“While coworking spaces might come pretty close to the ideal working space, at times they can also be spaces where some of the worst characteristics of a capitalist economy are being reproduced — just like in an ordinary workspace,” she writes. Independent work may solve many problems, but it doesn’t get rid of asymmetric relationships between those handing out work and those completing it, she states. What does she mean by this?

If there is a big difference between the partners in a work relationship, sometimes the stronger party gets all the advantages and benefits, while the weaker party has to bear the full risk and disadvantages.

Usually the strong partner is someone who is established and well connected. Often these people or companies are very good at communicating and selling, they act mainly as project managers, while contracting out the actual development or design work to other people. The subcontractors in turn are often newcomers who don’t have a big network, who are rather inexperienced and not as good at selling themselves and their work. Usually these people are happy that someone subcontracts them work and they don’t have to spend time on acquisition, communicating and networking. The relationship between the main contractor and the subcontractor can be win-win situation, but rather often it is not.

The result of this unequal balance of power, Pohler claims, can be impossible deadlines, insane hours, failure to pay for revisions to a project and extremely long lag times before payment for subcontractors. And coworking spaces, she feels, may be inadvertently making the problem worse. “It is easy to find young, skilled and motivated people as subcontractors, and it is easy to build relationships on the assumption that everyone is more or less the same and equal,” she writes.

Pohler may diagnose the problem in her article, but when it comes to solutions, she simply advocates for greater discussion of the issue and more openness in the community.

Is that an adequate solution, or do you think independent workers need to do more to protect themselves?

Image courtesy of Flickr user JD Hancock.

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There’s a new mobile app store available for millions of devices, but it’s not for iOS, Android, or Windows Phone handsets. As of Tuesday, the newest app store is for robots, and the first four apps are compatible with the estimated 6 million iRobot Roomba vacuums. Yes, we now have an app store for robots!

MyRobots.com just launched the new store which has some similarities to other mobile app stores. For example, the company will take 25 percent of any paid transactions for robot apps. One huge difference, however, is that these apps will run directly on a robot, or in the cloud for connected robots. Don’t expect, then, to see smartphone apps that interface with robots in this store.

The first initial applications add some interactivity to the Roomba, including a free app that allows you to have a text chat with your mobile vacuum. The three others are all priced at $25 and range in functionality: remote control over the web; mobile surveillance if you have a web-cam on your Roomba; and a telepresence app for when you’re away from home.

A developer program for the Robot App Store is now in beta, so developers can sign up to help shape the storefront with apps. Will this store ever rival the size and scope of the iTunes App Store? That’s not likely, but I do see many reasons to believe home robotics is the next big thing. I shared those ideas back in 2010 in a GigaOm Pro report (subscription required), saying the brains and sensors in a smartphone are enough to get the home robot movement rolling.

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Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents was in attendance at the court’s announcement of the ruling on Friday and said that Judge Andreas Voss didn’t specify any particular reason for the decision. The first ruling against Samsung last week also didn’t include a reason. Mueller said at that time that the reasons could either be that Apple had been found not to infringe the patent or that Samsung’s rights in exerting the patent had been deemed exhausted, which would result in Apple’s being granted a license by default. The same reasons could also be applied to Friday’s ruling.

For Samsung, this is definitely a setback, but it isn’t the end of the road; the company still has three other 3G/UMTS patents at issue in separate complaints filed with the Mannheim court. As long as the reasons behind the dismissals of these two lawsuits aren’t somehow related to all the patents in question, it could still claim a victory on one or more of those remaining.

Samsung could also still appeal the decision, and given that it, like Apple, posted record earnings for its most recently completed quarter, there is no financial barrier preventing it from doing so. With two companies at the top of their game slugging it out in the legal arena, there is little incentive for either to stop.

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As more and more workers take up the promise of technology and get out of the office to work where and when it suits them, employees’ needs for their company’s office change radically. Cubicles fall in importance as many opt to stay away from the office when they want to grind out work in isolation, and the remaining spaces increasingly need to be designed to foster collaboration. Enter coworking, whose very existence is predicated on the idea of providing spaces to break down isolation and get workers’ creative juices flowing. What lessons does the movement have for corporate types looking to create spaces that foster collaboration?

GCUC is featuring a panel entitled “How to Design, Build and Grow your Space for Collaboration” and to get a sense of what answers it might offer for those providing corporate spaces to increasingly nomadic teams, we spoke to two panelists — architect Jerome Chang, who is also founder of BLANKSPACES coworking in Los Angeles, and Harvard-trained designer Sidi Gomes, who is the founder of ParallelCities.com – for a sneak preview. Both said those interested in the future of office design should pay plenty of attention to coworking.

“The future, I believe, is that corporate offices are going to become coworking offices,” said Gomes. “One space that was able to host 100 permanent workers can now hold 300 mobile workers working different hours, half the time from home, or the coffee shop. Therefore, corporate offices should be learning everything they can from coworking spaces, especially how to still keep ‘community’ when the population suddenly triples in size.”

Chang agrees, calling Zappos’s new campus  for example, “a great extension of coworking ideals.” How so? Change explains that “Zappos is looking to build a whole mini-city community by having encouraged a lot more people to live, work and play all in the same area as their office. The surrounding community becomes the campus itself.” That’s an idea more companies may want to explore.

Not only are the ratio of workers to square footage and the relationship between campuses and their surrounding communities set to change, but so too is the balance of private to public spaces within offices, according to both Chang and Gomes. And coworking has something to teach companies here too, they feel.

Collaboration is all well and good, “but true creativity really comes from privacy and reflection,” according to Gomes. “Imagine Frankenstein being developed in a public lab. You need the privacy of a basement to do that.” But this creativity-protecting cocoon of privacy needs to be balanced with idea-sparking sociability. “If you were always locked up in a basement, you would never get the idea to create Frankenstein to begin with,” he continues. Coworking can provide a template for corporate offices looking to get this fine balance right.

“The cool thing about coworking spaces is that ‘privacy’ is achieved in an open floor plan setting, because you are surrounded by people you don’t know, and therefore are not expected to talk to, so you can put your head phones on and go heads down,” explains Gomes.

Could a bustling corporate campus housing three times as many folks as a standard office and with people coming and going at less regular hours offer the same advantages of meeting stimulating (relatively) new people combined with the privacy of proximity to near strangers that coworking does?

Image courtesy of Flickr user .dh.

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What did the new data reveal? As Steve King of Emergent Research recently told WebWorkerDaily, coworking, it appears, is exiting its infancy and moving into a more business-savvy second phase with fresh faces outside the original, typical community-minded founders taking an interest in collaborative work spaces. And coworking space owners have apparently gotten the memo about their movement’s exploding popularity, telling the pollsters in large numbers that they hope to capitalize on growing interest in the movement and expand their businesses in 2012.

More than one in three owners (36 percent) surveyed said they hope to open an additional location this year. But not all owners are aiming to be moguls of coworking with a chain of spaces to their credit. A further 10 percent are simply hoping to expand their existing space in 2012. Just over a quarter (27 percent) have no plans to expand at all.

Earlier findings from this same survey indicate only a modest 40 percent of coworking spaces were profitable last year. ‘Wouldn’t owners of spaces in the red shy away from further investment?’ you might ask. The survey results suggest that’s not the case. “Of the spaces that want to open a new location, only 44 percent are presently profitable, while the majority of the expansion-planners are either making a loss or breaking even,” reports Deskmag.

For more information on how expansion plans relate to the number of months a space has been in operation and other details such as owners’ predictions for membership numbers in the coming year, check out the full write-up from Deskmag.

Are owners of often unprofitable spaces looking to expand prematurely?

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Step one: Find out if your Mac can handle it

Not all Macs are eligible for memory upgrades, or at least not ones you can perform easily at home. Some might already be equipped with their maximum supported memory, and some might have more difficult to replace memory kits, like the MacBook Air does, for instance. But in general, you can find out if your Mac could take on more memory by checking your system stats.

In Lion, this is easy. Go to the Apple menu, click “About this Mac,” and then click “More Info…” Then, click the “Memory” tab along the top and it’ll show you how much memory you currently have installed, and the capacity of each individual module. In my example, I have 4 x 4 GB modules installed on my iMac, which is the most this model officially supports. Many base configuration models of iMacs currently available ship with two slots free, as mine did before I upgraded.

To find out the maximum memory your model supports, you can do two things. First, click the link in that Memory information page that says “Memory Upgrade Instructions” to be taken to the relevant Apple support site for your computer. So long as you know when your computer was released, you can find all the information you need, including Apple’s maximum memory capacity for your specific model here. If you need to find when your Mac was released, check our guide for finding that out.

You can also take a second option, which is to visit OWC, find your Mac of choice under the “Memory” section and see what options the site provides. OWC actually offers kits that provide memory in capacities that often exceed Apple’s official supported specs, but will still work fine with your hardware.

Step two: Figure how much memory you need to upgrade

OWC is a great resource for figuring out how much RAM you need to purchase to upgrade. Navigate to the Memory section on the OWC homepage, then find your model of computer. Now, the site will provide you with a number of options for memory upgrades and replacements. OWC had basically done the thinking for you, so you can just click on a combo package greater than your current memory configuration and not worry about whether or not the modules will work with each other or your machine.

The other benefit of going through OWC is that they have very fair prices, and they even offer rebate pricing on the memory that shipped with your Apple computer. You won’t get much, but it’s more than you’d make by throwing your old RAM in the garbage.

Step three: Install the RAM

Following Apple’s installation guides is the best way to go about replacing your RAM. Here are links to the instructions for upgrading iMac memory, Mac mini memory, MacBook Pro memory, and MacBook memory. It’s not difficult and requires a minimum of tools, but you will need a small screwdriver, like one you’d use for eyeglasses repair, in order to replace memory on iMacs and MacBooks.

Step four: Enjoy considerable performance boosts

When I upgraded my 2011 iMac from its basic 4 GB of memory to 16 GB, it was definitely like getting a new machine. Things never grind to a halt anymore; I can run Photoshop alongside other demanding applications without major slow-downs; and my computer seldom requires an actual restart or power-down to get things moving smoothly again. The entire upgrade cost me less than $100, too.

If you love your Mac but find yourself less than impressed with its performance lately, a memory boost could be just the thing to put the spark back in your relationship.

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While on average nearly one-in-five (17 percent) wired workers claims to telecommute on a frequent basis, the percentage of workers taking advantage of their broadband connection to get out of the office was far higher in emerging markets.

“Those working in the Middle East and Africa (27 percent), Latin America (25 percent) and Asia-Pacific (24 percent) are considerably more likely than those in North America (9 percent) and Europe (9 percent) to telecommute ‘on a frequent basis,’” the survey found. The rates for individual countries hold more surprises with these nations reporting the most and fewest telecommuters:

• India: 56 percent
• Indonesia: 34 percent
• Mexico: 30 percent
• Argentina: 29 percent
• South Africa: 28 percent
• Turkey: 27 percent
• Canada: 8 percent
• France: 7 percent
• Italy: 7 percent
• Sweden: 6 percent
• Germany: 5 percent
• Hungary: 3 percent

So who exactly qualifies as a frequent telecommuter for the purposes of the Ipsos survey? A telecommuter, the release explains is “an employee uses a stationary or portable computer to do their office work from a location outside of their office,” so a fairly standard definition that encompasses how the word is commonly used here in the States.

The survey also found differences between populations in how much appetite for telecommuting exists among those who have not yet been offered the option. In Japan, a measly 12 percent would telecommute if given the opportunity. Sixteen percent in Sweden and 19 percent in Great Britain felt the same, while a whopping 54 percent of Argentines would happily jump on the telecommuting bandwagon if allowed.

One thing healthy majorities in nearly every country agreed on though was that telecommuting is a productivity booster. Sixty-five percent globally told pollsters “telecommuters are more productive because the flexibility allows them to work when they have the most focus and/or because having maximum control over the work environment and schedule leads to job satisfaction and happiness.” Surprisingly, in telecommuting-bereft Hungary, 74 percent agreed with this proposition, as did a similar proportion of those polled in Argentina, Poland, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.

What do you think accounts for the national differences revealed by the survey?

Image courtesy of Flickr user diongillard.

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But recently ,Canadian current affairs magazine Maclean’s offered another possible contributing factor, one that gets a lot of consideration here on WebWorkerDaily. “Could the rise of independent work be partly to blame for the rise of inequality?” the article asks in an article entitled “The End of the Job.”

The rise of the contract worker may also be having a more wide-scale impact than previously realized. A growing gap between rich and poor in countries like Canada has been blamed, in part, on a growing number of poor quality jobs. There’s also mounting evidence to suggest that the rise of the throwaway worker has made recent recessions more painful and longer-lasting. Temp jobs? More like a temporary economy.

“It all amounts to a sea change in corporate attitudes about what constitutes a job in the first place,” concludes the article, noting the death of the job-security-for-loyalty model of previous decades. This move toward more independent and contract work is not only another contributing cause of inequality, but also of the general economic doldrums:

The concern is that all of this impermanence risks creating an economy built not on bedrock, but shifting sand….  Companies see contract employment as the answer to uncertain times, but [professor at the School of Labor Studies at McMaster University Wayne] Lewchuk says it may be a case of the medicine being worse than the disease. People who don’t earn as much money spend less, which isn’t good for the economy. “If people stop buying, then companies stop producing and lay off more workers,” he says. “You get yourself into a quicker and deeper hole. Meanwhile, on the other side of a recession, when you start bringing people back, you’re doing it at lower wages and they don’t have the kind of purchasing oomph necessary to get the economic engine started again.”

Of course, the need for companies to grow leaner, including by utilizing more independent workers, is driven by larger economic forces like globalization and better, cheaper technology, so it’s difficult to argue that independent work itself is the root cause of the problem. Pretty clearly it’s an effect rather than a driver of change. But Maclean’s contention that independent work may be a piece of a destructive cycle that’s both increasing inequality and holding back growth seems worth considering.

How much is the rise of independent work contributing to increased inequality? To economic stagnation?

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That’s the contention of Jim Ware, the founder and executive director of The Future of Work, in a fascinating recent article for Workspace Design magazine. In the piece, Ware says workplace professionals need to shake up their conception of their role to keep up with the times.

I believe it starts with rethinking—from the ground up—the role of a workplace professional. I’ve recently been tracking several debates about the definition of “facilities management” as discussed across a number of LinkedIn groups…. most of the contributors seem to have a very limited view of their jobs. They focus on keeping their buildings open and clean, on controlling costs, on ensuring business continuity, and sometimes on improving sustainability.

In contrast, I believe your job as workplace professional is to support work, wherever and whenever it takes place. And for me “support” means focusing on the work itself, and how it’s being done, almost more than the workplace.

As one senior executive commented to me several years ago, “The most expensive cost of any workplace is the salary of the people who use it.” Thus, the most important measure of workplace effectiveness is workforce productivity, not simple cost control.

This shift in focus, “puts workplace professionals squarely into flexible work programs,” Ware concludes. In order to be effective at providing work spaces that fit with more flexible conceptions of work, Ware says architects, designers and facilities managers shouldn’t shy away from playing futurist: “creating pictures (visions) of alternate possible futures, and then being sure your organization is prepared for any or all of them.”

With the world changing so rapidly and unpredictably, it’s unlikely workplace pros will be able to correctly guess the exact shape of their organizations’ future needs But that’s not the point, according to Ware. Instead of hoping to outdo the neighborhood psychic in accuracy, facilities managers should use scenario planning, envisioning a range of possible futures. What good does this do? The practice enables:

Managers to open their minds to the inherent uncertainties in the future, and to consider a number of ‘what-if’ possibilities without needing to choose or commit exclusively to one most-likely outcome. Scenario analysis enables managers, business planners, and executive teams to develop multiple options for action that can be compared and assessed in advance of the need to implement them.

The bottom line, according to Ware, is that facilities managers shouldn’t just worry about keeping the lights on and the real estate bill down, but should be proactively planning for the future of work. “Enlist your peers in HR, IT, and Finance, and together build the stories of how you believe your employees could be working in three to five years. Then, develop plans for a workplace laboratory where you (and those employees) can experiment with new layouts, new technologies, and new ways of working,” he concludes.

Do you agree with Ware about the changing role of facilities managers?

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The Oculus Surveillance and Telepresence Netbook Robot project is looking to secure $15,000 in pledges by Jan. 31. You can commit as little as $30 for an Oculus T-Shirt, $225 for a full robot kit (netbook not included) or $420 for a deluxe robot made of wood, complete with a headlight, T-shirt — for you, not the robot — and RoboRealm software. Even with the largest pledge, you’ll have to provide a netbook.

Although I’m a robot enthusiast, this project makes perfect sense. Netbooks are cheap enough and have more than enough horsepower and sensors to power a robot. I suspect that while many netbook owners still use their device as a traditional laptop, others have moved on to tablets or other mobile devices. That means an old netbook collecting dust can gain a second life.

Using the netbook’s webcam, an Arduino board and open source software, the Oculus could work well as an inexpensive ”place shifting” solution. The robot’s owner can remotely move the robot and see what the it sees, while communicating with other people over the web through a netbook’s integrated microphone and speakers. The Oculus even has a charging dock that it can back into on its own.

Note that this isn’t the first netbook-powered robot potentially hitting the market. Willow Garage has long offered the TurtleBot that combines a netbook with a Roomba iCrate base and an Xbox Kinect. As a result, you’ll pay much more for that solution; $1399 for a full kit including the netbook.

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Onboarding any employee into a company can be tricky, and as we’ve covered here on WebWorkerDaily before, getting new virtual employees up to speed is even trickier. In fact, the process has so many potential pitfalls that some experts on remote work recommend you skip it entirely, opting instead to train your remote workers face-to-face.

Speaking to MoneyWatch’s Laura Vanderkam recently, Mom Corps CEO Allison O’Kelly suggested managers bring new hires that will be working at a distance into the office for the first week or two:

Train in person. If you’re hiring someone into a virtual position, awesome. You can find a great person without having to pay moving expenses! But “training is the most difficult part,” says O’Kelly. You have to explain exactly what it is the person needs to do, as well as your culture. “We have had some people who we have tried to train virtually and it really is difficult,” O’Kelly says. The solution? Spend time together. O’Kelly is in Pennsylvania, and recently hired a CFO in Atlanta who spent two different weeks with her. Spread out over several weeks, those two weeks have been “invaluable,” she says.

Donna Wells, CEO of online company Mindflash, concurred with this position last year on Mashable, suggesting managers should:

Plan to have new remote teammates spend their first days or weeks at HQ. As good as collaboration tools are, they are not effective in building the personal relationships and communication shortcuts that come very quickly face-to-face. For the employee, it’s a chance to feel a strong sense of belonging and to establish a positive bond with the boss and whole team. For managers, it’s an opportunity to convey the company culture, to set expectations and start building the trust you’ll need later on to hit mutual goals.

Even here on WebWorkerDaily where we’re usually focused on figuring out how to do nearly everything better at a distance, my colleague Darrell Etherington has conceded that when done virtually, “training is tricky. Orientation for new remote workers, especially if they’re new to the job or company and not just making the shift from being an in-office employee, can be very difficult.” Though there are plenty of tech tools to ease the stresses of training remote workers and keep them closely connected to the office during those crucial first weeks if a trip in to get to know the team is impossible.

In your experience is trying to train at a distance a hopeless undertaking or can it be done well?

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The Das Keyboard is basically the opposite of Apple’s own typing input devices: It’s glossy black, imposing and has a distinctive old-school edge, while Apple’s keyboard is all lightness and aluminum. But the Das Keyboard is aimed at a particular crowd for whom the overwrought design (the company calls it “Darth Vader approved”) is a selling feature, not a downside.

Das Keyboard’s main draw is its use of mechanical switch keys, which make the experience of typing particularly rewarding, especially for touch typists whose fingers fly yet depend on some kind of tactile feedback. The company compares the experience to typing on an IBM Model M keyboard, a design some say has not been improved upon since. The new Mac-specific model also features dedicated deys for volume control, playback, screen brightness, disc eject, and even a sleep button for instant access to energy savings.

The built-in USB 2.0 hub should also be better than the one on Apple’s own wired keyboard: Das Keyboard says it can charge and sync your iPad, which the underpowered hubs on Apple’s own keyboards can’t manage.

The Das Keyboard for Mac normally retails for a fairly pricey $133, but if you pre-order now via the official website, it costs $113.

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At the start of each new year, jobs site CareerBuilder polls several thousand HR pros and hiring managers about their outlook for the year ahead when it comes to hiring contract and temporary workers. And just like the last three years, the survey this year found a steady uptick in the number of businesses planning on hiring contract staff, with 36 percent responding they will hire such workers in 2012. That’s up from:

• 34 percent for 2011
• 30 percent for 2010
• 28 percent for 2009

Certainly plenty of these temp positions may be traditional seasonal workers taken on to deal with the summer rush at a resort or as short-term fillers when an employee is out on maternity leave, for instance. But the steady rise in the number of contract employees firms plan to take on does support the argument that lean economic times are opening more and more business’s eyes to the advantages of agile hiring practices.

“Employers are relying on temporary and contract workers to support leaner staffs,” commented Eric Gilpin, president of CareerBuilder’s staffing and recruiting group in the release accompanying the survey. But he also noted that many firms plan to move contract workers to full-time roles if and when the economy picks up.

Do you foresee most employers reverting back to full-staff when the economy finally picks up?

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Blackberries and iPhones are meant to help workers manage their workload by giving them access to messages and alerts while away from the office.

But people become so obsessive about checking their email accounts and social networking sites that they actually become more stressed as a result, researchers said.

Some are so hooked to their devices that they even begin to experience “phantom” vibrations where they mistakenly believe their phone is buzzing in their pocket, it was claimed.

Balding’s team came to this conclusion after following the smartphone use of a relatively small group of 100 volunteers in a variety of professions and then measuring their stress levels. Anxiousness wasn’t linked to the participants’ profession, the researchers found, but instead to the amount of their smartphone use. The psychologists concluded that checking our phones stresses us out and the more stressed we become the more compelled we feel to check our phones, creating a vicious cycle of addiction and stress.

Simply switching off is the best solution, according to Balding, who urges managers to get on top of the problem:

Organizations will not flourish if their employees are stressed, irrespective of the source of stress, so it is in their interest to encourage their employees to switch their phones off; cut the number of work emails sent out of hours, and reduce people’s temptation to check their devices.

This is a similar conclusion to an analysis of iPass survey data on mobile workers done by another British academic a short time ago, which argued organizations need to help their employees police the boundaries between work and life and create space for genuine downtime.

Honestly, as a manager of mobile workers, are you trying to prevent smartphone overuse or pushing your staff towards it?

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1. Clean that screen

You’ve got a gorgeous screen on that iMac, but it’s covered by dust, debris and who knows what else. You may be tempted to use a bottle of glass cleaner — but don’t. That can harm the screen. My recommendation is to use Klear Screen kits, along with their microfiber cloth. They remove the debris while protecting the finish. If you don’t use Klear Screen, make sure whatever you do use is designed for glossy screens. For laptops, I highly recommend Radtech’s Screensavrz to prevent transfer of oils from the laptop keyboard onto the screen.

Let’s not even talk about that keyboard and how dirty it is. If you can shake it out, go ahead and do it. Then give it a good wipe with a safe, keyboard-specific cleaner.

2. Check the hard drive and keep it running right

Your hard drive stores your digital life and is a common point of failure in Macs. When’s the last time you checked the status of yours? Lion’s recovery partition makes this extremely easy. Hold down command-R at startup, and choose the recovery partition so that you can run Disk Utility on your main drive. For more information, check Apple’s detailed site about Lion Recovery.

Computers running operating systems older than Lion will need to boot from a CD or external hard disk to fully check the computer’s hard drive and perform minor repairs. If you want, you can also use third-party programs to expand your recovery and repair options.

Both Tech Tool Pro 6 and Drive Genius 3 have background monitoring of your hard drive to give you early warnings of problems, but if you want a free simple SMART warning program, check out the free SMARTReporter. Advance warning of a hard drive failure can be crucial to saving your data.

3. Replace that surge protector and test the battery backup

Do you know how old your surge protector is? Are you using one? If you don’t know when you bought it and you don’t know the amount of joules it protects against, it’s time to get a new one. Remember that a power strip isn’t necessarily a surge protector. One well-placed electrical “event” can turn that wonderful Mac into a glorified paperweight. As a general rule, when you get a new Mac, it’s also time for a new surge protector. I prefer name brand protectors from providers I trust such as Belkin, APC, and Tripp-Lite.

Similar to a surge protector, battery backups (UPS) tend to be set it and forget it. But batteries have limited life spans, and you don’t want to find out your battery is bad the hard way. It’s time to test the battery. Save your work and unplug your UPS from the wall. Did your Mac stay up? If it didn’t then your battery may be at end of life. Some vendors have software that will check the battery’s health and provide for graceful shutdowns during a power outage.

4. Clean up your cables

While you’re behind your Mac or on the floor checking your UPS and surge protector, do you know what each of those cables back there do, or if you still even need them? Organizing cables isn’t just about aesthetics. Disorganized cables tangled together creates the potential for chain reaction disasters: Pull too much on that iPod, and the entire string of computers and hard drives comes tumbling down. I’ve seen it, and it isn’t pleasant.

It’s time to trace those back, get rid of the ones you aren’t using and organize the rest. Lifehacker had a great article about how to get these under control. Oh, and you might as well dust that area, too, while you’re at it.

5. Check those logs

Your Mac has a little black box that records all sorts of problems and errata. Open up your Console app and it’s all there. It might be an application crash, a slowdown, or just general weirdness. For those of us who have trouble reading the logs and what they mean, Log Leech is well worth the $10. It makes your logs more Mac-like, and easy to find.

6. Lighten your load

Like many of you, I’m embarrassed with the collection of old manuals, disks and obsolete tech in my basement. It’s time to get rid of it. Old disks and manuals can usually be donated to libraries for their inventory or their big tent sale. While Apple has a recycling program, it’s limited to certain items, but your local Goodwill will usually take most items via the Reconnect partnership with Dell as will most Best Buy  locations.

These six tips will ensure that your Mac has a happy and healthy 2012. Anything you would add?

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Working from home has obvious benefits, but it has equally glaring and hard to fix drawbacks: the loneliness, the endless supply of interesting links and the tendency for work to seep into more and more of your personal life. So what’s to be done to make working from home, well work? Fast Company’s Kevin Purdy, a veteran remote worker himself, recently polled fellow web workers about their best tips.

The exercise turned up commonplace but utterly correct advice such as changing out of your pajamas and explicitly planning time for face-to-face human interaction, and is well worth a read in full to those new to the world of remote work or just looking for a well written post to buck them up and improve their work habits. But one bit of advice may be more of a jolt, even to those experienced at resisting the pull of one more cute cat link:

Realize when the problem is motivation, not space. Distractions, temptations, and kids can all legitimately get in the way of doing work at home. But sometimes you have to step back and look at other reasons why you’re avoiding the work that needs doing. Is it really because you don’t want to do it?

This is perhaps the hardest part of working from home. At an office, you are very likely to be found out and penalized if you spend all day checking Facebook or replaying Portal 2, so you at least make a stab at moving forward on even the most painful tasks. At home, it’s up to you to stay motivated, and the things toward the very bottom of the Awesome Challenging Fun list might never get done.

With the web awash in posts suggesting every imaginable variation on the to-do list and providing a seemingly endless parade of gadgets and pointers to be more productive, it’s refreshing to see someone acknowledge that the problem may actually be the content of your work rather than your system for accomplishing it. In that case, no number of colored flags or minute-by-minute scheduling will fully solve your issue. In fact, it’ll probably distract from the true solution, which is finding a way to begin to do more of what you enjoy and less of those truly soul-sapping tasks. Even if that means a career shift of some kind.

Do you ever obsess about tweaks to your productivity routine as a way to avoid acknowledging that the true, underlying problem of simply not liking your work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user edoardocosta.

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