Almostgotit.com

The Wall Street Journal’s online Career Journal  has continued its series of articles called “90 days,” presumably based on Michael Watkins’ bestseller, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels.  Each WSJ column addresses the most critical things to remember in the first days following a major career transition.

There’s lots of terrific cross-pollination here, so if you’re in transition, go ahead and read them all!

• 90 Days: Working Productively As a Telecommuter
• 90 Days: Relocating Overseas? Do Your Homework And Ease Your Way
• 90 Days: Acing Your First Post-College Job
• 90 Days: Working for Yourself Can Have Its Challenges
• 90 Days: Easing Back From Maternity Leave
• 90 Days: Dealing With a PR Crisis Takes Planning and Truth
• 90 Days: Joining a Nonprofit Board Is More Than a Labor of Love

~ For more WSJ “90 Days” articles ~

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Related Post:

The First 90 Days: Strategic Career Transitions

Over at the Rocky Road of Love blog, I’ve published five honeymoon-vacations-with-recipes in five days and will publish another five over the next week. I’ve found some amazing photos and the food is really good too. The problem is that the writing makes me so hungry!

The “Honeymoon Chronicles” thus far:

• Boat and Breakfast: Salmon Quiche A giant, floating resort in British Columbia’s Prince William Sound, accessible only by sea plane or boat.  A wonderful salmon quiche with a whole wheat crust.  What else could anyone want?
• A Castle in Scotland: Nova Scotia Oatcakes An overnight ride on the famous “Flying Scotsman” train. A castle near Edinburgh where Mary Queen of Scots once hung out.  One of Almostgotit’s favorite family recipes.  Heaven!
• Honeymoon in a Monastery: Cabbage Soup for a Crowd Just because monks are celibate doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t welcome honeymooners.  They’ll even serve them soup.
• South African Safari: Babotie Casserole There are no recipes for “Lion Steak:” I looked.  Babotie is a South African tradition: I won’t give it away, but it’s seasoned with almonds, spices and lemon.  Come see!
• Love in a Yurt: Chocolate Raspberry Napoleons with Raspberry Mascarpone Cream  Five star dining at 8,000 feet, where the food (and the chef) arrive by snowmobile.  Bonus: skiing burns lots of calories, so dig right in!

Asphalt parking lots so hot they melt the soles of your shoes. Summer evenings filled with the rattle and chirp of a thousand crickets. Cookouts and sweating, ice-cold pitchers of lemonade.

What does this all mean in our town? Time to go back to school!

That’s right. No more waiting until after Labor Day, these parts. Kids start back today, which is just so wrong! It’s hardly even August, for heaven’s sake. They should be swimming, not studying! Probably, as parents, we should organize some sort of deputation to the school board on the part of the children, because…

(just a minute while I close the door to my office.)

… I am SO GLAD!!! No more kicking the kids off of my computer! No more running them around to all their friends’ houses! No more chasing them around all day about their mud, and their stuff, and the doors they’ve left open, and all the cartons of food they’ve emptied and then shoved back into the refrigerator!

Being a mom is truly a freelance job, and therefore is always a balancing act. Flexibility is key, but it’s so nice when you can be a little organized, too. Forget January 1st – the first day of school is the real beginning of the year, and I’m SO looking forward to it!

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Coming Saturday: What “Back to school” resolutions are you making this year? Stop by to leave your comment, or drop me a line anytime.

As it appears I will either be freelancing (or panhandling) for some time yet, I’ve got some more homework to do. The Anti 9-5 Guide answered my questions in a recent post, which also sources a good freelance rate calculator to get folks like me started.

When I was trying to decide what to do about a recent job offer, a friend proposed a  “thought experiment” she thought I might be helpful as I made the decision about joining that particular company.

Think about a person you have worked with that you really respected for his/her skill and professionalism - someone who was a boss or mentor to you (let’s call her Jane).  Now imagine you are at a business lunch with the folks from the team that’s been interviewing you, and Jane walks by and stops to say hello.  How do you feel about introducing Jane to your new colleagues and saying that you just took a job reporting to these folks? Are you proud of that decision / accomplishment?

My friend then described a job she had once accepted with a small firm that seemed to have a lot going for it, with the benefit package and flexibility that she needed.  She still felt she was “settling,” though.  While she was able to do good work for them, there was something about the whole arrangement that didn’t quite fit.

One day we were all out at lunch and it hit me, “If “Jane” (a former boss that I just loved - professional, smart, you name it) walked by, how would I feel about introducing her to this crowd?”  I realized I would be embarrassed to let her know I had taken a job with them - I felt like I had settled.  Not because they are “bad” people or anything, but because I knew I was capable of something much different in my professional life.   I realized I couldn’t work somewhere that I felt embarrassed about, so I resigned the following week.

My friend didn’t just leave, however.  Because she was valuable to the company, she was able to negotiate a consulting arrangement with them.  “It works much better for me because I can be more forthright and open with my ideas and suggestions since I’m not as tied into them as I would be with an employment relationship.  And it works better for them because I truly believe they are getting better advice from me now.”

Career strategist and consultant William S. Frank heartily endorses this approach, recommending that any job offer that seems unsuitable in terms of duties, responsibilities, or earnings may work very well if reworked into a consulting opportunity instead. In an article he wrote for Careerlab.com, Frank lays out some very practical ground rules one should consider in making such arrangements, most particularly how to calculate an appropriate fee.  It is better, he firmly believes, to give a few hours away than it is to undercharge…  a trap he’s seen many first-time consultants fall into.

Consulting may lead to full-time job offers, or it may very well prove to be an attractive career choice in itself.  In the end though, Frank’s most compelling argument for consulting is this:

No one should be unemployed, even for a day. The world is full of  problems waiting to be solved. Someone out there needs you and your talents badly. It wouldn’t hurt you to volunteer a few hours a week for a charity or for a business in need of your skills, and it certainly couldn’t hurt you to accept a few small consulting assignments while you pursue full-time employment.

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It’s so new it’s not even in Wikipedia, and baby that’s SAYIN’ something!

Invented (according to Web Worker Daily) by software developer Brad Neuberg, Coworking is “a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents.”  Mostly young, mostly hip independent workers are trading their pj’s and isolation for shared work space where they can network, meet clients, and enjoy some of the time- and space-structuring benefits of “going to an office.”

Click here to watch Brad and some of his colleagues in a “learn more about it” video.

While it’s not an entirely new concept, the current “coworker movement” among the growing number of (mostly web) workers is clearly taking advantage of the social connectivity provided by the internet to collaborate in forming a number of “coworking” spaces  already available (or currently being formed) throughout the US. 

It’s a really neat idea.  What I want to know is whether they accept anyone older than 25, and if you can still get a mocha?

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Trying it on for size: permanent 9-5 expat?

Dale Carnegie is my flavor of the week.  The Universe dropped him into my lap a couple days ago when my daughter and I were rummaging through the “free bin” at our favorite used book store, where I found his How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job – a perfectly good copy that was rejected by the consignment counter for no apparent reason. 

I do love serendipity so very much, when it happens!

Carnegie suggests we should always start by asking what’s right rather than what’s wrong.   Nevertheless (serendipity being one of your stranger animals) this week also brought me a good column by Mike Gunderloy called What’s wrong with web work?   While it’s already very difficult for any working person with a family to find the right balance, Gunderloy and subsequent commentors (me included!) discuss several problems which are particular to free-lancing and working at home.   Food for thought, indeed. 

Another blog I’ve been enjoying is “The Anti 9-5 Guide: Career advice for women who think outside the cube“  which is published in my home town (Seattle) and sort of makes me wish I could go back and live there just to participate in author Michelle Goodman’s world.  Even if I can’t,  the practical (if slightly anarchical) tone is perfect even as Goodman wisely avoids any temptation to jump into the Mommy Wars.  The “profiles” feature (of Goodman’s “fellow 9-5 expats”) is especially wonderful.

Don’t know yet if these are my peeps, but the journey’s kind of fun. 

 ”Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
- Søren Kierkegaard

We shamelessly put the kids to work last weekend and “put up” more than half a winter’s worth of heating wood in one day   (3+ cords)  The log splitter doesn’t make wood nearly so pretty as an axe does, nor even as fast, but you can run it all day long – a thing you can’t do with a set of axe-wielding arms. 

Summer rhythm never seems to set in around here until summer is half-way through.  To tell you the truth, I still don’t know how to do it all very well, with kids and work — what there is of it — and Everything Else never quite fitting into whatever time we’ve allotted for it. 

Here, surely, is part of the solution, though.  Living, green things.  This is part of our whiskey barrel garden (hic) which we fenced off and built on what used to be the end of our driveway.  

It is wonderfully peaceful to get up in the morning when it is still cool and stand over the cucumbers or beans with a hose.  Everything smells good in the morning, too.

Later in the day, when Everything Else gets to be too much, I can slip out the back door without telling anyone to dump some stuff into the compost bin, lean into the barrels to pluck a few weeds, see how the volunteer tomatoes are doing, or rifle through the foliage to see if it’s time to pick the beans again. 

It’s not highly-productive time, it’s Being Time.  And I’ve (almost) learned that I can’t live without it.

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In defense of thoughts

While I own my own comp copies of PhotoShop and Dreamweaver (if I said any more, I’d have to kill you), I’m ashamed to say that thus far I’ve only used them minimally for my web work. 

I am, at heart, a luddite and compost maker, preferring the Zen of Making Use Of Simple Things.  Nourishing a garden with re-purposed organic material (= old dead stuff) is a beautifully redemptive thing, and works better than chemicals anyway; I can strip code and manipulate photos with great facility using only the default “notepad” and “paint” features that come with every PC.  Moreover, I take a sort of perverse pride in doing so. 

But after a certain point, deliberate ignorance is just stupid.

The web is a great resource and I’m trying to use it as intelligently as I can.  Web Worker Daily publishes several good articles every day,  from practical advice on best practices, personal development and time management for the freelancer to esoterica only an obsessive-compulsive techy could love. 

I’ve also (finally) built and am populating a solid feed reader so I can better skim through the latest and best material in my field every day.   

Some of this professional development work is fun.  Some of it isn’t…  Feed readers, for instance, should be a lot more user-friendly than they are, but I am surprised and gratified to find that, even among my web-savvy friends, I’m not alone in finding myself put off or even daunted by many of these “necessary” technologies. 

In the end, there’s no substitute for a good book.  So today, I’m going to go buy a book about using PhotoShop.   Digital storage media becomes obsolete every few years, and can be wiped out by system or human error; books are always fully compatible with human eyes and last hundreds of years. 

Plus, you can read them in the bathtub. 

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Related posts:
In defense of thoughts
Copyright violation & blogs: a tricky subject
Book tour cancelled: taking my Damitol instead

“Some mornings it just doesn’t seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps”    Emo Phillips

Frankly, I’m in an (almost) funk.  I met with two great guys at our favorite diner this a.m. to talk about some paying projects we have coming down the pike.  That’s good news, too.  But I also may just have lost one of my clients (for whom I was writing copy about one of the most boring subjects you can imagine – I mean, if you were going to pick a subject that was so quintessentially boring that you could make a great joke about it?  This one would be it.)

Nevertheless, it was honest work and paid well. I like the client too (as I generally do), and fervently believe in their right to assertively market a solid and necessary product.  Moreover, it truly is an interesting challenge to help people in such obvious need of a “make-over.”  Also, I’m learning a great deal. 

It’s really sweet to be (almost) employed.  That’s about how I would describe things at the moment, given I’ve only been (almost) freelancing for a couple of months now, and have only made enough money doing it to buy a new laptop (which was, first and foremost, NOT a Dell.  Dells are great, but they are also standard-issue at The Institution Which Shall Not be Named.  So of course I had to buy something else!)

Some have asked if I’d keep writing this blog.  Is it fraudulent to write about being unemployed when, technically, I’m not?  But then again, I would feel equally fraudulent  claiming I know everything there is to know about being an employed person now. 

Besides.  I have yet to write about my various inquiries and explorations of going back to school.   About all the post-stay-at-home-mom career issues that I’ve been obsessed with for the past few years.  About how even after you’ve taken all the personality type indicator tests that exist over the course of your ever-lengthening life – and even taught some of the WORKSHOPS for God’s sake – it’s still possible to have no idea what to do next.

Or how incredibly complicated life can become sometimes, especially whenever one is tempted to get smug, so that all of the normally-healthy, normally-obvious “things to do next” are neither.  Oh well.  As Whoopi Goldberg quipped,  ‘normal’ is just a setting on the washing machine.

I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.

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In Defense of Thoughts