for her own offspring because she’s the boss, and can afford to do it. Hooray for capitalism. Hooray.

So it goes. Don’t buy into the hype when you’re sold that party line of a work-life balance. Just pray for an understanding manager, and toe the line until you have other options. Or until our society actually gives people proper time off so they want to come back to work.

Yeeeahhhhhh

If you could just go ahead and come in on Saturday, that would be greaaaat.

You have a better shot with the manager.

Speaking of options, freelancing when you have a full-time gig can be a bit of a struggle.
It’s almost never ethical (and it’s NEVER professional) to do your freelance work while you are at your main gig, so how will you make it work, without being a shady bastard? The problem is, freelancing will cut into the “life” balance of your work-life balance. Accept that fact. If you’re not willing to put in the hours, don’t bother signing on for the gig.

You should also plan to “work smart” and maximize the efficiency of your work day. If it means getting in early to your office, do it. Also, if you can get out of the office for lunch, bring your laptop, find Wi-Fi OUTSIDE of your office, and take that hour to do something productive. Figure out what offline tasks you can do (writing, editing, transcribing, proofreading etc.) and do those when you have down time.

Finally, and most importantly: DON’T BITE OFF MORE THAN YOU CAN CHEW. Otherwise you may be out more than one job.

by

International contracting–A fist full of rupees ain’t a fist full of dollars

Recently, I had the incredible opportunity of meeting with a potential international client.

I also had the wonderful opportunity of declining an international contract at the end of the meeting, knowing full well they would take my ideas and attempt some brief stab at what I’d outlined. I wish them luck in the endeavor and hope they don’t make it too painfully bad.

It was an interesting contract in my field, with plenty of scope. Unfortunately, the company could not afford my rates (in dollars). At the end of the day, I decided not to reduce my rates to meet the client’s financial limitations, for a couple of reasons.

There’s an unfortunate truth to the fact that a client will not respect your product if you give it away for free or reduce your rates outrageously just to get them to sign. While you should make sure your rates are reasonable, reducing them drastically undervalues your work, and sets you up for a lifetime of underpaying gigs. If they can’t afford your rates, then they will not be able to finance your quality of work. You don’t have to be rude about it, but you do have to think of your bottom line first.

You can charge a relative rate, however, especially if you’re dealing with a client whose currency is not as strong as your home country’s. This means doing research to figure out the cost of living in that country, and charging a rate relative to that. Unless you live in/frequently visit that country, though, it would still mean less money for the same amount of work.

That’s where we parted ways, unfortunately. Great bunch of folks doing interesting things with their startup, but not willing to put serious money towards their web presence. Considering your website could be your international voice, I thought that was a poor strategic move, but I might be a bit biased :)

Onward, upward, hello 2013. Fingers crossed, I do a better job of maintaining this blog. Coming up next, “My first big contract.”

by

Process–The longest way ’round is the shortest way home

Recently, I decided to join the Starter League (formerly Code Academy) in Chicago to learn some things about UX, HTML and CSS that I couldn’t be bothered with learning unless I paid someone a bunch of money and forced myself to sit in a class. The “pay someone” part of this I’ll explain down the line. For right now, let me proselytize a little about process.

The proverb that’s heading this article basically means (according to the Internet) that, “It may seem as if it will take too long to do something carefully and according to directions, but in fact it will take less time than doing something carelessly, because you will not have to fix it afterwards.”

When it comes to process, especially, this is powerfully true.

Unless you are working on the same type of software for the same types of projects all of the time, you cannot make something that is both perfect and fast at the same time. Good processes take time to dream, design and then implement, especially if they involve people from different teams, like IT, design, and marketing, for example. Each of these teams will have different needs, and there will automatically be a chain of events that need to take place in some orderly fashion to make it all work out logically in the end. The better organized your plan is, the better it will be executed, and the fewer major errors you’ll have to deal with down the line. If you’ve ever had to write a thesis paper or technical document, you know that the outline takes the most time. Once you have figured out what needs to be said and organized it into organized thought, the actual writing becomes a matter of filling in the blanks.

It’s not very different when it comes to implementing new software. The more facts you have, and the more cohesive the outline, the better the outcome.

I haven’t put in my application to Starter League, just yet, but I intend to take classes from them because I think they have something I can learn to improve my understanding of processes. I’m not just talking within the scope of my current company, mind you, but the overarching scope of “building something new.”

As for the “pay someone” aspect, freelancers, take note. If you are cheap/free, your product will not be valued, even if you have the best training in the world, and the most dedication to your client. There are plenty of free tools I could use to fill the gaps in my knowledge, but I choose a paid course that is organized so that I don’t have to put much thought into the coursework or worry that I’m not getting a comprehensive education in my chosen areas. You’re doing the legwork for them by taking the longest way around, so please charge them accordingly for providing them the shortest way home.

by

The weight (Take a load off, Admin)

As you grow in your position, and take on more leadership duties, you should be aware of what the bitchwork in your company/organization is, and make swift moves to avoid, delegate, or gain a meaningful skill out of it.

Let’s face it, if you’re at the most-junior level position in your group, then you’re going to get saddled with the lion’s share of the bitchwork, but once you’ve cleared that hurdle (or left that job for a better one) it’s time to take the load off, as that song goes.

Take a load off, admin. Don't get saddled with bitchwork.

The Weight is an excellent song, and these are its original performers, The Band. Click on the member with the most intense stare, and listen to a live version of the song on YouTube, if you’ve never heard it.

If you think you have the wrong type of personality for leadership, then I strongly encourage you to fix that attitude first, and then fix whatever “defect” you perceive as a limitation.

We get the current stereotype that charismatic and outgoing personality types tend to be drawn to positions of command. Leadership isn’t just about charisma, though, it’s about being a good strategist, clearly communicating with people, and most importantly—getting shit done without having to do all of the work, all of the time, for everyone, forever.

This doesn’t mean you get to sit around, read Reddit, and send commanding emails to your “minions” all day long. Only assholes do that. Then again, if you went the opposite route of getting too hands on and involved in the minutia…well, you’re still an asshole, because you’re basically telling your team you don’t trust them to do their job well, or to learn from their mistakes.

Don’t be an asshole manager.

In a thoughtful, mercifully short post by Andrea Owens in the Harvard Business Review blog, Owens points out that a good leader is one who can provide his/her team the skills to succeed, and then inspire them into productivity.

Bottom line: As a manager, your job is to put out the fires and act as a flak jacket for your employees. That way, you can put the load right on the people you hired to succeed at their jobs.

by

SEO “experts,” or, the 21st century hucksters

Everybody loves search engine optimization right now. If this was high school, SEO would be the most popular kid and everybody would want to take SEO to the prom, and it would be voted prom queen. For life.

Something like that, anyway. SEO is new, interesting, and calls for people who are analytical enough to understand the robots, and creative enough to stay one step ahead of them.

While I’d like to think we’re at that comfortable point in our relationship where I can talk to you about SEO without having to define it, let me go ahead and link you to this Wikipedia article, in case we’re not there yet, but you’re too embarrassed to tell me.

Search engine optimization, and its fatter, more successful brother, search engine marketing, come from the awesome Internet boom of the mid-1990s. While they have gone through a few iterations, currently, SEO and SEM specialists (ideally) work on things like creating compelling, keyword diverse content, making sure everything is titled and tagged sensibly, and overall, making the user experience a friendly, happy one, while increasing traffic and profits to the company.

Here’s where the story gets dark.

We won’t even have to touch or look at your website to cure it of everything that ails it! Results guaranteed!

Since it’s a new trend, there are no established industry standards for what a SEO person should know how to do. There’s also no degree program for SEO/SEM, yet, and that has some pros and cons. The pros are mostly in the diverse talents of SEOs who didn’t have to go to school to pick this stuff up.

The cons run the gamut from untrained people who can seriously mess up your website, to actual cons who will take your money and run, after they seriously mess up your website. You can see an example of this in the story of J.C. Penney’s, and how Google suspended their website for being shady.

Like it or not, many SEO Experts and Agencies are the 21st century hucksters and snake oil peddlers. The industry has a lot of grifters, and it has a dubious rap.

All that aside, the important lesson for you is to NOT become a huckster, so…

Here are five ways you can be a good SEO specialist.

  • Read, (goddamnit): Read the blogs of the people who invented this stuff. Find out what they’re thinking, and keep on top of news in the industry. You might not know immediately that a search algorithm is going to change, but you will react faster if you know something about how these people think.
  • Don’t write crappy content: If you are writing articles full of jargon, keyword stuffing and nonsense, your page will eventually get marked as a spambot. In the meanwhile, you’ll be turning off potentially loyal customers with your visual assault on the English language.
  • Deliver results, don’t guarantee them: Unless you have an “in” at Google, you can’t accurately say when the algorithms are going to change, so you’re tap dancing on quicksand if you try to guarantee results. Create reasonable goals (increasing traffic, reducing bounce rates, improving time-on-site, etc.) and work hard on delivering on those promises.
  • Check your ego: If you know how to SEO the hell out of web content, and can do things to optimize HTML that would make Danny Sullivan weep with joy, then hooray for you. If they ask you a technical question outside of what you know, don’t BS an answer to sound like you know everything. Let them know you’re going to let an expert in that area handle that portion of it, and you are there to make sure it translates to a good user experience. Or good content. Or good web design. Or, whatever. Just don’t lie, OK?
  • Be transparent: You should be able to explain what you do in 60 seconds or less to the person who is going to hire you. You should also be able to tell them, in plain English, what you intend to do to their website, how you intend to do it, and what you will be showing them once it’s done.

Another thing you can do is to be realistic and call yourself a specialist, rather than an expert. Unless you invented SEO, then you can be all the expert you want. We’ll get back to SEO in later posts, focusing more on how you can develop this skill into a viable part of how you change the way a website looks and feels, as well as the mindset of the people you manage to get the work done.

by

Same as it ever was, change management

This post may be dating itself, but there’s an HR concept that’s been kicking around since the 1980s that has been resurrected recently, called, “change management.” It’s exactly the sort of thing a project manager would say.

Or you know, this guy:

Sometimes the future your leadership is envisoning is to keep things the same. How much do you care?

Yeeahhhhhhh I’m going to need you to let me say “change management” while making sure everything stays exactly the same. OK? Great.

The definition of change management in this particular piece is the HR-PM one, where the agent of change is brought forth to revolutionize the way management works in an industry; overhauling the “top-down” approach in favor of a more egalitarian and creative environment. Essentially, the point is to take your product/service from its current, blah state into a better, more desirable future state.

And bless their hearts, they may mean it, too.

Unfortunately, if everything has always been done one way, and you are the only agent of change, then you might find yourself faceplanting into a brick wall of resistance in your near future. Not because you enjoy that sort of thing, but because the people in charge are used to being in charge, and the people who aren’t in charge are afraid to change for fear of getting fired.

The question is, how can you change that?

Here’s where you get a nutritious bowl of corporate irony: You can fluidly introduce change management as a concept if you use a top-down approach.

…the people in charge are used to being in charge…the people who aren’t in charge are afraid of getting fired by the people in charge. And you’re supposed to change this.

Here’s the reasoning: If the people in charge want to stay in charge, then you need to put them in charge of something; your plan. Before you go changing things, get your plan fully supported by your leadership. It might not hurt to get a concrete set of goals from them. Three to five salient points ought to be enough direction to keep you on track while you’re changing things around.

Once they are squared away, drill down further. Once you have your vision quest, you need to spread the word, starting from the top banana, all the way down to the last button pusher. You want them to know they have an opportunity to do something different, and for the time being, they can use you as the intermediary. Keep your door open for conversations.

Unless you have one of those “open layout concept” offices…which, is another post for another time.

(On an aside, if anyone in your leadership team says, “Oh, but that’s your job,” about creating goals/structuring the future…then prepare to spend hours on a presentation/proposal that will result in your faceplanting into a brick wall of resistance.)

In future posts, we’ll talk about the trails and tribulations of implementing a change management strategy in a structured industry. For now, keep your eyes and ears open for that opportunity to get some spare change.

by

Keeping your cool and staying relevant

If any part of your job involves social media, web content creation, SEO or SEM, you have the tremendous burden of staying “cool” in the eyes of your peers and (more importantly) the people who hired you.

“But SoosheBot,” you might say, “How can I/we know what is cool? Oh woe, etc.”

You can’t, actually. There isn’t, as my old editor at Argonne National Laboratory was fond of saying, “a cool-ometer you can use to measure your coolness.” What can you do, then?

Homework.

Sorry kids, school is still in session. Staying on top of the latest trends in social media and your industry means doing your homework. Photo credit: Unknown

Sorry kids, school is still in session. Forever.

One easy way to stay on top of the social media and search engine marketing/optimization game is to learn about the topics your fans care about . Then you can tweak your website’s content to match their needs, better. You can find this information with traditional marketing techniques and with devices like analytics tools to see how your users behave online.

While you are working on that, grow your fan base by having actual conversations with your current fans, wherever you have the most fans/followers. Don’t forget to pay attention to your future fans, too, you’ll need them, so find them and talk to them.

Oh, and while you’re juggling those things, read some books, blogs and studies about the latest ideas in social media and website trends. It pays in the long run because you can modify your web content and social media to match what is going on in your industry in real time, rather than being tardy to the party. By doing this, you will look terribly cool and trendsetting.

Let me get you started: Here’s an excellent post written by behavioral psychologist Susan Weinschenk about website design and human behavior online. Once you’ve combed through her articles, try and find some RSS feeds to subscribe to, like Mashable, or whatever else you find useful to your niche industry.

Be cool, kids. Your job depends on it.

by

Disaster management

Natural disasters happen all the time. Pretend you were vacationing in Hawaii and decide to take a hike to look at a beautiful, active. So there you are, trotting along blissfully and communing with Nature, until all of a sudden you see this:

The question is, what is your backup plan?

If you didn’t have one, well, unless you’re very lucky, have fun melting in the lava…of failure.

I kid, I kid. (But not so much.)

Disaster management is, simply put, having a plan for the worst outcomes. All of them, all the time, always.

This approach may seem a bit pessimistic, but its actually all about careful strategy.

An example of this: Let’s say you were asked to head up a project that depends on multiple people, gobs of shiny new technology, and you’re given a firm deadline that, if you miss, you’ll look like an ass.

Before you say yes, you should ask yourself these five things:

1) Can I live with the failure? AKA–Do the pros outweigh the cons?
2) Do I really have a choice of saying yes or no?
3) Will I have a reliable team, technology and resources? Can I get them?
4) Who will notice if you succeed?
5) What are the things (and people) that can break and totally screw up the progress?

This Disaster Management approach asks you to take apart every task, figure out what the worst possible outcomes could be, and then create a backup plan to solve each worst-case scenario.

Over time, this will become second nature, and you’ll find that your projects run smoother because you can devote less energy to putting out fires and more to getting the job done flawlessly.

In future posts about Disaster Management, I’ll talk about how to implement it into your overall project planning and managing experience.