I’m just back from Spring Break, during which I joined my wife and daughter on the trip to see grandma and grandpa in Los Angeles. While they went to the zoo and to play mini-golf, I was working. It was the classic scenario for remote working — I was in a familiar location (the in-laws’ house), with […]
Author Archives: doodly
The Best Places to Find Your Next Remote Job
So you’ve decided to join the movement of the future and look for a remote working job. But where do you find one? Craigslist won’t help, and most of the big job listing sites start by asking you where you want to work (as a result I imagine a lot of people are accidentally looking […]
In Praise of the Four-Day Week
In 1995 I was in Dublin working my first job after getting my Masters. I was writing what was then called computer-based training, which would grow up to become online education. I was helping to produce courseware to teach people how to use Microsoft Office products, which even then were bloated and less than intuitive. […]
Remote work isn’t just for digital nomads, it’s also for boring people like me
I love reading stories of intrepid people living as digital nomads, living in exotic places while running their businesses, or freelancing their way around the world. Aussie digital nomad James Clark has a great list of resources and links to the blogs of other folks doing a similar thing, which often revolves doing web-related or […]
Can Mindfulness Be Your Startup’s Secret Weapon?
ABC news anchor Dan Harris has a striking line in his recent best-seller on meditation, 10% Happier: “Many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment. And imagine living your whole life like that, where always this moment is […]
Presenteeism and What to Do About It
We’ve all seen the co-worker who drags themselves to the office while they’re fighting a stinking cold, and sneezes and groans their way through the day, because ‘they’ve got something they have to get done’. Heroic, right? They must be the sort of committed and dedicated employee we need — someone you’d want in you foxhole when […]
5 Reasons Non-profits Should Embrace Distributed Working
Some (but not all) of the organizations pursuing the widest range of innovative working practices seem to be software or web-related firms. Buffer, Automattic, Treehouse and Lullabot spring to mind, but there are many others, and that’s not a huge surprise, since these firms work in a virtual world where their raw materials, and the […]
Dear America, you have cruel and unusual work practices
Dear America, you have cruel and unusual work practices Dear America, you have cruel and unusual work practices Dear America, You know I love you. You’re funny and generous and have a great attitude. You’re pretty and you’ve been really good to me since we first got together in the late 90s. But we need […]
An Unplanned Corporate Culture is still a Culture
Why it’s crucial to examine values from the start When I was working as a web content strategist, I had a terrible boss. There was a clash between what was important to me and how the company was run: I wanted to do creative projects that focused on storytelling and content marketing while the boss […]
Why do we still have offices?
It used to be that work was the place that contained the equipment and materials you needed to do your work: paperwork, typewriters, fax machines and copiers. Now, unless we need specialized machinery or are working in stores where people come in to buy stuff (remember those?), a lot of us can theoretically do our […]