Freelancing in Real Life

For the past month or so, I’ve been using ShutterCal to upload a daily photo. ShutterCal then displays photos in an actual calendar format making it easy to look back over the past month of photos. As a person who works from home, I discovered some really neat advantages to doing this that I hadn’t thought of prior to using it:

• It forces me to get out of my PJs and into “real” clothes every day as well as comb my hair. Well, maybe not comb my hair. But I can look back and figure out when I last had a haircut. No more going two months between cuts.
• It acts as a daily journal. I can go back and look at past days and look at the context of the photo for an idea of what I did that day.
• It gets my creative juices flowing…easily. Most of the time I shoot my daily photo simply using the webcam on my MacBook. Easy, but creatively challenging to make each photo different somehow.
• It gets me out and about. Looking back over a monthly calendar of photos, it’s easy to spot trends. If too many photos in a row are me sitting in my house, then it’s time to get out.

These are all great things for someone working from home. If you decide to join me on ShutterCal, you’ll find my calendar here. Let’s be friends!

Last week my wife went cross-country skiing down on the lake by our house. When we made it to the far end of the lake, we stopped for a breather and I noticed an area on the shore where a beaver had been hard at work. There were a few trees down and I decided to take a closer look at its handiwork. I snapped the above photo as I explored.

Looking at this photo, I realize how much of an artist a beaver is. From huts and dams right down to the pattern of teeth marks on a downed tree, the evidence of the beaver’s hard work is beautiful. Beavers were made for chewing and building. They excel at that, and thus their job-well-done becomes a work of art.

I love experiencing the final result of people doing what they do best. Something as simple as the pancakes made by the top cook at the local cafe to the skyscraper designed by a famous architect to the simple but powerful WordPress plugin developed by a tinkering high-school student. Experiencing excellence, whether simple or complex, never gets old.

People (and animals) doing what they do best results in a masterpiece.

The awesome folks at XShot recently sent me one of their “XShot 2.0″ hand-held video/photo accessories. It allows you to place a smaller camera or flip-style camcorder on the end and extend it out a few feet in front of you, thus eliminating the need to hold your arm out when trying to do a self portrait. It actually extends further than your arm would allow (unless you’re Manute Bol), thus allowing for a very natural shot.

In today’s video, I take it out for a test session. This thing is going to be great for upcoming AnywhereMan vids, not to mention outings with my wife when we want to snap a pic of the two of us together.

For another review of the XShot, check out Phil Montero’s video on TheAnywhereOffice.com. He gives a nice description of how the XShot functions.

If you’re interested in buying one, just visit the XShot website and you can purchase it directly from them.

Did you ever see the clip of comedian Louis CK talking to Conan O’Brien about how everything is amazing, yet nobody’s happy? If you haven’t seen it, take a few minutes to watch it before reading the rest of this post. First of all, it’s hilarious, and second, it’s 100% true.

Two nights ago I realized how amazing things are. Specifically, I realized how amazing it is that I can do what I do and interact with the people I do.

I was sitting in our local Caribou Coffee getting some extra work done for the day. Okay, first amazing thing: I was getting work done from the place that serves my favorite coffee. Caribou is awesome, and the only thing more amazing that being able to get work done there would be for them to give me my own dedicated Dave-only table that I could use all-day every day. I think I’m pushing my luck, so I’ll continue…

The second amazing thing was that I was having a few conversations on the side using Twitter. Just think about that: I am able to have casual conversations with folks, most of whom I’ve never met, who are hundreds and thousands of miles away. Twitter is an amazing tool. I’ve met many new friends and clients using the platform, and I’ll say it again: it really is the world’s largest water cooler.

Okay let’s continue down the social media path for a second. Not only is Twitter amazing, but the social media concept in general is amazing. It’s so flippin’ easy to find folks with the same interests, hobbies, career, and concerns as you. It’s so easy to keep in touch with people you haven’t seen in years. Personally, there are a ton of past friends I interact with on Facebook that I might never have talked to again just because of geography and losing touch. It’s amazing!

Lately I’ve been making it a point to use Skype a lot more. It’s been much easier on my MacBook than it ever was on my PC, for some reason. Skype is amazing. I feel like I’m almost in the same room as the person I’m talking to. It blows my mind! Tuesday night I was on Skype with a friend (from Twitter, whom I’ve never met in person) and he was on the road for his job. He jokingly said that if I was the AnywhereMan, he was the EverywhereMan. Having Skype allows him to interact with his wife and son in a way that’s a lot more personal than just an audio-only phone call. It’s not a replacement for actually being there, but it sure helps.

Any plain old chat application is amazing. When I was sitting at Caribou on Wednesday night, a chat message from my wife popped up in Google Talk. “Did you unhook the computer from the TV?” she asked. Being able to ask that question with just a quick little message versus a disruptive phone call is pretty slick. And yes, we’ve got an old Dell PC hooked to our TV and we watch our Hulu shows on it each week. That is also amazing.

Finally, the Work Anywhere concept is blow-my-mind amazing. I sit in the basement office of my small house in Grand Rapids and shape and mold the interwebs for clients who are mostly NOT in Grand Rapids. In fact, the largest concentration of Lift Development clients is actually in California. I’m in my shorts right now prepping to do some work for a bunch of them, my kids are upstairs playing, my wife is making coffee, and that is just plain amazing to me.

While there are always plenty of things to bum us out, focus on the little amazing things you might have never taken notice of in the past.

What’s amazing in your life?

Even if you don’t have a Work Anywhere career, there are still plenty of amazing things if you just look around. If I still had to commute these days, I guarantee being able to automatically download podcasts to my iPod Touch on a daily basis and listen to them during the drive would be among my list of amazing-ness. In fact, I kind of miss that…just a little bit.

Here is part two of my first “Startup Saturday” in which I built and launched a new business/site in a day. That site is TweakMyTheme.com.

Please note that some of the steps in this process are simple enough for anybody who has the ability to place orders online to complete, i.e. ordering a domain, ordering a hosting account, etc. You’ll see me flash a link in the video, but here’s a link to my exact steps for launching a theme-based WordPress website fast.

Amazing enough, I just publicized this launch for the first time yesterday and I’ve already gotten an overwhelmingly positive response and some potential business.

What kind of business are you thinking of launching? Would the ability to get it off the ground on a single Saturday motivate you to pursuit it?

I love throwing new business ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks.This mentality has led me to practice something I call “Startup Saturday” where I essentially launch new web business ventures in a day. Here’s part one of the vlog for my latest launch: TweakMyTheme.com.

TweakMyTheme.com is a WordPress theme customization service. I’ve customized quite a few WP themes in the past, so the service itself is nothing new. However, lately I’ve felt that it’s important to package certain skills into “products” and give them their own website. Sometimes listing everything I do (design, ASP.NET programming, video, SQL design, etc) on a single site results in a watered-down offering. Maybe I should just focus on one of those skills altogether, but that’s another story…

I spent a Saturday a few weeks ago putting the site, plan, and content together. To further complicate my life, while working on the TweakMyTheme site I also came up with two more startup-in-a-day ideas, so I’m already looking for the next free Saturday to launch another one. It’s a lot of fun and I’m getting good practice, if nothing else.

Am I off my rocker? Is it better to launch a lot of “small” businesses and see what works, or do you think one well-planned venture is more powerful?