Take That, Byatches

Because some weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, it may be hard to keep positive and focused on the career of you, here’s some sounds bytes that should help recharge you:

• 2 Zen 2 be True: The Zappos Way of Managing:  I know it sounds cliche, but really, wouldn’t you want the CEO of your company to be so confident in your business’ fiscal health, that he can focus on the bigger things in life? Like, how to keep you happy?
• Take the Higher Note Once in A While: Yes, Ladies. It is ok to say the “F-word” in the workplace. Just mumble it under your breath if you’re surrounded by people you may not like. Hot air rises.
• Feel it In Your Fingers, Fill it In Your Toes (& Stop There): Sometimes just seeing the beauty in human design and engineering inspires me aesthetically. Pick the thing that does it for you and gaze. With time, you may not experience the residual osmotic effect you desire (rendering you a Buckminster Fuller fill-in), but odds are you’ll peak eventually and have enough plateau-like moments in between to get you through the thick.
• 1 Million People Give a Crap About Poo (& You): Social networking gives us a limitless, infinite world as far as our words and actions go. Just look at Susan Boyle. Yeah, we know she looks like Harry Potter in drag, but she sings like a dream.
• Newspapers Have a Pulse: At least for now…

It’s ironic that someone like me, in a former life, an online exhibitionist – whose muse used to be disastrous dating stories and whose mouthpiece was blogging – gets shy these days on subject of work-life blurring on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

My day job consists of educating people on the necessity of online marketing, the importance of community-building tools in general, and how the web can make content dynamic and have a far greater reach and impact on your audience. I believe wholeheartedly in what I do. In fact, these days, businesses must adopt technology-savvy, holistic approaches when thinking about going to market with a product. It’s a prerequisite for success.

In the past year as I’ve become more of a part-time, seasonal blogger and full-time desk jockey, I’ve been finding I need to separate my work and life activities more. This wasn’t a problem in the past since most of my gigs weren’t “career-track” type jobs, but as I get older, and more serious about my 9-5ish lifestyle, I’m finding it increasingly more difficult to keep this boundary intact, which makes me crave privacy even more.

So where does this leave me? I flock to my account settings and privacy preferences on social networking sites like a maggot to rice. What this really boils down to (sorry for the butchering of a metaphor here) is that I don’t always want my work to know what it is I think and don’t think or don’t do after hours because a lot of it’s random and unfiltered. I like unfiltered. The flip side of the equation is that, for me, social networking used to be fun, which is why I started. It stops being fun when “work” enters into the equation, even when you love the work you do and value the people you work with. The same rule doesn’t apply to former work situations, however.

Recently a situation occurred where a work peer requested to “follow” me on Twitter. I have my Twitter settings set to “private” so followers must issue a request which I then can “approve” or “decline.” It’s not all that complicated and since I seem to get my fair share of spam-like twitter requests, it works out well. The truth is I didn’t readily accept the request. At first, I just left it there, then she reminded me, then before I knew it, her request had been pending for a few mos. I finally accepted it, although not without my hesitation. My reluctance stemmed from Twitter being the last piece of social networking out there that hadn’t been tainted by work. It was a relic and I cherished it.

So I could start another Twitter handle, and keep that one private, but what happens with my 65 followers that has taken me like 1.5 years to build organically and from which I had an in-grown marketing base from which to promote my work and share my failures and successes? Do I spend another 2 years building one or wait for the next best social media channel to sweep the world and pimp that ride?

A piece of advice for those facing such situations – and I have a feeling that’s a number of you out there – Be forthright and honest with your coworkers, share your hesitations and desire for privacy. You don’t owe your day job your night and weekend hours too. I have a feeling my colleague would have been cool with my candor, and even if not, eventually the tension would have subsided, and I would have respected myself more. In short, don’t always give into the peer pressure. Stick to your boundaries.

In healthier economic times

I recall one Thanksgiving when I was in college when I was sitting at the older sister’s house in the dining room and we went around the turkey table detailing one thing we were thankful for. I haven’t been too faithful to this tradition (call it lack of discipline), but it doesn’t mean I don’t give thought to the things that make me all warm and fuzzy inside at least once a year. This year I’ve decided to take inventory online.

Drum roll please…

• Blogging – When done right it can be a  constructive means of collecting thoughts, innovating, and bonding with other like-minded folk. And as a networking tool for the “brand of you,” pretty fab.
• Twitter – So I wasn’t an early adopter and it took a while to get with the program, but I slowly understood the power of Twitter as a promotional vehicle. Not to mention apps like TweetDeck and HelloTxt that make it so easy to aggregate and align all my status updates across Facebook, LinkedIn, and any other network I decide I “need” to join. Besides, how can you not love an app that connects people by way of their shared minute-to-minute compulsive twittering AND takes allows us a vital distraction in our mundane lives?
• Wading in the Calm – As impatient as we are with life, especially in such a fast-paced high tech world where we’ve come to expect on-demand 24-7, digging a little deeper sometimes can prove fruitful. This can happen when we get laid off a job, suffer a major personal setback, or just feel down in the dumps, often as a result of the former and latter. It’s also consolation to know professional and personal contacts don’t need to be compartmentalized as far as job networking and emotional healing go. They can be one and the same.
• Digging Football – I squirm. I become irate. I scream expletives. Apart from blogging, watching NFL is my outlet for aggression. Moreover, it also makes me a believer. With the exception of my husband, there aren’t too many things that do that for me.

Balance happens where we least expect to find it.

Below are a few things that could have saved me some major hassle, not to mention temporary insanity meltdowns, when I started on my home office-in-a-box/freelance business.

It’s my hope that these words of wisdom (WOW) will also benefit those of you adjusting to life as solo entrepreneurs:

• Invest In Your Physical Space: Part of the reason I settled into more of a makeshift office scene from the get-go was because freelancing for me was a temporary gig and not part of my long-term plan. Only, the more time that went by and the more I found myself with freelance work, the more I discovered that idle objects such as a proper desk, lighting, and file cabinets were critical to providing me with an organized environment suited for doing work. And whether or not I wanted to admit it to myself, uncomfortably slouching over my laptop sitting on the couch 12-18 hours a day still qualified as me working and earning money so why not invest in a home office that acknowledges that? And saves me from a future of bad posture?
• Time Tracking Widgets Are a Gal’s Best Friend: The more clients and accounts I worked on, the more things got complicated so I started looking for the best tool to track and log my hours. To find the best tool,  I posted a question on LinkedIn’s Q&A forum and while I got some pretty interesting feedback and networked a bit (always a plus) with respondents, I ended up finding the Harvest app through my Yahoo widgets. I can access the widget and start logging hours when I start working, juggle multiple accounts for single or multiple clients, and can later import all this info into a handy, dandy invoice. Harvest does this all on it own and saves me the headache of needing to go back and count hours. While it’s always recommended to do your due diligence just to keep track of your hours, Harvest helps out in a pinch!
• Keep Your Support Crew On Speed Dial (or Gmail Chat, Facebook, or Twitter): It’s important to stay upbeat and positive and who better to keep it real than your intimate crew of like-minded entrepreneurs. I have a group of a few gals and we Gmail Chat or Twitter ourselves into sanity (in the form of silliness) throughout the day, sharing our tales of woe and elation as we try to meander ourselves through the ups and downs of our freelancing lives.
• It’s Ok To Do Group Events: As a freelance writer, networking isn’t always my bag, but it’s a necessary evil for those of us trying to drum up business and it helps facilitate us continuing to do what it is we love to do. I was at a loss for finding pertinent, relevant events (Mediabistro wasn’t a broad enough group for my technology tastes) until I came across Gary’s Guide. Simple in its interface, it lists all major networking events for technology and entrepreneur meet-ups for 11 metropolitan areas, including New York, Boston, and San Fran. I always find an event on there that’s interesting and potentially a good hook for my line of work.

Being apart of the pack

Recently, BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy wrote about using Facebook to “fire up” your career and employing social networking tools as a means to build out your professional network. She mentions Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn as ripe resources to unearth potentially untapped contacts and network your way to gainful employment.

Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn may make you visible and vulnerable to internet search engines, but Twitter is your face in bright lights with all its glaring blemishes.

I created a Twitter account over a year and a half ago when Twitter went beta and after a whole 24 hours was so disengaged I didn’t update it till just short of 2 weeks ago. So now I’m back on Twitter and starting to rethink its appeal – for professional purposes.

As long as active Twitterers are conscious of the fact that any of the 25 comments they update in the course of the day may show up in a search, there’s no real harm done and more to be gained from using Twitter. In fact, Twitter is all about encouraging constructive conversation, if used the right way.

• For one, I love that potential clients can “follow” me and keep abreast of all my professional endeavors. It’s the easiest way to insure that I’m in front of them at all times and that visibility could lead to potential gigs.
• It’s free advertising and effective self-promotion for the brand of you!  I can post links to my work and showcase my current work-related pursuits without resorting to an email blast which equates to more fun for everyone…
• You can choose to be a “follower” and pick the right contacts for you depending on your professional goals and who you should be mingling with. Responding to the right peoples’ comments will then allow you a more direct line to engage in a conversation with people you might otherwise have never yielded a response from.
• You can switch up the conversation on a more personal and accessible level. It’s not simply that you can reply to a comment left by someone you want to get in touch and exist solely on a professional plane with that individual. It’s the fact that you can set the tone of the conversation, its subject, and choose to much less formal in your discourse.
• Call me a voyeur, but keeping an eye on what other people in my field are up to is the most efficient way for me to research what’s out there and keep competitive with peers in my industry. Not to mention learn more about opportunities I might be interested in and what events I should be attending and most likely, am not.