This is a post by guest blogger, Business360 Researcher and ClickNworker, Anne Jordan 

“Anne Jordan’s book, showing the Boldini portrait of Lady Colin Campbell held in the National Portrait Gallery, London”

The internet has enabled a lot of people to work at home and put into practice Charles Handy’s concept of “portfolio working,” where you earn an income from a range of sources. Working at home has certainly enabled me to become a “portfolio worker,” juggling freelance work as a business researcher with the longer-term project of researching and writing a book. The freedom to do both these activities has given me the opportunity to achieve a lifetime dream, whilst still earning a living! 

Since leaving full-time employment I’ve built-up a client base, mainly from my network of contacts, and undertake a combination of ad-hoc business research and regular research/writing projects. A lot of my work is related to the financial services sector, or consumer goods, but it can be anything. I love the variety and intellectual challenge that this provides. 

At the same time I’ve written the biography of a Victorian woman: “Love Well the Hour: The Life of Lady Colin Campbell (1857-1911).” This has been the largest research project I’ve ever undertaken, and needed me to apply my skills to a new subject and write in a different style for a different audience. The book was published in December 2010 but the work doesn’t stop there. I’m now spending time on marketing the book, and starting to get to grips with Facebook, a new blog site and Twitter. The ultimate aim is to get the book dramatized and although it’s too early to give details, I’ve started talks about a possible TV production. 

In the meantime I still have to pay the bills, so clients like Business360/ClickNwork have been invaluable. Every month I undertake a four-day regular task for a professional services client of Business360, and then do ad-hoc work between. The four-day task is the only firm commitment, so other work is slotted in from a range of clients, providing the flexibility to plan in time to also work on the book. 

As a child with my head constantly in a book, I always told adults that I wanted to write a book when I grew up … but never knew what I wanted to write about. When the subject finally came to me, years later, it was the ability to work from home that enabled me to achieve that lifetime dream. 

If you would like to read more about my book, see my website or the publisher’s website. 

http://www.ladycolincampbell.co.uk 

http://digbig.com/5beehp

Many apologies for neglecting the ClickNwork blog for so many months. But we’re back, and raring to go.

We have just added a post about some of the work we’re doing in newsletters. We’re excited about it and see it as a great opportunity for us and the people that work for us.

But this post is personal. All about me!

This blog is partly about raising the awareness of the benefits of working at home, or “working from wherever”.

I usually live in England, most recently on the Kent coast, within sight of the French coast, but we decided last year to spend some time with my family in New Zealand, and that’s where we are now.

I’m working in a cottage, owned by the family, within about 50 metres of one of Waiheke Island’s beautiful beaches. The island is a 35 minute ferry ride from Auckland, and it’s a stunning place.

I count myself very lucky to be able to up sticks, put my laptop under my arm, travel half way around the world, and, after a few days of transition (sorting out the broadband connection etc), be up and running again.

I can now look out on a serene picture of a calm bay of deep blue seas, spotted with a few boats, and surrounded by the sound of cicadas and birds, like the Tui.

That contentment is heightened by images from back home of snow and ice, and commuters waiting around on cold railway platforms or by exposed bus stops, stamping their feet and looking decidedly miserable. Believe me, I ain’t ever going back to doing that!

ClickNwork  usually works behind the scenes delivering services and providing professionals to meet specific roles, like research, or data entry, or writing etc. Mostly, the companies we work with don’t want publicity and we respect that. But lately we’ve been doing some work where our partner is happy to provide details and I thought I’d give some details as it gives a good example of how things at ClickNwork actually function.

Business360 has created a series of websites that are geared to delivering highly focused business information to industry professionals. The idea behind these is that while we’re all inundated with information getting reliable, accurate and timely material on really specific topics is hard. For example, if you’re manager of Dove soap, how do you get a full picture on competitor activity in the US, or if you’re interested in marketing healthy snacks, how do you get a comprehensive view of research into what alternative ingredients and how other companies are using them?

Business360 has built a system to deliver these sorts of services and ClickNwork is managing the resource.

Currently we have 4 researchers involved (Beth in the US, Carol in France and Sheilah and Obie in the Philippines). These people track information on very specific topics and, when they find material that is good and newsworthy, they upload it to our system.

We then have a number of writers who prepare short, sharp summaries of these selected articles. Currently we have 8 writers involved – Paul and Devin in the US, Allan in the Philippines, and, getting to know the ropes, Alan in Thailand, Jun in the Philippines and Janet and Bill in the US.

As with most work ClickNwork manages, none of these people are on permanent contracts although we do expect the work to grow and continue. Business360 likes the freedom it has to scale back with contract workers if need be and is more confident about taking on more because it has this optionality.

The individuals themselves have a target number of hours a week but they also have flexibility about when they put in the work – some work in the morning before their fulltime work, some in the evening and some through the day.

There is also great diversity around lifestyle and motivation. One writer is a professional abstractor who wants to spend more time at home, one runs his own newsletter and this work fits in nicely with his other assignments, one is writing a book and likes to be able to earn some income without moving from his desk, another is a primary care giver and needs to be at home and one is retired and just wants something to structure the day around and provide a little bit of income. This wouldn’t and couldn’t work in a regular work setting, but here, with the right infrastructure, it works just fine.

If things go well we expect to double the team in coming months as we roll-out the service.

Initially we are working in six main areas, and in each case there are a number of newsletters that users can choose to receive (most are for subscribers only but there are some publicly available ones that I’ve listed below).

You can see some of the output of our work here:

Food Business which has these newsletters and the archive to its free newsletter here.

Sustainable Business; newsletters, archive to its free newsletter.

Health & Wellness; newsletters, archive to its free newsletter.

Innovation, newsletters, archive to its free newsletter.

Diet News, newsletters, archive to free newsletter.

Personal Care, newsletters, archive to free newsletter.

I happened upon this UK-based site today…the National Pyjama Club. There are pictures on the ClickNwork site of the views from the workers’ office windows, but this reverses the perspective and shows pictures of the workers themselves, in their night attire, apparently working at their job, at home, clutching teddies or with their heads wreathed in still-damp towels.

No, I don’t have some sinister predilection for pyjama-clad home workers. I just like to keep abreast of developments in the home-working arena. Honest!

I thought this was an interesting idea. I think I mean “interesting”, but maybe I mean “inexplicable”.

I’m not sure whether most merely start the working day accoutred thus before changing in to something perhaps a little more in harmony with a professional environment - and I would like to state here and now that I really am not at all interested – but it does highlight one of the benefits of working from home: the freedom it gives you from some of the conventions of corporate life. Why don a suit, when the only sentient being you are impressing is the dog? He’d probably anyway be more impressed by a biscuit or a W-A-L-K.

I have to date tried to resist the temptation of letting sartorial standards slip too far when working at home, but I do have to confess to having periodically talked to clients in other time zones in a state of disarray one would find wholly unacceptable outside the home.  It’s not a regular occurrence, and I’m not proud if it (well, maybe a little bit), but “needs must” and all that.

Maybe we’ll have something similar on the ClickNwork website…but, then again, perhaps we won’t!

My last blog entry got me thinking about where people work. The ClickNwork site has profiles of a number of people that work with us, and some of them have added pictures of the view from their office window. You can see them by clicking the the profiles for the individuals at http://clicknwork.com/profiles.asp.

They are very different: from the busy Chennai street market scene seen by Ravi to the sort of vista you would design for yourself (if you had the opportunity) that is enjoyed by Dave in New Zealand.

They could be working on the same project, doing the same sort of work, while all around them their very different lives are carrying on. I find it fascinating – perhaps I need a hobby? – and it underlines how rapid  communications have brought the disparate parts of the world together, to some extent.

I thought I’d add a picture from my window – just to prove that the sun does shine in England. The outlook is a bit short-range when you compare it with my colleague John’s view from his 17th storey office window, overlooking Central Park in New York. But he doesn’t have a shed!

The point is, you can work pretty much anywhere, but I would have thought that there would need to be some fairly specific reasons for the working environment arrangements below to be appropriate!

I love working from home, but I have to confess that sometimes I wish the office was a little more difficult to get to, and with a slightly better vista.

My office is at the back of the house on the ground floor and I can’t resist checking emails if I’m anywhere on the ground floor of the house.

My view from the window isn’t horrible, but could be improved with slightly better positioning.

Having the office outside in the garden has been on my mind ever since I saw a friend of mine use a large wood cabin as his office in his garden.

I didn’t like the idea of working in what is effectively a garden shed – nothing against sheds, for storing bikes and garden equipment etc – but an article on the OfficePod drew my attention.

I like the idea and the look of it. The company claims it’s environmentally-friendly, in reducing CO2 emissions, and provides an extra room (if you’re constrained for space in the house) away from any distractions in the house. It’s not as cheap as setting up a desk in the house, but if that’s not an option, then maybe this is.

So, I started looking around for other similar products, such as the range of buildings from Kithaus.

 And there’s the Qube too.

 Actually, there are lots of “garden sheds” that I wouldn’t mind working in either!   

With swine flu, rising travel costs, higher unemployment, and the tougher challenges in just in making ends meet, many people are turning to work-at-home opportunities.  The upside can be great but please be very cautious about who you deal with. Too often work-from-home schemes turn out to be work-from-home scams.

Consumer Reports in the US recently ran an article about current scams being. The FBI also  recently gave guidance on what to look out for.

The Federal Trade Commission has since 2001 warned of the dangers of work-from-home scams and provides a categorization of work-at-home schemes (nicely using the term ‘flop-potunities’), but people are still being caught.

Two essential pieces of advice:

1.       Don’t pay upfront, whether it’s for inventory or “how to” information; most scams require you to pay for something that usually turns out to be worthless.

2.       Avoid network building and multilevel marketing schemes.

It’s so easy to be seduced by promises of a fast buck, pound, euro, or yen, especially when you need to earn money, so always have in mind the time-honored maxim: if it looks too good to be true, it is.

The only money we receive is from the clients whose work the ClickNworkers deliver, and also a little bit of advertising revenue, since we put Google Ads on the site.

If you know of a scam and want others to know, please contribute to the comments.

Oh, and don’t do this…

I heard an interview on WNYC yesterday with Dalton Conley, talking about his new book Elsewhere, U.S.A, or more precisely, Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.

His basic idea is that technology and social change mean we have evolved from settled careers at one place of work to frenetic lives with no work-life boundaries. And in parallel, economic uncertainty has risen, increasing stress and the need to focus on work. At times he is pretty dour:

Leisure? The “good life”? What are those? Work is the central aspect of our lives. We are lucky that it is fulfilling work—work that we will probably continue to do until we are no longer capable—but it is, unlike that of my parents, all-consuming work.

He interviews well and his central observation about the disrupting impact of technology is solid but I think he is wrong about core elements. Yes, technology is allowing work to spread outside the workplace and this is causing some people to constantly check email and to be available 24/7. Part of that is personal style but as I look at it, the same technology has given great opportunities we otherwise wouldn’t have had. In my case, because I work from home I can be with my children and help them get to school every day, I’m around during the day if I need a distressing wrestle with my two year old (I have to wait until afterschool for the more challenging higher weight groups), I’m there to cook and eat with them and put them to bed. None of that would have been possible without the technology I rely on. But there’s more – I can go for rides in the park as time permits, do my shopping at off hours, and on and on. All of this means I am happy to let work intrude at other times and so I don’t begrudge talking to clients in London at 6:00am my time, or talking to a West Coast client at 10pm, it all comes with the territory and I want it like this – the thought of getting on a train and being out of town or at work from 7:00am to 8:00pm every day isn’t for me.

As I see it, if you can offer valuable services to companies that you can deliver from your home (which is what ClickNwork is about), then I think you can get the best of the work environment (intellectual stimulation, community, pay) with the benefits of home life (more leisure, better family interaction, less hassle).  Conley fails to bring out these positives and sold us short.

At one point in the interview, Leonard Lopate, the interviewer asked – ‘most of these developments have had a negative affect, is there a way to reverse any of it..? and Conely falters: “Well, if I communicated completely negative affects I want to correct that”. He then goes on to explain how some of the change is “demand driven”, how a lot of people, especially professionals love their work and so on – all good but a bit late for print!

I looked on the web and see he has many of positive reviews, but others aren’t so sure.  Janet Maslin in the New York Times (and International Herald Tribune) had some funny moments, saying that “Conley spends part of his time out on a limb, sawing”. She adds:

“But this book’s greater problem is the thin, iffy nature of its extended arguments. To back up the familiar claim that we have allowed merchandising to invade our private lives, he invokes (in no particular order) the selling of formerly free snacks on airplanes, slogans on T-shirts (with a thumbnail history of the T-shirt thrown in for filler) and the perils created by the bottling and marketing of water.

.. But Mr. Conley has no big new point to make. He awkwardly coins new locutions (“weisure” to conflate work and leisure, “convestment” to do the same with consumption and investment). He struggles with jargon while trying to interject the term “intravidual” into our collective conversation. Beware an “of course” when a point is anything but self-evident: “The irony, of course, is that the intravidual is just as much an ‘intervidual’ (inter meaning ‘between’), since it is the networked nature of our new, Elsewhere economy and the penetration of others into us that shatters the individual.

…He dutifully travels to Mountain View, California, to note the Orwellian nature of life at Googleplex, Google’s corporate headquarters. A pox on Mountain View: It is now the destination of choice for writers seeking to pad books with sci-fi visuals and newish-sounding but already conventional wisdom.”

Don’t get me wrong, the book is worth a read but I do think it needs better research and balance.

He’s done the rounds and in case you’re interested, here’s another interview with Neil Cohen on NPR.

I mentioned at the end of my previous post that in my next post I would, in the interest of fairness and balance, talk about some of the possible pitfalls and disadvantages of working from home, again from the worker’s perspective. There are a few, although I have counters to some of them – I’m an advocate of working from home, so what do you expect? – but I have to admit, not all of them.

• It’s sometimes difficult to concentrate on work at home. Some say that they couldn’t – or, in fact, can’t – work from home because they would be – or are – distracted by the TV, the kids, their partner, or even the washing up. It can be difficult to get in to work mode at home, but if you are easily distracted, then you have to think of ways of reducing or eliminating the distractions, or finding ways of enhancing your focus on the work. For example, make sure your friends and family know that just because you’re at home, it doesn’t mean that you’re always available for a coffee etc.  This brief article pinpoints a few of the issues here: http://www.freelanceuk.com/news/2305.shtml. My partner recently told me that her sister, who works from home for a local authority, puts a business suit on when she’s working, and dons a name badge. No-one sees her, but she feels it necessary to break the link with home life in this way.
• Some feel lonely at home.  People constantly insist that I must miss the camaraderie of the office environment. I do, a bit…but I don’t miss the office politicking. It’s good to assemble around the water cooler and talk for a while, but I can do that on the phone. If I ever want to annoy people about West Ham’s burgeoning chances of qualifying for a European competition next season, there are any number of people I can phone who would be only too happy to explain to me the extent of my delusion. If you feel lonely while working from home, make more of an effort to be sociable in your leisure time.
• A lack of feedback and support. It’s good to bounce ideas around with work colleagues, and to get some ideas and hints from other people. It’s possibly not as easy to do that at home, but it’s really not that difficult to develop a network of like-minded people that you can phone and discuss things with, and develop a set of contacts to confer with if necessary.  Maybe people also feel that they aren’t getting feedback when they work for themselves at home, but you can get round that by making sure your clients give you feedback, or send some of your work to your network to get them to comment on the work.
• A bit of disruption at home. Clearly, if you want to have a comfortable working environment, you’ll need to find some appropriate space in your home, and that’s not always easy. You might need to install a dedicated phone line, buy some additional hardware, and get a nice roomy desk and other office furniture. It costs money, and it takes up space. If your home is a bit “compact” already, this might not be easy. It might not also be easy to cover the set-up costs involved, but start cautiously, buying second-hand furniture if necessary. I bought a perfectly good three-drawer steel filing cabinet a few weeks ago from a charity shop for £38. It suits me fine and apparently the money I spent on it will feed several little rabbits (I bought it from Hoppy’s Haven, in Deal, England) for weeks. It does what it needs to do; and I get to feel self-righteous.
• Additional costs of utilities. I don’t think I have a counter-argument here. During the winter, I do use more gas (for central heating) and electricity (for lighting) than I would if I were working in a corporate office.
• Lack of career progression and development. Working in a normal corporate environment gives your career a certain amount of structure: for example, career progression, promotion, and measurable development against targets. It helps you to build a picture of how well you are doing. It’s not impossible to do that yourself, working from home. You can set targets for yourself – e.g. number of new clients, revenue targets, or an improvement in client feedback. Career development could be measured in terms of the type of work you do – you might start doing fairly low-value work, but as clients begin to trust you, you might end up doing increasingly complex and valuable work – possibly more valuable than your previous employers would allow you to do. Send yourself on training courses, and award yourself a bonus – if you deserve it and the cash flow allows it.