I work as an independent IT contractor in the UK and I would never want to be part of the payroll at the companies that I work for.
Being off the payroll means I get far more flexibility in the hours and days I work, which gives me a much better life/work balance and the time to follow my other interests. In a normal year I work around 180 days.
I have also escaped corporate politics and the bullshit that goes with it.
So please donâ(TM)t feel sorry for me, I donâ(TM)t want any wage slave t-shirt and having less meetings in my life is a positive thing
I am a freelancer and I choose my own flexible hours. Some days I prefer to take a few hours for lunch and catch up in the evening. If I send an email late at night I donâ(TM)t expect a response till the morning.
If you Slack me in the evening Iâ(TM)ll assume your making up time on something and if a quick response is going to sort you out, then happy to help.
What I wonâ(TM)t do is call you out of normal hours, as you donâ(TM)t have a choice to respond to that.
I would take the odd out of hours email in return for flexibility on when I work every time.
This goes both ways, I have always been happy to answer the odd call, slack message outside my normal hours. In a flexible work culture not everyone works the same office hours as you. It doesnâ(TM)t take much to write a quick reply and then switch off again. No big deal.
Workers need a right to disconnect to give them downtime to recover.
You're misunderstanding what flex-working is. It doesn't mean you available 24/7, it means you choose what hours you work to produce what you agreed to have working by an agreed deadline.
It's about empowering yourself to structure your own day, rather than having office hour imposed on you. Not everyone is at their most productive during normal office hours. I suck at mornings and often have constructive ideas late at night.
When you work very different hours to you co-workers you need to get over the binary distinction between life and work. There are degrees of availability, it doesn't hurt to reply to an email from someone who works a different set of hours to you whilst your doing something else and then they are likely to help you out the same way later.
I did this for two years, I averaged six hours work per day, as that is all most people are productive for, but it was split up in between other things, be it day to day life, hobbies, exercise and personal projects. I'd start the day with a rough plan, but it would adapt as the day went on. If I got a meeting request when I planned on going for a bike ride, then then plan would change. If I got a call or an email whilst on the bike ride, then I'd stop at the side of the road and deal with it for a few minutes before continuing.
If something interesting came up in my life during the week, then I might focus on it then and instead work the weekend to keep the project on track.
The important thing is I was for the most part in charge of what I was doing. It enabled me to fit work around my life, rather than fitting my life around work. The liberation that created was one of the most distressing ways I ever found to live life.
The problem is that there is an expectation of interruption, if there is a possibility of interruption.
...
Being constantly "on guard" for an interruption means you have to divide your attention between monitoring the sources of potential interrupt for the interruption happening, and the thing you actually want to be or should be doing.
I think the problem is that you care too much about the risk of interruption. Better just not to care about the fact that it might happen and that you might have to change your plans later on. It's much better to just live your life and adapt to things as they come along. What's the point about getting stressed that about a minor risk that you might have to spend 10 minutes replying to an email at 10pm in the pub once every now and then.
I once spent two months on 4 hours notice to fly from London to Kansas to work on a project for a week. That had a real impact on my life, but I never thought of it as stressful, just something to factor into my plans.
I had a flexi-remote working job for two years and it was the best gig I ever had. Yes I'd reply to emails at all hours of the day, but I also worked an average 6 hours a day and found it easy to maintain a life/work balance. I ended up moving to Barcelona for six months and had my dream life for a while traveling around the world and working from wherever I happened to be that day.
If you have a job that you enjoy, a good boss and co-workers then it's great. But you have to be someone who can copy with blurred lines in your life and the idea that working/non-working isn't a binary distinction.
It's the same with being on-call in an IT-support gig. Some people are happy to carry a pager and responded to it now and then, others for some reason that I don't understand get really stressed by it and feel on edge the whole time the pager is on their belt.
A Mac is the easy choice, you can run whatever OS you like on it. They are the best built laptop out there, so will last longer and even a 3 or 4 year old one has a good resale value, so cheaper in the long run. To get an even better deal check the Apple refurb store.
Why do you need a DVD drive? They are just dead weight to carry around. With full screen apps in OS X Lion I now find the 11 inch screen more useful than my 27 inch iMac. If it's a machine to carry around a lot then consider size and weight over everything else.
Lastly wait a couple of weeks, lots of new models are due soon.
The solution to this problem is simple. Start taxing domain names at 50 bucks a year and the use the money to go after the spammers and other such scum.
I own a number of domain names and I'd be happy to pay a tax on them if it meant that these companies could no longer afford to hold on to a few domain names that I'd like.
It's not the card I object to, lots of nations have them. It's the database that is the real menace. Guess their will now be a rush in 2007 and with any one with any real clue about the issue renewing their passport before the deadline.
I really do feel failed by the House of Lords by this shabby deal.
I've had the motherboard replaced on my Dell laptop a few times, because the serial port that my Palm V gets plugged into never seems to last more than a month. After which time it only seems to work for two or so minutes at a time.
I've always put this down to the build quality of Dell laptops, I've also had the screen, keyboard, CD writer and battery replaced over the last year and a number of other people have had the same serial port problem in my office.
In the end I gave up and got a USB serial adapter to fix the problem, as I came to the conclusion that the port on my laptop wasn't properly earthed.
Their may be something in this, but I think they should be sueing their motherboard supplier. I ran the Palm V on my old Gateway laptop without problem for over a year.
Slashdot Mirror
I work as an independent IT contractor in the UK and I would never want to be part of the payroll at the companies that I work for.
Being off the payroll means I get far more flexibility in the hours and days I work, which gives me a much better life/work balance and the time to follow my other interests. In a normal year I work around 180 days.
I have also escaped corporate politics and the bullshit that goes with it.
So please donâ(TM)t feel sorry for me, I donâ(TM)t want any wage slave t-shirt and having less meetings in my life is a positive thing
I am a freelancer and I choose my own flexible hours. Some days I prefer to take a few hours for lunch and catch up in the evening. If I send an email late at night I donâ(TM)t expect a response till the morning.
If you Slack me in the evening Iâ(TM)ll assume your making up time on something and if a quick response is going to sort you out, then happy to help.
What I wonâ(TM)t do is call you out of normal hours, as you donâ(TM)t have a choice to respond to that.
I would take the odd out of hours email in return for flexibility on when I work every time.
This goes both ways, I have always been happy to answer the odd call, slack message outside my normal hours. In a flexible work culture not everyone works the same office hours as you. It doesnâ(TM)t take much to write a quick reply and then switch off again. No big deal.
Personally I find doing code reviews in the evening relaxing.
Workers need a right to disconnect to give them downtime to recover.
You're misunderstanding what flex-working is. It doesn't mean you available 24/7, it means you choose what hours you work to produce what you agreed to have working by an agreed deadline.
It's about empowering yourself to structure your own day, rather than having office hour imposed on you. Not everyone is at their most productive during normal office hours. I suck at mornings and often have constructive ideas late at night.
When you work very different hours to you co-workers you need to get over the binary distinction between life and work. There are degrees of availability, it doesn't hurt to reply to an email from someone who works a different set of hours to you whilst your doing something else and then they are likely to help you out the same way later.
I did this for two years, I averaged six hours work per day, as that is all most people are productive for, but it was split up in between other things, be it day to day life, hobbies, exercise and personal projects. I'd start the day with a rough plan, but it would adapt as the day went on. If I got a meeting request when I planned on going for a bike ride, then then plan would change. If I got a call or an email whilst on the bike ride, then I'd stop at the side of the road and deal with it for a few minutes before continuing.
If something interesting came up in my life during the week, then I might focus on it then and instead work the weekend to keep the project on track.
The important thing is I was for the most part in charge of what I was doing. It enabled me to fit work around my life, rather than fitting my life around work. The liberation that created was one of the most distressing ways I ever found to live life.
The problem is that there is an expectation of interruption, if there is a possibility of interruption.
Being constantly "on guard" for an interruption means you have to divide your attention between monitoring the sources of potential interrupt for the interruption happening, and the thing you actually want to be or should be doing.
I think the problem is that you care too much about the risk of interruption. Better just not to care about the fact that it might happen and that you might have to change your plans later on. It's much better to just live your life and adapt to things as they come along. What's the point about getting stressed that about a minor risk that you might have to spend 10 minutes replying to an email at 10pm in the pub once every now and then.
I once spent two months on 4 hours notice to fly from London to Kansas to work on a project for a week. That had a real impact on my life, but I never thought of it as stressful, just something to factor into my plans.
I had a flexi-remote working job for two years and it was the best gig I ever had. Yes I'd reply to emails at all hours of the day, but I also worked an average 6 hours a day and found it easy to maintain a life/work balance. I ended up moving to Barcelona for six months and had my dream life for a while traveling around the world and working from wherever I happened to be that day.
If you have a job that you enjoy, a good boss and co-workers then it's great. But you have to be someone who can copy with blurred lines in your life and the idea that working/non-working isn't a binary distinction.
It's the same with being on-call in an IT-support gig. Some people are happy to carry a pager and responded to it now and then, others for some reason that I don't understand get really stressed by it and feel on edge the whole time the pager is on their belt.
1366x768 is great on my MBA 11, so long as you use full screen apps in OS X Lion. I even prefer it now to my iMac 27 with it's 2560x1440 screen.
A Mac is the easy choice, you can run whatever OS you like on it. They are the best built laptop out there, so will last longer and even a 3 or 4 year old one has a good resale value, so cheaper in the long run. To get an even better deal check the Apple refurb store.
Why do you need a DVD drive? They are just dead weight to carry around. With full screen apps in OS X Lion I now find the 11 inch screen more useful than my 27 inch iMac. If it's a machine to carry around a lot then consider size and weight over everything else.
Lastly wait a couple of weeks, lots of new models are due soon.
The solution to this problem is simple. Start taxing domain names at 50 bucks a year and the use the money to go after the spammers and other such scum.
I own a number of domain names and I'd be happy to pay a tax on them if it meant that these companies could no longer afford to hold on to a few domain names that I'd like.
To problems, one stone.
It's not the card I object to, lots of nations have them. It's the database that is the real menace. Guess their will now be a rush in 2007 and with any one with any real clue about the issue renewing their passport before the deadline.
I really do feel failed by the House of Lords by this shabby deal.
www.netidentity.com have been doing this since at least 1998 when I got my account with them.
I've always put this down to the build quality of Dell laptops, I've also had the screen, keyboard, CD writer and battery replaced over the last year and a number of other people have had the same serial port problem in my office.
In the end I gave up and got a USB serial adapter to fix the problem, as I came to the conclusion that the port on my laptop wasn't properly earthed.
Their may be something in this, but I think they should be sueing their motherboard supplier. I ran the Palm V on my old Gateway laptop without problem for over a year.
Dave.