Linkswitch #74, Casting Vision, Money Rules, Seamless Workspace

One of the most powerful lessons I have learned is to cast a vision and stick to it. This lesson applies to freelance work, but it also applies to life in general. Casting a vision for your career is hard and can take years to fully develop, which requires sticktoitiveness. But, if you apply tenacity over time, you will find the end result is powerful and motivating in a way nothing else can be.

Imagine you’re driving a car. And the highway stretches in front of you straight as an arrow. Mile after mile of the same, same seems to suck you into vortex of yawns. Then suddenly you you see a curve in the road. The curve is the disconnector. It’s the thingamajig on the journey that jolts you back to life. You’re all alert. You’re all eyes and ears. And you’re paying close attention.

The bad news is that the ability to read a well-written sentence does not translate into the ability to write one. With more of our interaction taking place through emails, text messages, status updates, tweets, blog posts — heck, with more of us having to become writers — there are also more people in need of writing help than any time in human history. Thankfully, Grammarly can give us that help. For a price.

I have a bit of a problem with certain advice flying around these days, specifically the type of stuff that gives you backpats about hating marketing and sales. I think we’re all too supportive of people who dislike pitching and promoting – we should get a little more cold-hearted about things.

We should slow down on reading the stuff that discourages you from becoming true money-hungry marketers. There’s nothing wrong with marketing to make money. In fact, we should read more about how to be a little more greedy and rake in the cash. Forget the advice that teaches you how to build warm fuzzies with your audience – it isn’t getting you very far.

Almost every Web designer can attest that much of their work is repetitive. We find ourselves completing the same tasks, even if slightly modified, over and over for every Web project. Following a detailed website design and development process can speed up your work and help your client understand your role in the project. This article tries to show how developing a process for Web design can organize a developer’s thoughts, speed up a project’s timeline and prepare a freelance business for growth.

First of all, what exactly is a ‘process’? A Web development process is a documented outline of the steps needed to be taken from start to finish in order to complete a typical Web design project. It divides and categorizes the work and then breaks these high-level sections into tasks and resources that can be used as a road map for each project.

Our economy is almost entirely based on a Darwinian competition–many products and services fighting for shelf space and market share and profits. It’s a wasteful process, because success is unpredictable and unevenly distributed.

The internet has largely mirrored (and amplified) this competition. eBay, for example, not only pits sellers against one another, it also pits buyers. Craigslist makes it easy for buyers to see the range of products and services on offer, making the marketplace more competitive. Google, most of all, encourages an ecosystem where producers can evolve, improve and compete.

I think the next frontier of the net is going to use the datastream to do precisely the opposite–to create value by making coordination easier.

Do you want to build a following? Are you using free stuff to build your brand? Do you want to learn how?

From Lady Gaga to Oreo, brands have been using freebies to build a social media following for years. The details may change, but the approach is still the same—build a following by giving something away. In this article, I’ll cover five methods to grow your following using freebies.

Every masterful writer has a unique voice: Think James Joyce’s avant garde stream of consciousness, Mark Twain’s just-folks dissection of the human condition, Ray Bradbury’s nostalgic haze of poetic reverie, Bill Bryson’s mirthful menageries of adjectives and adverbs.

Great writers, whether literary giants or popular favorites, are the soloists of the writing choir. Most people, however, do not have, or have not yet developed, voice (otherwise referred to as mood, style, or tone), and are as yet relegated to the chorus.

That is Parkinson’s Law, first published in The Economist in 1955 to describe the tendency of British civil service to increase in manpower even when the amount of work remained the same. What does that have to do with freelancers? In this post, we’re going to explore how freelancers can use Parkinson’s Law to increase our productivity. If we accept Parkinson’s Law, then it follows that freelancers can get more things done by shortening our work days.

Our “workspace” is no longer just the place we sit while working, it’s come to mean the entirety of how we get our work done. Our offices, practices, devices and software. Note that “work” comes first in “workspace.” Tools and specific locations may be required to get the work done, but they are generally secondary to the work. Ideally, once we have designed a solid work practice, we don’t have to spend much time thinking about our tools as we get the work done. Thinking about tools means we aren’t working and being productive. We need a seamless workspace to be able to focus on our work; our tools and practices should allow the work to flow from activity to activity with as little disruption as possible.