Break Free from Round the Clock Availability

A recent survey by Mozy, the online backup provider, found that on a global basis, workers are putting in far more time at the office than the traditional nine to five–and that their bosses are underestimating how much time they put in.

Globally, workers spent nine to 10 hours a day in the office, and were available via email 11 to 12 hours. The average employee started work at 8:18 am, leaves the office at 5:48 and stops working completely at 7:19 pm.

Americans stay online the longest–nearly 12 hours a day. On average they’ve put in almost an hour of time online before they even get to work.

The survey also found that 80% of bosses think it’s okay to call staff in the evening. On average, U.S. bosses said the latest they felt comfortable calling was 7:15 p.m. or so. There was even a small portion–1.4%– who think it’s fine to call after midnight.

There’s a tradeoff. For instance, 36% of bosses now think it’s okay for employees to take a break to chat, and 13% are fine with employees tackling personal tasks like online shopping during the work day.

The sample size was small. On behalf of Mozy, Vanson Bourne surveyed 500 employees and 500 employers in France, Germany, Ireland, the U.K. and the U.S.

What struck me from these findings: It’s now a given that workers are expected to put in more time than in the past, yet they’re not getting credit for it. If bosses don’t even know that their employees are logging more work time than the company realizes, you can bet that their teams are getting underpaid.

Even if an employee is “lucky” enough to work for the small percentage of bosses who thinks it’s okay to, say, order the children’s backpacks for school online from work, that’s because the supervisors know full well that workers are spending time at home working instead of keeping up with their lives.

These trends are not going to go away. And I’d venture that this is why so many workers in traditional jobs are extremely stressed out and disgruntled. Working hours like these can put severe strain on our personal relationships, leaves working parents away from their children from most of the daylight hours, and allows little time for other pursuits, whether they are creative or charitable. Some of these companies essentially own their workers lives. (I hope none of you reading this work for a boss who thinks it’s okay to call you after midnight–unless you’re on the night shift!)

If you’ve been dreaming of starting your own business, imagine the results you’d get if you invested the same hours you’re expected to log at a corporate job and were available to your clients 75% of the hours you’re on call at work now.

I’d venture that many top professionals, once established for a few years, would actually make more money than they do in corporate America working fewer hours–far more than they need to earn to cover the hefty cost of health insurance and then some.

And they’d be a lot happier.

(Here’s our review of Mozy’s backup services.)

 

Making the Break , , , , , , , ,
Posted on August 16, 2012 by Elaine Pofeldt Leave a comment

The Features You Want In Your Home Office Phone

Your telephone is a crucial, but easily overlooked, piece of equipment in your home office.

For years, I limped along with an old cordless phone. I’m not sure why I never thought to get a new one; it was just one of those $80 expenses that kept slipping to the bottom of the list. In retrospect, that decision cost me much more than $80.

During one crucial conversation about a project at a New York City publication, the battery went dead. Because it was a conference call, I couldn’t easily call right back – I ended up missing the rest of the conversation, blaming it on “Verizon problems.”

(I’d apologize to Verizon for the misplaced blame, but its customer service has been so difficult to deal with on so many occasions that I don’t feel an apology is necessary).

After that cordless completely died, I bought a Vtech – which has turned out to be a great investment. (There’s a $99 deal on it today).

Here are the features I’ve found extremely useful – and which you may want to consider when you are purchasing.

• Built-in answering machine. I opt not to use the one on my phone; rather, I use a cloud-based phone mail from Verizon because it’s easier to access when I am away from home.

• Clear speaker phone. As far as I can tell, there’s no difference between the quality of my calls when I have the speaker on or off.

• Voice announcement. I don’t think I can live without this feature now that I’ve had it. True, the announcements are comical sometimes: The phone translates the area code 703 as ZOE when it verbalizes it. But over time, I’ve come to recognize the way the phone pronounces certain regular callers. I can tell if it will be worthwhile to sprint across the house to reach the phone.

• Call quality. This is an underappreciated feature – but in an age of fuzzy mobile phone calls, I find it a relief to speak via a landline – and I expect others, do, too.

• Earpiece. I spent many years holding a phone between my shoulder and my ear while I was typing and, no surprise, developed shoulder and neck pain. The Vtech phone comes with an earpiece, which, again, callers have assured me makes no difference to the call quality.

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Posted on August 15, 2012 by admin Leave a comment

$200KFreelancer Available for the Kindle … And Tips For Setting Your Blog Up

We’re excited to let you know that that $200KFreelancer is now available in a Kindle edition, through Amazon.

The subscription, available for a 14-day free trial, costs 99 cents a month.

If you like to do your reading on the Kindle, you may find this version more convenient than the web version. For instance, if you travel frequently, you can save the posts and read them on the plane. We’d appreciate your feedback if you try it.

And for those of you who have blogs of your own and want to sell them for the Kindle, here’s the link to the program we used to join the program. Bookmark it, because it’s not easy to find.

One thing I’ve learned from setting up the $200KFreelancer is that even adding simple features to a web site can take a lot of time. Mastering new software programs often is a challenge.

The Kindle program is one exception. I am not a techie and was able to set this up in an hour. It takes a day or two for the blog to go live on the site.

We’ll let you know how the program goes for us once we’ve used it for a while. Meanwhile, if you try it–either as a subscriber or as a seller of your own blog–please let us know what your experience has been.

 

 

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Posted on August 14, 2012 by admin Leave a comment

Stop Being a Victim of Your Company!

In the New York Times this past weekend, Alina Tugend told the story of three friends who had suffered unemployment–twice–in “Laid Off More Than Once, And Seeking a Career.”

One of Tugend’s friends lost two Wall Street jobs, one during a merger and another during a corporate restructuring.

Another friend lost her editing position when the magazine where she worked closed in 2007, freelanced full time for a year, then got hired by another magazine–and in 2010 got laid off again during a wave of downsizing. “I started thinking I was not going to be able to stay in journalism,” the friend told Tugend. Tugend’s pal ended up getting a job at another magazine, though it’s one she doesn’t love. (For the stories of how Elaine and Elizabeth transitioned out of full-time media jobs to freelancing, see our posts 5 Rules For A Successful Freelance Startup and The Double Life).

The third of Tugend’s friends, Shane Fischer, a Florida lawyer, got laid off twice because of lack of work at two separate legal firms–and then decided to become a solo practitioner. He seemed like the happiest of the bunch. “It’s a struggle but at the end of the day, when I work hard, I know I’m working hard for me and I don’t have to justify why I didn’t bring in 10 percent more to a senior partner,” he told Tugend. “I’m actually grateful those old employers let me go.”

When I read articles like this, I’m struck by the pain that people who view themselves as employees suffer in an economy where many industries are rapidly changing.

Because they equate a successful career with having a traditional job with a big employer, they walk around with a sense of defeat when a position proves to be impermanent–even if the layoff has nothing to do with them. While they may use freelancing as a stopgap, it’s seen as a less desirable alternative to a job.

Meanwhile, instead of taking Shane Fischer’s route to economic independence, they keep on using the same strategy to build financial stability back into their lives: They apply for the same types of jobs they had in the past–only to suffer layoffs again because their industry is experiencing major turbulence.

If this has been happening to you or to professionals in many firms in your industry, it may be time to start rethinking your career. You may not have to stop doing work you love in the future, but you will probably have to look for other ways to do it.

Long-term jobs with benefits are fading away in many industries–which are migrating to an increasingly global business model that includes more contingent workers, or seeing rapid technological change that reduces the need for a large workforce. Sure, plummy full-time gigs will still exist for some people, but not for as many as there were before. And who will companies choose to fill those coveted spots? It’s often going to be young, smart people in their thirties with no excessive salary demands. Folks at that level know enough to be competent in their fields but don’t come with medical problems and dependents to ratchet up the company’s healthcare costs.

Learning how to freelance is a hedge against these market forces. In many fields, there’s still more work available than the existing full-timers can do. But an employer isn’t likely to hire a new person, if say, there’s only enough of that work to keep someone busy 50% of the time. Companies would rather hire a temp, consultant or freelancer until demand picks up.

If you’re feeling like your company is in turmoil or doesn’t appreciate you, my suggestion is to take a few hours this week to start lining up some freelance projects that don’t pose a conflict of interest. Winning freelance jobs doesn’t happen overnight. Even after 20 years in journalism, I only secured 3 assignments my first three months, because it took some time to market myself–and for the folks I contacted to find  appropriate projects to farm out to me. It took a while to build a full-time business. (See our post on How I Landed My First Gig: A Cautionary Tale).

But if you start now, you’ll be able to make some progress toward greater economic independence. The $200KFreelancer offers a lot of information on how to get started. Once you’ve built a few freelance relationships, keep them going, even if you have to keep them on the back burner. This will change your whole mindset about work. You will have less of a feeling that you’re walking on eggshells at work, lest someone in power decide that you’ll be the next one to go if there’s a need for cost cutting. You’ll have a way to make some money immediately if you do get laid off. You will be exposed to other professionals who see your value (and may even want to hire you away, if you’re still inclined to want a full time job).  And it’ll give you some practice for running a business as a freelancer or independent professional, in case that proves to be your best option in the future.

Freelancing isn’t a cushy solution. It doesn’t come with the bragging rights to senior level job at a company that everyone at a cocktail party will  know. But it’s a very viable way to make a living now–and it can be lucrative, if you’re serious about it. Better yet, your job security depends on one person: You.

 

 

 

Making the Break, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted on August 13, 2012 by Elaine Pofeldt Leave a comment

Judge’s Order A Bellwether For Paid Content?

Are we the only ones disturbed by the proliferation online of content that is paid — but not obviously so? In other words, content that is propaganda or “fake journalism?”

Apparently not. U.S. District Judge William Alsup,  said “the court is concerned” that Oracle and Google may have hired authors to comment about their ongoing patent court case. Now, Judge Alsup wants the parties to submit a list of their paid propagandists.

This is according to the web site Paid Content, where you can find the full article.

Florian Mueller, a self-described “patent analyst” wrote a series of one-sided posts over the course of the trial such as “Oracle Java patent rises like Phoenix from the ashes.”

You don’t have to be a professional journalist to realize that kind of content is unethical. By all means, take the jobs you need to pay your bills — and hit your income goals, whatever they are — but make it clear to the readers when you have a conflict of interest.

If you don’t make a habit of those ethical practices, you’ll find the high-profile real journalism jobs harder and harder to get.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted on August 10, 2012 by admin Leave a comment

On Gratitude … and Deadlines

Last Thursday, I unexpectedly found myself getting emergency surgery. I’m still on the mend but, thanks to a great medical team, should be back to normal in a week or two.

When I got home from the hospital several days later and walked into our little house where we can look out at tall trees, deer and bunnies, I was flooded with gratitude. I was still here, my husband and four children had been wonderful, and my father was ready to help keep them busy so I could get some rest (albeit, at my laptop). The other family members and friends who knew what happened were ready with offers to assist. Every colleague and client I contacted had been amazingly flexible, giving me a chance to get some rest when I needed it. Elizabeth had offered to step in for me if I needed help. The freelance writers working on projects for me went out of their way to be accommodating. I was flooded with a sense of how lucky I am to have so many terrific people in every area of my life.

As I lay in the hospital bed, I thought about how glad I was that I had made the choice to be a freelancer almost five years ago. We can’t control unexpected events, like a sudden, life threatening medical problem–and that’s scary. But by choosing the freelance route rather than a corporate one, I haven’t been forced to prioritize making a living over things that are ultimately more important to me. I’ve been able to have a life where people come first — yet I can still do creative and rewarding work (including what I do on the $200K Freelancer!) and, with my husband, pay the bills. It was nice to realize that–when given a powerful reminder of how life can change in an instant–I have no regrets about how I’ve been spending my time on this planet of ours. Freelancing has brought me a life I don’t want or need to “reboot.”

 

 

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Posted on August 8, 2012 by Elaine Pofeldt 2 Comments

Jonah Lehrer And What The Scandal Says About Writing

Let’s be honest here: If you’ve been freelancing or even making your living as a writer in any kind of realistic way, you know the narrative tricks that brought Jonah Lehrer down.

The investigation into the Mann Gulch fire.

The act of a composing a high-level story in a condensed space requires a constant series of judgments. At the most fundamental level, it’s a balance between creating the story and sticking to the truth. (Here’s the blogger Felix Salmon on what he calls “the narrative dark arts”). De facto, you have to leave some elements of the truth out to create the story. It becomes very tempting to make the story more pure, to arrange elements of the truth in a fashion so easily consumable that it no longer really resembles the truth.

That’s what Lehrer got into the habit of doing. The truth began to serve his story too much.

Someone asked me the other day if there are more Jonah Lehrers now, or if they are merely being caught more frequently. I’m not sure either is the case. Search engines make it easier to catch this kind of intellectual chicanery, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that there’s a greater appetite for catching it now. Truthfully, we like what the Lehrers of the world do: They break things down in digestible ways.

It’s only reluctantly that we face up to the idea that we were so desperate to believe that story is the truth that we bought Lehrer’s easy ideas hook, line and sinker. So there are the Rick Braggs of the world, and the Janet Cookes, and depending on the media’s mood at the moment and the details of what they did, the storytellers get punished for giving the audience what they demanded.

The writers who are content to live in the world of literary books get subjected to less criticism, perhaps because we respect what they do more or perhaps because we understand intuitively that the ethical balance between truth and story shifts the other direction in those kinds of books. One of my professors at George Mason University casually mentioned in a class that it’s fairly well known that Annie Dillard borrowed the event described in the famous scene from Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, in which the cat leaves bloody footprints, from one of her students. In other words, the cat’s footprints never actually happened to her – even though the book is a called a “nonfiction” narrative. (I’ll add her publicist’s response if I get it).

The students barely blinked an eye at the idea that Dillard made the event her own in service of the story, and I can’t say that I mind, either. The rules are different for a piece of literature, even if it’s nonfiction.

One other book that I love, Young Men and Fire, is exactly about the struggle to wrest narrative from the strict truth. In parsing the details of the Mann Gulch fire, which killed 12 smokejumpers in 1949, Norman Maclean fought his own way to a narrative that was ultimately – only in the last sentence – about his wife’s death and his own mortality.

He wrote:

In this cockeyed world, there are shapes and designs, if only we have some curiosity, training and compassion and take care not to lie or be sentimental.

What the story of Jonah Lehrer – and the popularity of writers like him — tells us is that the broad public has little appetite for the intellectual rigor that Maclean suggests is necessary if we’re going to understand even an imperfect version of the truth.

Give me a niche audience any day, then.

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Posted on August 7, 2012 by admin Leave a comment

Don’t Put Yourself out of the Running

In one of the gigs Elizabeth and I share as contract editors, we assign articles to freelance writers. And every once in a while, one of those writers will go AWOL. The deadline will approach, but I’ll get no word about the progress of the story. I’ll let the “cushion” I’ve built into the deadline pass and then try to reach them again. Sometimes, it takes weeks to hear back from them.

When I’ve finally caught up with these folks, they’ve usually hit a roadblock on a story and been afraid to bring it up. Maybe the central premise hasn’t worked out, a competing publication has covered a similar story, or the legwork required to get the story has turned out to be many times more time consuming than we originally thought. Sometimes, they’ve had a family emergency. One time, a writer had actually completed a terrific story on time but thought it wasn’t good enough and kept asking for more time to polish it, until I persuaded her to send in a “draft version”–which turned out to be excellent. Her own perfectionism had gotten the better of her.

In every case, I would have been happy to find a solution with the writer–I constantly renegotiate deadlines and the like with my “regular” writers to take into account things like unexpected business trips or a fresh news hook–but I wasn’t given a chance. Instead, I was left wondering what happened. In some cases, I had a worked with the freelancers for years with no problems and what happened was a blip on the radar screen, explainable in retrospect, so I continued to assign work to them. But typically in cases like this, I won’t trust the writer with another assignment. Why would I? It makes my job a lot harder.

If you’re struggling to make a living as a freelancer, it’s important to take a look at how you’re communicating with your clients when “life happens” and you can’t meet a deadline. We all hate to ask a client for more time or to report that a week of research has been fruitless. But most reasonable customers won’t take you off their list of go-to freelancers if you shoot them a quick email at the first sign of trouble and say, “I have to leave town for a few weeks to deal with a family illness. Can we extend the deadline of my assignment? If not, would you like to reassign it?” The same holds true if you send a note saying, “I’m sorry–the angle I suggested isn’t working out. Can we talk by email or phone to figure out if there’s some way to salvage the piece?” It’s long, unexplained disappearing acts that lead to lost business.

 

 

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Posted on August 1, 2012 by admin 2 Comments

Freelancing: Life on the Fringe

I’m lucky enough to have an amazing group of friends whom I’ve known since kindergarten or thereabouts. We grew up in a small town on Long Island. On a rare “girls night out” last week, I met them for dinner in Manhattan and, while we caught up and had some good laughs, marveled at what they’ve all accomplished. They include a high-ranking lawyer for the federal government, a top insurance industry executive, a senior telecommunications expert, an ad agency executive turned nurse, and a librarian who’s embraced the latest techno trends in her industry. They’ve juggled careers with a lot of other things, from raising children and helping out with aging parents to heavy-duty volunteering.

These are the kind of friends who are almost family, because we’ve known each other so long, and there are no pretenses, the way there might be at a college reunion. As I listened to the latest on what was going on in everyone’s life, it hit me that I was currently the only one who did not have a traditional job, the kind that comes with a steady paycheck or healthcare and benefits. Nor does my husband, who runs his own business. And, as my friends talked about their plans for the future, it struck me that, living without the relative safety net that big employers offer (even in today’s turbulent economy) means a very different type of life in 21st Century America than earning a paycheck within the world of traditional work.

Freelancing doesn’t offer bad future, just a different one. In my own case, my husband and I make a good living, can afford to live in a town with great schools, and manage to pay our ridiculously high health insurance premiums somehow. I have lots of time to spend with my children. We’ve gravitated toward friends whose lives are more about creating, building and giving back than accumulating material possessions, so there’s little social pressure to live beyond our means.

But we face a future where the only financial security we have as a couple is ourselves and our ability to work really hard–often every day of the week–and save. In fact, our present reality comes with very little security, either, in the traditional sense. In corporate or government jobs, you get the same paycheck every week, even if you’ve been less productive than usual because, for instance, you’re feeling burned out after a big project. Not so in freelancing. And there are no sick days or maternity leave. There’s no protection against unemployment. There’s no big entity (as far as I know) to help freelancers stay on track financially, by offering a 401(k) plan or pension. While there are freelancers’ groups that push for our interests, their negotiating clout pales by comparison to that of corporate America or big unions, so we get ignored by politicians, for the most part.

So, even though on the surface it looks like we’re part of the American mainstream–a married, working couple with four children, living in a New Jersey suburb–it hit me that actually, we’re really not living like a lot of our neighbors and friends. In choosing a life where we have the freedom to set our own rhythms and priorities, we’ve become part of the fringe, with all that entails. I think it means accepting that there’s a lot more planning–financial and otherwise–that we freelancers have to do on our own–and not letting that legwork detract from the very real joys of independence.

 

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Posted on July 31, 2012 by Elaine Pofeldt 2 Comments

Work Like A Woman, Not Like A Man

So I was in a meeting, one of those regular weekly meetings, and I was one of two women in the room. I had a to-do list that stretched all the way down a yellow legal pad, and I was cherishing a vision of leisurely, peaceful evening, with time to curl up with my daughter over Dinosaur’s Binket.

Meanwhile, the blowhard was explaining why it is VERY VERY important to hire only people with a move-fast, take-no-prisoners style for web coverage. “It’s dog-eat-dog out there, man, and we want to be the alpha dog,” he said seriously. It was another in a long string of cliché-ridden sentences that spoke more to the fact that he was trying to impress the executives in the room with his “vision” than accomplish what actually needed to be accomplished at the meeting. Irritated, I said little, though it was I who worked out the details of what needed to be done to actually hire that person later. He ultimately got a lot of the credit for building the web site and continues to work his way up in the corporate world.

Meanwhile, I stepped off the career ladder to work at home and be with my kids.

I rebuilt this scene from memory, so the quote isn’t strictly accurate, but the gist is. The tech guy was one I worked with a few years ago and though he wasn’t really a bad guy, he always, well, acted like a man. Specifically, a man trying to get ahead in a corporate environment.

It can be difficult to talk about the discomfort that some – or many – women still feel in the corporate world without resorting to stereotypes. So, forgive me if the limits of language mean that I have to resort to some.

Not talking about those issues at all would mean that we’re never going to address the extra stress and discomfort that many women feel in corporate settings, where the qualities and priorities that we think of as typically male still dominate.

“Corporate culture, work culture is very oriented to a competitive, all-or-nothing kind of environment,”  – stereotypically male, says Angel Kwolek-Folland, a professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Florida who has written about women and business. “There’s an expectation that people will not play by the rules, that people will cut a throat to get where they want to get.”

In the 1970s and 80s, she says, many people believed that if companies merely put women in the pipeline, the gender balance issue would sort itself out. That just hasn’t happened.

Women who can’t or won’t adapt either live with the stress of the mismatch, or drop out. The numbers bear out the fact that women still just don’t fit in all that well to corporate America. According to Catalyst, an advocacy and research organization for women in the workplace, in the Fortune 500, women held only 16.1% of board director seats, 14.1% of Executive Officer positions, and 7.5% of Executive Officer top-earner positions.

More documentation? In a report title Damned If You Do, Doomed If You Don’t, researchers found that “when women act in ways that are consistent with gender stereotypes, they are viewed as less competent leaders. When women act in ways that are inconsistent with such stereotypes, they are considered unfeminine.”

The cultural mismatch between women and corporate America becomes even more apparent after you leave a company to strike out on your own, as a freelancer or as an entrepreneur, as I did almost 10 years ago.

As a freelancer, you can create your own working environment. I think anyone looking at mine would say it has taken on a distinctly feminine cast.

Though I work more than full-time hours, my children and my home regularly rise to the top of my to-do list. I pick them up from school most days and volunteer at their Brownie meetings. I don’t need to hide the fact that my number-one priority on some days is planning a birthday party.

But those are the obvious things. What’s less obvious is the different style of working I adopted once I was no longer spending time thinking about getting ahead – and whether I needed to step on other people on the way up.

My image now matters a lot less than the bare fact of my work product. I don’t usually worry about sounding smart in meetings. I don’t worry so much anymore about whether kindness might be seen as weakness. My chief purpose as a freelancer is usually to help my clients look good – versus, in a corporation, making myself look good so that I could advance.

My status as an outsider also allows me to feel free to have conversations with people that range far beyond business: in a corporate setting, those network-building moments are limited to special events or water cooler talk. I spend a lot of time on them. Drawing people out, personally  – a skill that I think of as distinctly feminine – is often one of the most fruitful parts of my day, because it helps me figure out what a client needs and how I can help meet that need.

As a freelancer, I’ve also escaped the artificial time constraints of the corporate world, which are still, especially at the higher levels, geared around the idea of a working man and a stay-at-home spouse. Big travel demands, the idea that you need to put your best-foot-forward in a dry-cleaned suit, breakfast and dinner meetings (I was often stressed about getting there on time) …  those are mostly memories to me now, and I am more productive for not having to worry about them.

Corporations miss out on a lot by clinging, perhaps unknowingly, to masculine culture mores. I don’t really know of any evidence that says those masculine qualities – ruthlessness, rule-breaking – are truly necessary to building a successful corporation.

What’s to say that a company built around stereotypically feminine characteristics couldn’t be just as successful? What would a corporation look like if it were built around the characteristics that we think of as feminine? Or, better yet, what would a corporation look like if it were built to be accepting of the qualities that we consider both feminine and masculine?

When Elaine and I started this side project, 200kfreelancer, our number-one goal was to build a company without stressing ourselves out. At some point, we talked about whether we wanted to pursue an angel investment. “Nah,” Elaine said. “Then we’d have to start working like men.”

Can we grow a company without working like men? We don’t know yet. But I would bet on us.

 

 

 

Making the Break, The Lifestyle, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted on July 30, 2012 by Elizabeth MacBride 1 Comment