Archive for the ‘Working Virtually’ Category

I wasn’t sure what to title this, so you got a mish-mash. Every morning, I have to take a pill. I can’t tell you how many times I forget it. I try to take it with food or milk, but sometimes I’m so busy wrangling the kids out the door or dealing with an early client request or just plain running around like a crazy person that I don’t grab anything to eat/drink… so I have this issue remembering it.

Ah, but see… Shawn, a guy I work with (he’s in MI or somewhere I think – yes, we are virtual) – at Linux Journal has the same problem. His solution is pretty genius actually. He set up a Twitter account and tweets to it once he’s taken his pill for the day. If people see he hasn’t tweeted (that’s twitter-speak for posted), then they will start to bug him about taking it.

Pretty cool, eh? Yeah, so, I can’t remember to take my pill, how the heck am I supposed to remember to remind HIM to take HIS pill, right? So, I decided to piggy back off of his idea…

I added itookmypill (that’s his twitter account) to my devices (I only have like 2 people that come to my phone – I use twhirl for the rest, otherwise the text messages make me crazy). What happens is this… when he takes his pill, it texts me that he did and THAT reminds me to take it. At the same time, if I don’t get a message (he usually takes it by 7:30 central), then it seems to trigger a reminder that “hey, I didn’t get a message from Shawn today” and I remind him.

How awesome is that, folks? Did you follow that? So, basically what happens is that his tweet reminds me. If I don’t see a tweet from him and remember my pill, I can remind him. Or if we both forget, typically someone else will see that he didn’t tweet and someone will remind him that reminds me.

I mean, really, you can’t beat that. THAT is how you make technology work for you, folks!

If you take a morning pill, try it out, you can join twitter and just have that one as someone you follow, add itookmypill to your device list… what a great way to help someone and help yourself at the same time!

Happy Holidays!

A lot of our readers are VAs. and other work-from-home professionals. Whenever we run across a resource the we find useful, or think our readers might find useful, we like to share.

How about 101 resources? Check out blogtrepreneur.com’s list of 101 online resources to make running your online business a little easier. The list includea a litte bit of everything, from Backup services to VoIP options and a ton in-between.

Are you thinking about adding a wiki to your business toolbox? There are tons of options out there now. How can you decide which one is right for you?

Here at OffAssist we favor a combination of Google Docs and BackPack.

For good advice and feature comparisons, check out WikiMatrix.org. Answer their handy questionnaire and let them help you find the right Wiki for your (or your clients’ for you VAs) needs.

Working from home is hard work. Employees who work 8 to 5 are usually given an hour for lunch and two 20-minute breaks throughout the workday. Why should VAs be any different?

Not sure what to do with those 20 minutes?

Check out this spiffy list of 50 websites to waste some time, courtesy of Time Magazine. The article is a couple years old, but the info is still good.

Now, go Goof Off! You’ll feel better for it, I promise!

It’s coming…

IVAA’s 3rd Annual Online VA Summit is only a little over a month away. IVAA members’ early registration discount–a chance to save 20% off Summit registration–ends at midnight Central time on Wednesday, September 24, 2008.

We are virtual assistants, and, for many of us who started our business to be home with children and family, traveling to the in-person summit is difficult, if not impossible. Enter the online summit. A full day of networking, great seminars, and lots of take-homes in the form of full recordings of sessions that you can go over later at your leisure. Heck, if you can’t attend the summit, you can still register and get the recordings–how many professional conferences can you say that about?

Look at the definition of “Summit” in the title bar and you’ll see why we call it a summit and not a conference. The purpose of the IVAA Summits, both in-person and online, is to help VAs reach the “topmost level attainable” in their chosen profession.

FYI, Candy will be presenting a discussion on the personal and professional benefits of volunteering at the online summit this year. You don’t want to miss that, do you?

Hurry up and register today!

I recently (okay, just now) got a new gadget – a Flip Ultra camcorder thing – SUPER cool. Of course, I immediately needed to find something to video. I hadn’t shown pictures of my office in a long time, so thought I’d do that. I even refrained from cleaning it up. Still not as messy as some people, but to me, seems like a disaster area.

At any rate… I give you… my office… and yes, I know I called it a Flip “camera” – I’m obviously losing brain cells.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzJ--YN-i8g]

Here are the pics from May 2006. Wow. I really need to rearrange some stuff I think. And I LOVE the kid’s artwork on my desk area, so that’s staying, but sometimes it’s a bit distracting. LOL.

… hmmm….

If you work from home, whether for yourself or someone else, you know how quiet it can be. Deadly quiet. So quiet, at least when the kids are at school, that the sound of the air conditioner turning on sets your heart racing.

Once the adrenaline rush is gone, you decide you’ve GOT to get out for a little while. You pack up your computer and head to the local wireless hotspot, or a park if you’re working offline. It is undeniably noisier, but you’re still alone. No one knows you and many people will deliberately avoid you, afraid they might be interrupting.

So what do you do? Find a jelly! A jelly is a combination social event, networking and just plain work designed to help the self-employed or remote employee get a little human interaction every now and then.

For more info, check out this spiffy post on The Virtual Legal Assistant Blog. If you’re in Austin, and curious about co-working (another term for people working side by side who do not work together) and the new meeting venue for it here, check out Conjunctured’s web site.

Last week was one of those weeks where I was pretty sure Intuit was out to get me.

No, really, they are. Out to get me. Personally. It was just one thing after the other. My poor clients were being beat up. It wasn’t all Intuit’s fault, but still, dude, what’s going on over there in Arizona, folks?

The week before my monitor went out and I decided to bite the bullet and get a dual screen set up. I was joking that I needed a red phone with a direct line to Intuit to complete my set up… one of my team members heard me and sent me this.

Score! Take that, Intuit!

Yes, I will be sharing pictures of my new improved battle station computer set up soon. I just gotta find a red button and missile trajectories–move over, Mr. President, I’ll take care of this!

Well, the VA industry has made it.

How do I know? Because people finally know enough about VAs to create scams targeting them.

The Austin BBB had a good, if brief, article on the subject last week. Check it out here.

I get a couple of these a year, and I get calls and emails from newer VAs asking me about offers like this when they receive them and I always tell them to run screaming.

In honor of Candy’s new Twitter addiction (yes, I am kidding) :

Micro-blogging is all the rage. Ad Week has a nifty story on micro-blogging by businesses here.

I have no objection to general commercial use of a service like Twitter, but I am a bit creeped out by the people who “Follow” thousands of people. How can they keep up? It’d be like being a mind reader in a shopping mall, too much information and no way to filter it…

I admit it, I’m on Twitter, mostly to use it as a wide-open IM/whiteboard with friends, but I do occasionally, if obliquely, discuss my work, but it is far more social than networking to me. I also rigorously screen my followers. I’m boring like that.

For more variety, check out Candy (candieb) , Tom (tombeau) , Lanel (lanelt), or our friends at Linux Journal (linuxjournal) on Twitter.