GigaOM » Anne Zelenka Archives

Tip of the Week: Two Priorities/One Month

Anne Zelenka — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:00:54 +0000

How do you decide what you should do from your to do list? You have a free hour: should you write a blog post? Prospect for clients? Code a new feature? Instant message your boss? Take a nap?

In other words, what are your priorities? It doesn’t matter how much you get done if you’re doing the wrong stuff. Along with a to do list, you need a way of prioritizing that helps you decide what should be done.

I like the prioritization scheme that Susan L. Reid offers in her book Discovering Your Inner Samurai. She suggests you pick two top priorities and commit to them for one month:

Two priorities; one-month commitment. That’s all. Of course, if you can, you might narrow that priority down to one. Most of us, though, unless we are in an extreme situation, will have two.

Does having only two priorities mean you completely ignore other things you need to get done — work assignments, chores at home, or your taxes, for example? No. It just means when you’re scheduling your time and picking things to do you first look to tasks having to do with one of your two top priorities.

This may not work for your individual situation of course — two priorities may be far too few; a month may be too long. But it has the benefit of radically simplifying and intensifying your commitments for a duration that seems totally doable yet is long enough that it should produce some real results.

Related posts

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

3 Online Resources for Color Creativity

Anne Zelenka — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:00:59 +0000

It used to be only graphic designers and fine artists played with color professionally. Now everyone with a website gets to choose color themes and schemes. But where do you find help and inspiration? Here are three resources you might want to check out if you need to get creative with colors online.

Adobe Kuler color theme creation and sharing tool. From Adobe Labs, this Flash-based tool lets you create color schemes, tag them, share them, and download them. When you create a scheme, you can choose from rules like Analogous (close together on the color wheel) and Complementary (opposite each other) or make a completely custom scheme.

Sessions.edu color wheel calculator. Also based on Adobe Flash, the Sessions.edu color wheel tool works similarly to the Kuler creation tool, but it offers the nice feature of letting you see your color choices mix it up in one of four abstract designs. It also offers a different set of rules than Kuler — I especially like the “triangle” choice which gives a split complement scheme.

COLOURlovers color and design community. This website offers a wealth of resources for picking colors and staying on top of color trends. Go to the Palettes page to search thousands of color schemes developed by COLOURlovers community members, Trends to see where magazines and websites are going with color, and the Forums to talk color.

Share your favorite resources for getting creative with color in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

What's Your Email Style — Plain or Fancy?

Anne Zelenka — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:46:12 +0000

There’s no shortage of articles published about how to take control of your email; we’ve contributed quite a few ourselves. This week, I’ve seen the extremes of email management approaches, from very simple to incredibly complex:

Plain. Gina Trapani of Lifehacker offers Empty Your Inbox with Gmail and the Trusted Trio. With Gina’s scheme, everything that needs some action in the future goes into Follow Up (messages you need to take action on) or Hold (where you are waiting on something or someone else) with the rest getting archived. Voila! Clean inbox.

But remember you might want to transfer to do items from your email into your task manager or you might forget all you need to do. Out of the inbox can mean out of mind, as you may have discovered after you labeled a bunch of emails as Follow Up and then never looked at them again.

Fancy. Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Workweek says you might want to Outsource the Inbox and Never Check Email Again. Tim suggests you hire a virtual assistant to process your email, which would involve too much overhead of time, money, and hassle for most people. But if you’re an Internet celebrity who receives thousands of emails a day, it could be just the thing to free your time from email processing for higher value work.

What’s your email processing personality? Plain or fancy?

Related posts

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

5 Ways to Recession-Proof Your Career

Anne Zelenka — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:28:31 +0000

We could already be suffering a recession in the U.S., and the tech industry is not immune, as potential Yahoo! layoffs show. What should you be doing now to protect yourself?

Keep building that online persona. Share who you are and what you’re about online — through a blog or other means. Raising your professional profile online is one of the best ways to attract new job and business opportunities your way. Don’t just create an online version of a resume; get active and connected online.

Create additional income streams, even if you are an employee. Or perhaps especially if you are an employee — because your salary is vulnerable to disappearing all at once, while freelancers and business owners usually have multiple clients.

How can you create additional streams of income? Find a side job as a freelancer (be careful not to break any of your employer’s noncompete policies by doing so), start an ad-supported blog, sell products online, or offer consulting services in your field of expertise. While none of these things will — at least initially — make enough money to replace a full-time-with-bennies job, they can cushion the pain of income loss while teaching you new skills and growing your professional network.

Stay aware of what the market wants. Even during a recession, jobs go begging when employers can’t find people with the right skills. Even if you’re not looking for a job or more contract work right now, subscribe to Craigslist job listing feeds using searches that match what kind of positions might interest you. You’ll keep yourself informed as to what skills you might need to add to your arsenal, what companies are hiring in your area, and whether hires in your field are trending up or down.

Invest in human capital. In other words, beef up your skills. You don’t have to spend money on classes to do so, though that might be the easiest way to learn the basics of something unfamiliar to you. You can spend your time: find an unpaid internship with training as your compensation, do volunteer work for a nonprofit, get involved in an open source effort, or start your own just-for-learning-purposes project.

Create social capital too. If you do lose your job or a major client, your next one may very well come through your online network of friends and associates. Your online social network can not only help find new opportunities just when you need them, it can also provide emotional support when you go through tough times. Not sure exactly how to go about creating social capital? Here are some tips for networking like a human.

For more tips on recession-proofing your career, see Robert Scoble’s article from December “Surviving the 2008 recession” and Penelope Trunk’s article posted today “Maybe there will be a recession. Here’s what to do just in case.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Work-Life Boundaries for the Passionate Worker

Anne Zelenka — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:17:00 +0000

I bet some Web Worker Daily readers can see themselves in Seth Godin’s description of the passionate worker:

The passionate worker doesn’t show up because she’s afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it’s a hobby that pays. The passionate worker is busy blogging on vacation… because posting that thought and seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on the beach for another hour. The passionate worker tweaks a site design after dinner because, hey, it’s a lot more fun than watching TV.

The only problem with being super-passionate about your work life is that work can take over your whole life. That’s especially so for web workers since near-ubiquitous connectivity means you can almost always tweak that website, write that blog post, or code that next feature no matter where you are or what time it is.

How do you make sure your personal life doesn’t get lost? If you are truly passionate about your work, practices like limiting your work time or batch processing email may not be strong enough to keep work in its place — because your work is so engaging it magnetically pulls you back again and again.

What to do? Use boundary-setting methods that take advantage of your passionate personality. For example, choose flow-inducing hobbies and pursue personal goals with as much attention as you bring to your professional goals. You can read about those methods and more in the guest post I wrote for Tim Ferriss’ blog: 5 Boundary-Setting Tips for the Work Obsessed.

If you’ve come up with good ways to keep your passionate work life from smothering your personal life, share them in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Can You Take the Home Office Deduction? Probably Not

Anne Zelenka — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:46:21 +0000

If you work from home, you may be wondering if you can deduct costs related to your home office — a part of your mortgage payment or rent, for example. But unfortunately the U.S. tax law in this area doesn’t recognize the work-life blend that most home workers practice. If you mix business and personal activities in your home office, you can’t take the deduction.

The Wall Street Journal reports that most people eligible for this potentially lucrative deduction probably don’t take it:

“It is questionable whether most taxpayers who are eligible to take the deduction actually do so,” IRS National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson said in a report to Congress last week. She urged lawmakers to offer taxpayers a simpler, optional method of calculating the home-office deduction. [subscription required]

Why don’t more people deduct home office expenses? The WSJ identifies a number of reasons: the law is quite complex, requires extensive record-keeping, and is perceived to raise a person’s risk of being audited.

What might be the ultimate barrier for many home-based web workers, however, is the law’s requirement that, in order to deduct expenses for your home office, you use that part of the home exclusively as your principal place of business. Very few people use their home office only for work, even if it is their main place of business.

This law hasn’t kept up with the reality of work today. If you set up a comfortable home office with a nice computer, filing system, and workspace, you’ll probably do your personal work there — paying bills, for example. You might play games on the computer or use it for socializing too.

The law could allow a proration of time based on how the office is used; for example, allowing you to deduct 80% of costs if you spend 80% of the time in your office working. While this would add to the record-keeping burden, it would have the great benefit of allowing home-based businesses the opportunity to deduct actual expenses, just like other businesses can.

Related posts

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Coghead on AWS: The SaaS Ecosystem Expands

Anne Zelenka — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 13:00:36 +0000

Coghead, like DabbleDB and Zoho Creator, allows you to quickly create a hosted database-backed web application without programming. But unlike DabbleDB and Zoho Creator, Coghead wants to create a platform not just for web applications but for web businesses, and they’re doing it on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Coghead is building their business on a model similar to that of AWS: providing agile and scalable services over the web using pay-as-you-go pricing. Through their affiliate program, Coghead makes it easy for more software-as-a-service (SaaS) web businesses to launch, just like Amazon wants to use their limited beta DevPay service to encourage SaaS businesses atop AWS.

In Coghead on AWS, you can see the arrival of the SaaS ecosystem, as web-based services combined and layered on top of each other make it easier and cheaper than ever for anyone with a good web business idea to turn it into a revenue stream.

Coghead unveils v2.0 on Amazon Web Services

Today Coghead unveils version 2.0 of its do-it-yourself web application platform. Their 50 new features and enhancements look less interesting than their migration to Amazon Web Services for their computing infrastructure. (CTO Greg Olsen, who sees a SaaS-based ecosystem as the inevitable future of computing, calls AWS the most significant product of his lifetime.)

To build an application with Coghead, you drag and drop widgets to make web forms via Coghead’s Flex-based user interface. You don’t have to do any programming because Coghead has done that for you, nor do you have to buy and manage your own hardware and hosting. Coghead handles that for you, too — by delegating such responsibilities to AWS and to services built on top of AWS.

Web businesses, not just web applications

In December, Coghead launched the Coghead Affiliate Program, which provides system integrators, value-added resellers, and web tycoon wannabes an easy way to build and sell web applications using a SaaS model. Coghead affiliates build applications using Coghead’s do-it-yourself interface, then set their own per-user, per-month prices for use of those applications. Coghead takes their part of the monthly user fees, while the application developer gets the rest as revenue.

Until now, there hasn’t been an easy, low-cost way for a tech-savvy person with a good niche web application idea to turn that into a business. You’d have to find programmers, arrange web hosting, and build a payment system into your application. Coghead does all that for you.

The next web expansion?

Coghead builds on the SaaS offerings of others, including AWS (which offers both hardware and software as a service), as well on other services built on top of AWS — such as offerings from RightScale . Coghead in turn creates an environment for yet more SaaS businesses to launch. Current affiliates include Hekamedia for education, allRounds for private equity, and MCF Technology Solutions for general business applications.

Coghead is just one of many companies growing in the SaaS ecosystem. I previously covered Workplace2Go, which offers hosted business applications and uses the Jamcracker service delivery network behind the scenes. Workplace2Go, like Coghead, reduces the friction of starting a business.

It’s too early to tell which players in the SaaS ecosystem will survive and thrive — but Coghead, as both a consumer and producer of service-based offerings, looks well-positioned for success in this cost-efficient new world.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Open Thread: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

Anne Zelenka — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 18:12:14 +0000

While perhaps only our geekiest readers have a favorite programming language, it’s a useful question since so many web workers do know how to code, even if it’s just hacking up JavaScript and PHP on a WordPress installation.

Java, the choice of enterprise IT shops everwhere, isn’t feeling much love online these days: first InfoWorld calls it the new Cobol. Then two professors emeriti say it’s ruining computer science education.

Meanwhile, Ruby-based web framework Ruby on Rails doesn’t seem quite so hot this year as it was last January, Scala’s getting some laughs, and people have been wondering why Erlang’s so buzzy.

So geeks: share your own programming language opinions here. What programming languages do you use right now? Which ones do you love? Are there any you want to take a closer look at? And what programming languages suck, in your (surely humble) opinion?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Workstreaming: One Secret of Web Work Success

Anne Zelenka — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 23:51:33 +0000

If you work remotely from your colleagues — whether you’re a telecommuter or a freelancer or entrepreneur joining with other entrepreneurs loosely across geography — it’s helpful to let associates know what you’re up to on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis. In the presence of ubiquitous connectivity and absence of facetime, use workstreaming.

I defined workstreaming last March as “the publishing of work-related activities and events to your remote colleagues, usually via RSS but sometimes in other formats and ways.” This jumps off the idea of lifestreaming: sharing a moment-by-moment or event-by-event account of your life, whether through video or blogs or tools like Jaiku and FriendFeed.

How can you do workstreaming? Message boards can work well for corporate teams: post a message when a project milestone is reached, a document is available for review, a sale has been closed, a bug fixed. On her new blog Anywired, Skellie offers tips for using micro-blogs like Tumblr, Twitter, and Soup.io to do it. A macro-blog like WordPress or Blogger works well as a coarse-grained, person-focused workstream. Stowe Boyd is working on a secretive project called Workstreamr that he calls his greatest obsession. I can’t wait to see it.

Do you want to learn more about workstreaming and other new ways that web workers succeed when ubiquitous connectivity is a given but face-to-face contact is not? Then check out Web Worker Daily’s book Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working, where I discuss workstreaming and other secrets of success in the connected age.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Open Thread: What's Your Digital Dunbar Number?

Anne Zelenka — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 13:34:07 +0000

What’s the limit to the number of people you can maintain relationships with? What about online relationships?

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests that 150 is the maximum number of people with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships. That theoretical limit is known to sociologists and anthropologists as Dunbar’s number.

Might the number change when you’re talking about online relationships? Do tools like email, instant messaging, blogs, micro-blogs, and online social networks reduce friction and increase communication enough that the number of relationships you can maintain online might be greater than 150?

JP Rangaswami, who blogs at Confused of Calcutta, thinks his digital Dunbar number is higher than 150:

I’ve sensed that I have a Dunbar number of around 300 in the digital world, and I’ve been delighted to find I know most of the steady ones. Over the years I’ve actually met most of the community of readers, usually at conferences. The face-to-face contact, in turn, leads to a deepening of the relationship, and we land up creating and developing links in Facebook and Twitter. [I still land up with a smidgeon of LinkedIn requests, but to be frank the only reason I go to LinkedIn is to deal with Invitations to Connect.]

JP wants to get a conversation started about digital Dunbars and asks his readers:

How many Facebook friends do you have, how many regular readers of your blog, how many followers in Twitter, do you see a correlation between the three, if not why not, and so on. Do you tend to meet a core of this number on a face-to-face basis, if not why not? What other tools do you use, tools such as Dopplr and last.fm and netvibes and so on.

I’ve found I can comfortably follow only about 100 people on Twitter. Beyond that, I lose track of who people are and the experience feels more like noise than connecting. So I think my digital Dunbar might be below 150.

What about you? What’s your offline Dunbar number? Your digital Dunbar?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.