In all fairness, this month got away from me and I forgot to touch base with a designer to give him/her enough time to create something. Besides, I was itching to create one anyway. You’ll be glad to know we’re already on track for next month though.
After a long-overdue move back to the West Coast (apparently bringing the snow with me), I found myself working more often than not from home. Such is the contemporary life of knowledge workers, all we need is a steady stream of caffeine and an internet connection. So I was set: a home office provided the base, with regular sojourns to local coffee shops for a change of pace. But I wasn’t completely happy with the arrangement; I wasn’t as productive as I know I can be. And as time went on, cabin fever began to creep in beneath the doorstop.
Thus, I’ve been spending more time than not over the past few weeks at a coworking location in Capitol Hill. Working from an actual office environment once again, I’ve noted a few things - finding several pros/cons that will effect everyone differently.
The first, and perhaps most important fact, is that the term is “coworking”, not “co-working”. Certainly the copy editors and house-style perfectionists will groan in revolt, but there it is. I’m a coworker, not a co-worker (and certainly not a cow-orker). There is no hyphen.
Secondly, while having warm bodies to talk to certainly staves off the cabin fever, one can’t be so… carefree… in most office environments. Obnoxious music, PJs, and crass conversation tend to be frowned upon in public - especially in a public where your office mates are trying to work. That’s not to say we don’t have fun. I can’t speak for every coworking location, but ours is pretty casual. Casual just doesn’t mean “mine own home”.
A large plus to working in a collaborative space is that everyone comes from different backgrounds and is involved with different projects and companies. There’s always room for interesting water cooler chatter and discussion fodder at after work happy hour.
With the office about a mile away from my home, I’m finding that the walk to and from is wonderfully cathartic. The morning walk is a good mental prep for the day, and I often take advantage of the time to check in with the team over the phone. Evenings, the walk is just long enough of a cool down to release some work-day stress and relax before the evening’s activities.
One straightforward con is that people bring germs. During the winter months, quite a number of nasty bugs accompany us all to the office, ready to hop onto new hosts. I’ve been laid low once already this season by such creatures.
But the largest gain for me is an increase in productivity. Better people than I can concentrate for hours on end all by their lonesome - with little distraction. But while in the home office, it’s so easy to take long breaks and wash dishes, vacuum the floors, and correct all the wrong people on the internets. Coffee shops aren’t much better as even fellow laptop toters are more often than not stalking Facebook rather than anything resembling work. But in a coworking situation, there is a strong sense of peer solidarity to get things done. Everyone is there for a variety of businesses and pursuits - but every one is working.
I certainly take full advantage of a home office for those days I’m not feeling so social. And coffee shops provide a wonderful source of get-’em-up during off-hours. But my preference has become the quiet and diverse fraternity that is an office nomad.
(I’ve enjoyed my time at Office Nomads so much, Elevator Up started our very own coworking location. Stop by and stay awhile!)
As a preface, you should know…I’m completely for Outsourcing and I think you should be as well. But keep reading before you begin forming your (possible) rebuttal.
NOTE: For the sake of sanity, I’m going to use the word “outsourcing” to mean in country work (Outsourcing) and out of country work (Offshoring). There’s a lot of discussion around the value of these differences but I’ll leave my thoughts on “Outsourcing vs. Offshoring” for another time.
Here are my thoughts why Outsourcing is valuable, if not crucial, and why a lot of us keep getting it wrong.
What is it that you do and why are you doing that? If that question is easy for you to answer, you’re much smarter than I am. For myself and many folks I’ve talked with - it’s a very difficult question to answer.
One reason this is difficult is because many of us, especially small business owners, not only offer our services but are also responsible for all things surrounding/supporting them. Everything from taking care of the finances to taking out the trash. Of course, there’s something to be said about being smart with your money or not letting certain tasks be beneath you but again, it does beg the question - “What exactly do you do?”.
As a small business owner, I find myself doing everything from sales, account management, billings, managing past due accounts, taking out the trash (and sorting out what can be recycled), talking to lawyers, information architecture, front-end coding, some back-end coding, project management, speaking, employee growth plans, interviews, developing marketing plans, company growth strategies, and the list just keeps going on and on.
The constant struggle is balancing the amount of time I spend doing what I do best, my core strengths (what makes us money), against the operation of my company.
The past few months I’ve been working on tipping the scales back on the side of my strengths and my passions. The awakening moment for me was after I listened to a short podcast from A.J. Jacobs entitled, “My Outsourced Life”. The summary is: Why should Fortune 500 companies have all the fun? I hired a team in Bangalore, India, to take care of everything in my life-my e-mails, phone calls, shopping, arguments with my wife, to reading bedtime stories to my son.
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What impacted me wasn’t the fact that I could get cheap labor to take care of my mundane tasks (well, it did a bit) but the ability to simply ask for help. I’m going to say that again because I think it’s key to everything here - You HAVE to know when to ask for help.
Asking for help isn’t a natural human activity - which is exactly why I think many of us struggle so hard to make forward progress. If you subscribe to the idea that you SHOULDN’T do everything, then start asking yourself “What should I be doing?”. As you begin to answer that question - you can begin to hire the right people. You may even consider outsourcing or offshoring work in order to allow you and/or your company to stay focused. It’s all to easy for some companies to get these lines blurred, and it results in growing too large or broadening services too far.
I have another article coming where I’ll be discussing each of these points in detail, but these have been some of my first steps.
First, keep a notepad next to you and begin writing down all the things that you do. Try to be as detailed as possible but make quick notes. You’re not trying to write an autobiography. Next, start asking others what they think you actually do, and what they think you’re best at. This can be somewhat of an eye-opening experience so brace yourself.
The next thing is to be aware of what other people and companies are offering. Companies like AskSunday.com and GetFriday.com can help with various administrative tasks, Amazon is offering fulfillment services and a scalable workforce. You’d even be surprised to know there are many local companies and individuals talented in helping companies with a variety of tasks.
At Elevator Up, we make a point of capturing various outsourcing possibilities within an internal wiki. This has been a great way for us to keep track of what is out there and remind us down the road when we may need these services.
So instead of avoiding the issue of Outsourcing, embrace it. Constantly evaluate what you and your company may have to offer your customers. Don’t try to do everything yourself but do what you do best and work with others that can allow you to continue that.
Innovation is a powerful thing online. I’m finding this out more and more while writing for my own website. When a concept is born, all I can think or talk about is getting the idea off the ground. Everything from defining it further and putting all the pieces together to generating buzz, down to maintaining and growing the idea. Problem is - for every 10 ideas I have only 1/2 of one of them get anywhere.
It’s not that the ideas are bad either, we hear other people talking about or creating buzz about the same things we never finished and then we kick ourselves. So what is it? Is it the idea that we love to have or is it the product? This has to be one of the biggest caveats of owning your own business. You generally have to HAVE the product to sell or create to make money but my passion, and certainly Aaron’s passion is planting the seeds and watching other people grow within our ideas.
There’s a business model out there for this kind of passion but 2009 is going to be the year, both personally and professionally, where we start to take more risks and decide that growing our own ideas into something larger, whether they fail or flourish, is worth it.
First one out the door? A Living Book - look for it at jodimichelle.com. Let there be Buzz!
I looked back on the goals I made for 2008 and whether I felt I accomplished them. I also formed my new goals for 2009, and my reasons for each of the goals.
This was a good experience to reflect on my areas of growth over the past year.
Last January I wrote about my resolutions for 2008. I’ve done a great job accomplishing some of these goals, while I’ve missed the the mark entirely on others.
Curiosity has pushed me to do a lot of CSS exploration and whereas the education has been extremely valuable, I’m realizing this is an area I’m not deeply interested in. Sure IE6 likes to treat developers like punching bags, but I don’t entirely blame that specific browser. I lay my indifference on two points.
First was the realization that user workflow is not the same as front-end coding. User workflow is the series of user interface decisions a user must make in order to use a system, while front-end coding is the implementation of the user interface in XHTML/CSS. Designing user workflow is pretty interesting, but my brain certainly hurts afterwards. I think front-end coding appealed to me because of how much closer you are to the workflow than back-end coding. You can write the server side back-end code fairly divorced from the user workflow, but it’s really not encouraged.
The other point was realizing how much brain effort refactoring front-end code takes. Refactoring is the work involved to make dramatic changes in the code. One of the reasons I’m such an advocate for automated tests is because of the the refactoring benefits. To date, there aren’t any ways to write automated tests to validate the visual components. Therefore every time I would begin refactoring CSS, I always has a sense of experimentation, and the hope I didn’t break stuff. That’s the same uneasiness I had when working with untested back-end code.
Now you can still write elegant CSS, and there are people who can refactor CSS styles easily. I just don’t think I’m one of them.
Along with gaining more experience with CSS, I’ve come to realize Design is a very overloaded term. This January I was specifically wanting to improve my Graphics Design chops. Graphics design encompasses more of the feeling or emotion a design emits. Fonts and color palletes are two basic tools, among many, that a Graphics Designer has to decide on and use effectively.
I found early on that I really suck at graphics design. My pseudo-scientific justification is this: I believe there are parts of the brain that influence the creativity of good graphics designers, and I think I’m retarded in each of them. I’ve talked with designers, and observed their imaginative accomplishments, and I just don’t think that line of work will ever come easily to me.
I think I’ve done a great job with this goal. By the middle of March, I felt very comfortable working with Dvorak layout, and I’m still using it to this day. From a purely subjective standpoint, I feel my typing speed has increased significantly, I’m not pounding the DELETE key as often, and my wrists/fingers feel less tense.
This was another big goal for 2008, and I think I’ve made a lot of progress. I recognize I still have a lot to improve on, but I’m miles farther than when I started this year.
In May I wrote an article called Clearing Distractions and Getting Stuff Done and I think it’s still completely relevant today.
Oh boy, I failed this goal miserably. I did some initial scratching at code in Jan/Feb, and that petered off quickly. I still think Rubinious is a great project, but I think this was one of those “My resolution is to lose 50lbs this year.”
Kudos to anyone who had that type of resolution and stuck to it. You have a lot more discipline than me.
This is a goal that we (or I) didn’t accomplish, but I don’t think it’s as much of a failure as my Rubinious goal. Elevator Up has come a long way this year mostly with our work on Ascribe as well as other smaller need-to-do projects like our own website redesign.
Keeping last year’s goals in mind, lets look at the future for 2009. These are my “resultions”:
I’m a developer, and bravado aside, a pretty good one. But I am doing practically nothing with regards to the Open Source community, and that’s disappointing.
I don’t necessarily need to start my own projects, but I do need to become much more involved. Anywhere from submitting major/minor patches to the open source libraries I use, to taking charge of areas lacking in existing projects, to just being present on mailing lists/forums/irc and helping people new to the project.
I am inspired by Mike Gunderloy who worked with us on Ascribe. When he started working with us, he had some Ruby/Rails experience, but he learned a lot along the way. Now he’s making tons of contributions to the Rails Documentation. And that’s pretty friggin’ admirable.
I need to be contributing more.
I strongly believe Elevator Up develops damn good software. Part of that has to do with our process, another with our development practices, and I think a good portion comes from the spirit: “We care.”
While there’s a time for building quality software, there’s also a time for playing and experimenting with code. Unfortunately, I haven’t been making time for my “inner developer child”. I chuckle every time I read that phrase, but it’s true. I need to be regularly pulling out my crayons, or jumping into sandboxes, or just taking time to dream.
Going to conferences like RubyConf and seeing the inspirationally cool stuff people are playing on, not working on, has really exposed that need.
I need to be playing more.
I’ve learned a lot about myself while writing articles for both this newsletter and for my own blog. I think a lot has to do with the idea that organizing my thoughts for others to read (and hopefully connect with) really makes me think about my opinions, biases, and perspectives.
Sadly, I haven’t been making enough time to write these articles. They either read like a fleeting conversation, or they just don’t get written. I’ve found that writing is not difficult, making time for it is.
I need to publishing more.
I’ve also improved my interpersonal skills this past year. It wasn’t an explicit goal in January, but early into the year I became really interested in trying to understand the people I interact with. A Stephen Covey quote from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People comes to mind often: “Be efficient with things, and effective with people”.
I’ve grown quite a bit in 2008, and I’m really liking the changes. I’m interested in the possibilities that are created when I try to understand the person I’m talking with, and I’ve been fascinated with results so far.
I need to connect more.
This is a carry over from last year’s resolution. I’m still focused on Elevator Up creating a product this year, however small it may be. My perspective on what constitutes product has changed considerably this past year. Even to the point where I look at opportunities in our Hosting services as products. It’s even more encouraging when I consider other people at Elevator Up are also motivated in accomplishing this goal.
I think the concept of waiting for a perfect idea has held me back to the point where I don’t even move forward on smaller ideas.
I’m looking forward to 2009, and I think Elevator Up is on the path of accomplishing some exciting things. I can’t believe how much I have changed in the past year, and I’m really wondering who I’ll grow to become when I write 2010’s goals.