I’ll be at Gnomedex Friday and Saturday, soaking up new ideas.
I’ll be at Gnomedex Friday and Saturday, soaking up new ideas and meeting new people.
Working at a computer, connecting via all the usual social media platforms, certainly gives you the feeling of being exposed to new ideas. But the in-person experience is so much less controllable and, usually, so much better.
I’ll report back on the highlights — or maybe I’ll see you there and we’ll get to talk.
A tax form for freelancers.
Just in time: A tax form for freelancers.
A list I follow pointed me to a Jan. 9 article in The New York Times which predicts a new generation that expects instant replies to its queries for information. The author, Brad Stone, believes this is the generation his 2-year-old belongs to, a generation that will view even the current 20-somethings as “Old Fogies” when it comes to information technology.
Stone quotes Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, who has written “Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn.”
Dr. Rosen said that the newest generations, unlike their older peers, will expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and won’t have the patience for anything less.
“They’ll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,” he said.
I’ve got news for Rosen and Stone. People who expect instant responses have been around for centuries. They’re called “tyrants.” They can also be known as “bosses” and “clients” (or even “spouses”) to those unwary or unwise enough to get involved with them.
I’ve had some amusing experiences along those lines recently. All too recently. Last night there was a message left on my phone at 7 p.m. by a businesswoman I’d never met saying that she wanted to talk with me about doing some writing for her website. In the message, she asked me to call her back later in the evening. “I work from 7 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week — this project is so important,” she said in a highly dramatic tone. “You can call me any time, so we can get started as soon as possible.”
I called her back this morning, on my way to a meeting in Olympia. It took quite a bit of conversation to politely get her to hear that I was saying “no” to working on her Very Important project. What I didn’t tell her, though I was sorely tempted, was that it was not my current busy schedule, or the quality of her project, that prompted my firm “no.” What turned me off was her insane approach to the project. Clients who don’t have any balance between work, friends/family, and play in their own lives will never understand that I insist on having that balance in my life.
I am sensitive to the balance issue because of a bizarre experience I had a few weeks ago. (NOTE: Details are changed to protect identities.) I was working with an out-of-state client on a long-range project that involves routine phone meetings. He emailed me saying that, hey, he had some free time the morning of Thanksgiving Day, so why didn’t we do an hour-long phone meeting then?
I didn’t know whether to be more astonished by someone asking to have a routine, hour-long meeting on Thanksgiving than I did that he hadn’t even acknowledged in the request that there might be something unusual about expecting me to be available on a major national holiday that focuses on friends and family.
It felt awkward to be reminding him that, er, I had plans, so would not be available for a Thanksgiving meeting.
This rant has a happy ending. I don’t believe that Stone’s daughter and her toddler friends are going to grow up to be tyrants and demand that everyone be available to them all the time. They’ll learn that some things are worth waiting for. And that some things, by virtue of being demanded rudely, will cease being available at all.
For every Scrooge you might offend (“Bah humbug! Wasting time writing holiday cards when she should be editing my annual report!”) you’ll have a dozen other clients who get the “warm fuzzies.”
There are plenty of good reasons to send holiday greetings to the clients of your small business.
Allena Tapia, the About.com Guide for Freelance Writing, writes that for every Scrooge you might offend (“Bah humbug! Wasting time writing holiday cards when she should be editing my annual report!”) you’ll have a dozen other clients who get the “warm fuzzies.” Or, at the very least, notice that you’re organized enough to do a holiday mailing.
This year I’m sending out a mix of printed cards and email greetings. I was rather astonished to see that I have two significant clients (both with out-of-town companies) for whom I don’t even have snail mail addresses!
Staples now offers a full line of OXO GoodGrips office products.
No, not the Halloween leftovers. When I say “desk candy,” I mean really cool, ergonomic office equipment.
An email from Staples today informs me that they now offer a full line of OXO GoodGrips office products.
OXO — the people who brought the smooth-edge (gunk-free) can opener to my kitchen — are now going to expensively restock my desktop. Offerings include the handheld stapler (non-slip grip and 20-sheet capacity); scissors with a box-cutter setting (how well they know me!); a ruler with sides for drawing and cutting; and a push-pin dispenser with a telescoping magnet wand so you can grab pins without having a mini-acupuncture session.
There’s also an intriguing assortment of retractable markers and pens, though nothing to woo me away from the Uni-ball Vision Elite airplane-safe pen.
Pay close attention to each contractor’s ad to figure what they want to know about first — skills or work style.
I bid for contract work on a regular basis, and recently started two new contracts.
The selection processes for the two gigs got me thinking about the way companies choose new people for their organizations. The process usually involves two filters, but the order in which they apply them is significant.
One filter selects for quantifiable skills and experience. How effective this filter will be is based on how well the organization has analyzed the work it wants to have done. Well-structured organizations with narrow job descriptions for contract work (“an experienced editor to edit the latest revision of this book” “an experienced outside sales person to fill this sales position while our regular employee is on National Guard duty”) have great success with this approach. But often this relatively rigid approach leaves organizations deaf to applicants whose strengths are wholistic rather than job-specific: energy, team building, leadership, loyalty, creativity, etc.
The second filter selects for the best stylistic fit with the organization. At its best, the “fit” filter gets the company a smooth transition, clear communication, and a satisfied employee or contractor — one who’s likely to be with the organization for the long haul. But this filter often accounts for hires who “look like” the rest of the organization when it comes to gender, age, socio-economic background — and that can lead to self-congratulatory group-think and stagnation.
For one of the contract positions I sought, the company filtered applicants first by skill set and then interviewed a few of us to find out if we would be a stylistic fit. Company #2 filtered applicants for style, and then interviewed the compatible folks to see who had a decent skill set — and was really compatible.
The process told me quite a bit about each of the clients, and their priorities. (And I noticed that client #2 seemed to be having a lot more fun with the interview process.)
But it also reminded me that I need to pay close attention to each contractor’s ad to figure out what they want to know about first — skills or work style.
As a marketing writer, I get paid to write about a wide range of products and services for a variety of audiences. Some of what I write verges on the silly; other assignments are dry and technical; still others involve hard-driving sales language that verges on being over the top.
I don’t mind being asked to write in a way that isn’t my style; in fact, I relish the challenge. I couldn’t do it 40 hours a week, but for a shorter assignment, it’s fun.
But what I want to talk about here is those assignments that just…aren’t…right.
They might sound like just another writing assignment when the phone call comes in, but when I sit down to do them, the tell-tale clues appear. It often starts with a weird little twitching in my stomach. And there’s a narrowing of the eyes. I try to get started with a few sentences, but something just isn’t…kosher.
This is the point at which I’m tempted to call a writer colleague and whine, or go off and distract myself with a cup of tea. But that’s just a waste of time. Because when I return to my desk, the problem assignment is still there.
I started to draw up a bullet-point list of the five top signs that something is wrong with an assignment. But then I realized there’s this simple litmus test:
Would you want your name attached to this piece of writing or would you be comfortable if it came to the attention of a potential client or employer, identified as your work?
If the answer is “yes,” you can probably buckle down and do the writing. If the answer is “no,” stop now. Move away from the keyboard. Take a deep breath.
Because you’re going to call (not email, but call) the client and tell them why are having “some issues” with the piece. If your client is the type who doesn’t hear or recognize feedback, you may need to state, clearly, “You need to get someone else to write this.”
They’ll either say “OK,” or, more likely, they’ll ask “Why?”
Tell them what makes you uncomfortable about the piece. Chances are, if you’d be unwilling to have it appear under your name, they’d probably be embarrassed to have it appear under theirs. Explain why, and they’ll be grateful to you for bringing it to their attention.
I recently had a client whose SEO consultant asked me to post a bunch of “anonymous” comments on rival companies’ blogs, touting my client’s products. I was able to show the client the story about the Motorola employee who did this and how he and Motorola got outed and humiliated on Boing Boing (“Motorola, could you please tell your viral marketer to get out of our comments?”). The client’s heartening reponse was: “Whoa! Don’t do it!”
A few minutes ago I got an email from an established Seattle website for female shoppers. The chatty introduction to their list of this week’s hot sales and events was this:
But there is one thing that never fails to make us feel like a kid… we hate staying home alone at night. Especially for long periods of time, like when our boyfriend goes on week-long business trips or our roommate goes on vacation. We are completely ridiculous about it. We end up checking every nook, cranny and closet for scary attackers at least twice before we climb into bed, seriously consider sleeping with a big knife under our pillow for protection (and would do so if we weren’t afraid we would end up hurting ourselves with it), and finally, we resort to sleeping with the lights and television on. We only manage to catch a few winks of sleep between all the worrying and jumping up to check out every little noise we hear. It’s exhausting to be a grown-up (a scaredy-cat grown-up, that is).
Well burn my bra and call me a feminist, but if a client had asked me to write that, I’d have been deafened by the alarm bells going off. What about you?
It wasn’t my client, it wasn’t my email, so I just clicked Unsubscribe. And I doubt I’m the only one who did.
I pride myself on having a fairly good idea of what path I’m on and where it’s going. Nevertheless, I often find myself drifting off by a few degrees. Doing too much of X, and not enough of Y — and pretty soon I realize that if I keep it up I’m likely to wind up at quite a different destination than I’d envisioned.
Career advisor Curt Rosengren addresses drift and similar issues on his blog The M.A.P. Maker (Crafting a Life of Meaning, Abundance & Passion). I liked the post he did on “8 simple questions to move you to towards your dreams.”
Grappling with issues of goal-setting and self-motivation? Jim Benson offers some insight into the relationship between our actions and our goals.
Coincidentally, I was talking with a friend who’s looking for contract work about the mission of my writing business. I asked him to guess what my mission statement is, and he replied “to provide high-quality writing products for clients you enjoy working with.”
But that’s only half of it.
The part he couldn’t come up with was the first half of the mission. The complete statement is: “To support myself by providing high-quality writing products for clients I enjoy working with.”
That’s a mission statement. Without the first half, it’s just a martyrdom statement. And I have seen too many small businesses march off under that type of banner, never to be seen again.
The economy is putting many experienced writers out of jobs and leaving once-busy freelancers fretting over shrinking contracts and vanishing clients. I’ve had one client go out of business and two others are capping my hours on particular pieces of work.