AnywhereMan

Sometimes living the Anywhere Lifestyle means that you can live somewhere exotic like a tropical island or beachfront condo. Sometimes it means you can live your life as a digital nomad, constantly moving from place to place and taking your career with you. Sometimes it means you can live in a cabin right next to your favorite lake.

For me, it means I can live in a smaller community, work from home, spend lots of time with my family, have access to awesome outdoor recreation, and run into friends at the grocery store. It doesn’t have to seem exciting. Simply being able to exist in a place where you want is a great thing in itself.

Where do YOU want to be? Are you there now? Where do you see the Anywhere Lifestyle taking you in the next few years?

Things have gotten really busy for me with the release of my WordPress customization service, TweakMyTheme.com, a few months back. Today I discuss why it’s helped my business.

Here are links to a few things I mention in this video:

• How I Started a Business on a Saturday Part 1
• How I Started a Business on a Saturday Part 2
• Give Each of Your Products or Services a Website

By building a website and community around each of your products/services, you’ll have a chance to really highlight the great things that you are doing. Pick one thing and try it!

Earlier this week I published a new article to MakeUseOf.com about TokBox, a video chatting and messaging app. In the past, I’ve encouraged all of you to do as much video as possible. Since we don’t get a ton of in-person “face time” with clients and co-workers, using an app like Skype or TokBox to have real-time video conversations really help strengthen trust in a relationship where we might otherwise be more heard than seen.

TokBox gives you an additional feature that is SUPER convenient for Work Anywhere folks like me: video messaging. You can record a video using your webcam and instantly send it to a client, prospect, vendor, or anybody else. I’ve taken to sending video messages over emails on many occasions. For me it’s almost quicker than typing out an email.

I go into all the details in my article, but just wanted to let you folks know that it might be an app that really adds a nice benefit to how you communicate from wherever you might be.

Check out TokBox. What video chatting/messaging services do you currently use?

I have no idea how to accurately title this post. Last night I was going through some of the amazing videos on Vimeo’s Documentary channel and came across this one. Just watch it (it’s about 5 minutes long) and comment back with any words you can think of to describe it.

Whatever you’d call this, it inspires me to ignore temporary or even permanent setbacks in pursuit of an end goal. Kudos to Sean Mullens for a well-done mini-documentary.

Lisa Kanarek wins the AnywhereMan Award for my favorite blog title: Working Naked. Lisa is a home office expert who puts on seminars, writes books, and offers consulting to companies and individuals wishing to have an aspect of working from home in their operations.

Lisa is also the subject of my first AnywhereMan interview. I’ve had the privilege of getting to know her a little bit better through her blog, this interview, and even a guest post I wrote for her last week. She truly is a working-from-home expert and I think you’ll really enjoy this interview…minus me, the newbie, learning how to facilitate an interview. Good thing Lisa is a seasoned pro!

Here’s a bit more about Lisa from her site:

Lisa Kanarek is one of the nation’s leading home office experts and the author of several books including Home Office Solutions, Organizing Your Home Office For Success and 101 Home Office Success Secrets. She is the founder of HomeOfficeLife, a firm that advises corporations and individuals on all aspects of working from home and is founder of this blog.

Kanarek has been a guest on several national programs including Good Morning America, CNN Financial News, CBS Up-to-the-Minute, CNBC, American Public Radio, Movie & a Makeover, Public Radio’s Marketplace and Voice of America radio. Kanarek has been featured—as an author and in interviews—in hundreds of publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, Success, Money, Entrepreneur, Cosmopolitan, Dwell, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Marie Claire and Redbook.

Whoa! Well, add “AnywhereMan.com” to that impressive list. Thanks for your time and fantastic insights, Lisa!

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!

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.

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?

In honor of Valentine’s Day, this video is about relationships. Okay I wasn’t really thinking about Valentine’s Day at all when I set out to record this, but it’s fitting nonetheless. The meat of this video is in the first three minutes, but keep watching if you’d like to see some of the ways we’re trying to overcome a throw-away mentality in our household.

We live in a period when everything is disposable. If something breaks, we just throw it away and get a new one. With regards to things like the environment, this is obviously a bad thing. However, it’s even worse if we apply this mentality to people and relationships.

People are valuable. We are all unique, each with our own strengths and weaknesses. Though it may not seem like someone is of value to you right now, you just never know when your paths may cross again and on what terms. Not that it matters if you ever cross paths again: just be nice.

Also, I think we give up to easily on people a lot of times. Great relationships take time and effort. Commitment in the long run takes a “fix-it” attitude  where you’re willing to do what it takes to make it work. This is the type of attitude clients and employers like to see. It can be a big key to networking as well.

Failing at fixing “stuff” can be tolerated, but let’s make sure we’re committed to doing the work when it comes to relationships. The good news is that I see a lot of people on a regular basis with this type of attitude.