Maybe when you start that conversation, your boss can't believe that you are pushing back, or what you say or what you ask. Your boss might not remember everything you're doing. I had a manager like that. So I drew him a picture of everything I was doing for the next few weeks. I had the weeks across the top, and a list of projects down the side, and showed him how I was going to allocate the time. And, I had a big black line partway down the page, labelled "Unstaffed work."
"Johanna, you can't have 'unstaffed work', you're only one person."
"Yes, I can. I'm only one person. If I can't do it, no one can."
Now, you are not me. You might not want to have the conversation the way I do. In fact, you might want to be much less in-your-face than I am. That's perfectly fine. But you have to say no to multitasking. You have to manage your own personal project portfolio.
No matter what you do, start the conversation. Because multitasking is the illusion of progress, not real progress. And, if you have tried to have this conversation and are having trouble, join me in Peer Project Portfolio Coaching.
These days, especially for technology professionals, maintaining an online presence is crucial. But one of the biggest challenges facing anyone trying to bolster their presence online is choosing an appropriate service. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are all very well, but Facebook is mostly used for personal information, while LinkedIn is a professional site, but doesn't give you much latitude when creating a personal feel to your online profile. Twitter is even less conducive when it comes to personalised style - especially given that most people will be reading your Tweets in a dedicated reader rather than going to the Twitter site anyway.
Image via Wikipedia
Ideally, a personal profile site will be able to aggregate information from various social networks, while giving you the chance to create your own special look and feel. There are a variety of options to choose from.
This AOL owned site lets you create a personal splash page using any photograph
that you want. You can add your own links (say, to a variety of personal and
business webpages), along with links to services including all of the popular
ones, along with others such as Foursquare, Posterous, and Github. One useful
feature of this site is the analytics capability, which enables you to monitor
how many views your site has garnered, along with who is linking to you. You
can also measure your Klout score, which
gives you a measure of your online influence.
Flavors.me
Flavors.me is an alternative to About.me that I find slightly more slick. Not
only does it provide customisation capabilities and links to your other
services, but it also lets you read your social streams from those other
services, too, turning it into a kind of FriendFeed, but with a lot more
polish. It offers you a variety of design features, including multiple layouts,
and even provides search engine optimisation capabilities. This site works on a
freemium model, providing a basic (but still highly functional) site for free,
with an upgrade offering more layouts, specific mobile display options, and
other goodies, for a fee.
AboutOurWork.com
This site is designed more for small businesses that individuals, but then, if
you are an IT contractor who has incorporated, you qualify. It lets you
customise your profile page, in much the same way as About.me, but takes a
slightly different approach to measuring the value of your network. It uses a
social graph, replete with bubbles and lines, to show others who you are
connected with. You can also add a smattering of social network links, to take
visitors to your accounts on services such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
Kimtag
This aggregation site that you choose a tag, which can represent everything
from an individual to a company or product. Once you have chosen your tag
(which could be your name, for example) you can type a little about yourself,
and add information such as your name, location, and a vCard. You can also add
connections to the major social networks, along with other data such as your
phone numbers and address. One attractive aspect to this site is that it
automatically assigns you a QR code for your page (although it is easy to do
that for any page on any service, by simply using a QR code generator).
Naymz
Naymz focuses heavily on reputation management. It measures your social
influence, through other social networks that you link to the system. It also
uses assessments by your peers on the Naymz network. Together, your peer
assessment and social influence constitute your RepScore.
There are many more personal online profile sites, some focusing on social
networking links, and others focusing on presenting your information as
effectively as possible. Why use them instead of simply creating your own web
site?
They can take the hassle out of web site development, leaving you time to pursue more relevant pursuits such as finding an amazing job. Their social networking features are also beyond what most of us could build on our own sites, and pulling your accounts into one place is a great way to present your entire online presence in one site to a potential employer (although you may want to leave social networks with a personal focus off the list).
Of course, these personal profile and social service aggregation sites are themselves proliferating, leading to a similar problem: which one do you choose? At some point, surely, someone will come up with an aggregator for the aggregators, and so the whole tangled mess will continue. I chose to redirect to a site from my own domain name, and promote the domain name on my business card, giving me total control over my own home on the web.


Image by intheozone via Flickr
Where do you work? I've been a freelance writer since 1994, and I have almost always worked from home. It offers its benefits - the coffee is free, there's a well-stocked fridge, and there is always an office cat or dog available to lower your blood pressure. You get to arrive at work whenever you please, and you get to work in your jim-jams, all day, should you wish.
But there are downsides, too. Isolation. A lack of people to bounce ideas around with. A distinct dearth of office camaradarie. Let's face it: for a freelance worker, working at home can be dull, and lonely. And that temptation to work in your pyjamas all day can be a curse in disguise.
Coffee shops and libraries are alternatives, but they're largely transient. You may get to enjoy the ambient background buzz, but you are unlikely to really connect with someone who has the same mindset as you. What's the answer?
Co-working spaces aren't a new thing, but they create new possibilities. Known in the past as as 'telecottages', they have been gaining traction. For a freelance worker, or for someone starting out building their own small company, a co-working space can be a godsend.
Co-working spaces are best when they play host to a co-working community. The community is really the meat in the sandwich. Without a community, a co-working space is little more than a collection of desks and a whiteboard. But bringing a collection of like-minded people together can produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
What does a co-working community look like? It shares an element of commonality. It may simply be that all of the members work in the same field. Maybe a cadre of coders can come together to lend each other support and advice, for example. Or the sense of community could be little more than an ideology, such as subscribing to the notion of quality in work. For some, simply sharing a fabulous working space can be enough.
There are various approaches to co-working. Some of them emphasise the community, and the space is secondary. One example is Jelly, an occasional get-together where people in an area arrange to work together in a temporary space, such as a coffee shop or a person's home. For writers in particular, National Novel Writing Month hosts a series of 'write-ins' where people gather together to work on their novels. These are valuable initiatives. Working together encourages and inspires people.
I like the idea of co-working communities because they help you to manifest your own ideas. As a freelance writer I have had lots of business ideas over the years, but I have never got any of them off the ground, because I didn't have a community of people around me that could help me to make it happen. It is very difficult for one person to make a large project work without the help, support, and skills of others.
Other co-working initiatives focus on the space and the community together, as a single entity. I recently set up The Office, a co-working space and community based in Vancouver, it brings together a selection of people with different skills. I have graphic designers, coders, copywriters and videographers. There's an ounce or two of social media in our skill set, and one or two startups too. I created a set of principles for The Office, that everyone is asked to abide by when they come to work in the space. The principles are pretty basic. Integrity, honesty and transparency figure highly, as do the willingness to commit to something larger than yourself, and be fulfilled in your work.
The idea behind The Office is to make individuals more powerful when they come into the space. We host speaking events and workshops on a regular basis, and also encourage people to share what they're working on via 'show and tells' with a networked projector.
The ultimate goal behind this not-for-profit co-working space is to create a fund using any surplus revenue. Rather than the founders taking a profit, we pump the money back into the fund. Any member with a socially progressive business idea that needs help to get started can apply for funding, and can also use the skills of the community to make their businesses happen.
The Office is based in Vancouver, and most of our readers are in the UK. Otherwise, I'd invite you to stop in for coffee. But for freelancers in our fair city, it is turning into a sanctuary for people to come and work at, and feel at home.
What's your ideal working environment?
How can you make money developing IOS games? An informal survey conducted by one developer suggests 'be in the top 10%'
Owen Goss, an independent video games developer based in Guelph Canada, surveyed 252 developers who created games for Apple's mobile operating system, to find out how much they earned. The survey took place online over seven days. It turned up some interesting results, one of which was that the Pareto principle seems to apply to IOS app revenues; a small number of developers earn a large part of the cash.
One of the great things about being an app developer for Apple's mobile operating system is that the App Store can be used to market your app for you. Millions of App Store users can see it. However, that is also part of the problem: there are many apps to choose from, and it is easy to get lost in the crowd.
On average, games developers make about $165,000 from a title, but here is where statistics can be misleading. That is the mean average. The median splits the developers in half. 50% of developers have made less than $3000 lifetime revenue from the App Store.
The revenue curve is exponential, because the few developers who are most successful make most of the money. Those in the 75th percentile have made roughly $30,000 lifetime revenue from the App Store. The bottom 25% of developers have made less than $200. Those lucky 4% of respondents who are most successful made over $1 million.
Getting into that successful 10% at the top of the pile isn't rocket science, but it isn't easy either. There are some pointers.
Polish your app
the best IOS apps look good. They are shiny, just like the phones they run on. Games are properly play tested, and gameplay is well thought out, so that there is a solid progression throughout the game.
Do your own marketing
Doing your own marketing is also important. Simply relying on being featured in the App Store isn't a realistic business model. Good marketing includes understanding social media and soliciting user feedback.
Don't race to the bottom
There are thousands of apps for the IOS platform, many of them doing almost exactly the same thing. Your app will succeed on its quality. Don't be tempted to rush it out. Concentrate instead on making it better than the others available.
Look for new opportunities
New social media networks and other developments such as Apple's iCloud promise to disrupt games development. These opportunities along with in-app purchases, can be used to maximise your revenue.
Be original
It's hard to find originality in the oversaturated app landscape, but not impossible. Spend more time in conceptualisation, and ensure that your idea stands out from the crowd.
With Apple's iPhone 5 rumoured to be launching next week, this will be a big quarter for games developers. Will you be ready to capitalise on the ongoing success of the platform?
How much value is locked up in our social data? The information that we enter into our social networks already has explicit value. LinkedIn can tell a recruiter who you work for, and what you do there, along with what skills you have. But what implicit information is embedded in that network, which it isn't obviously communicating?
Tacit information in social network sites may include how often you post, who else you know on that network, and perhaps most importantly, what kind of person you are. A resume says one thing, but the way that you interact online says far more - and recruiters may soon be able to mine and quantify this information.
Sentiment mining is a good example. Companies such as Attensity and Lexalytics already produce systems that analyse text to produce structured data. They use these techniques to help customers with tasks such as customer relationship management, advertising optimisation, and social media monitoring. But when it comes to social media mining, these techniques are still relatively rudimentary. Searching Twitter streams for "British Airways" and "sucks", or "terrible" to see which customers are irritated so that you can reach out to them is a basic operation.
But your language says far more about you than whether you've had a bad experience on British Airways. In their book, Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan and John King identify five stages of maturity in leadership. As individuals become more mature and better able to lead, their maturity is evident in the language that they use. The language that you use at stage one is markedly different than the language you use stage five. It's more negative, self-centred, and generally victim-like. At stage five, you are using language that is more positive, and community-focused. You revel in other people's success, and identify goals that are bigger than yourself.
Heidegger once said that language is the house of being. Your language defines how you are in the world. So the way that you conduct yourself on social media sites is about more than simply avoiding unprofessional behaviour. Not posting drunken pictures of yourself on work-related social media sites is basic common sense. The smart candidate, however, will use such sites to show how mature and helpful you can be. What kinds of things are you saying on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and how are you bringing people together and helping others? How often do you post intelligent answers on Quora and Stack Overflow?
Right now, recruiters may scan such sites manually to see what kind of leadership potential you have. In the future, natural entity recognition algorithms might score you based on parameters such as these. In an algorithmic world, such things become increasingly likely. Are you ready?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0545817/ "You're a tiger! Grrrr!"
That was my favourite line from Dearth of a Salesman, a programme in Steve Coogan's Coogan's Run comedy series. He played IT salesman Gareth Cheeseman, a greasy, awkward little bag of anxieties, attending a sales conference and trying to further his tin-pushing career. It was a stereotypical portrayal of IT salespeople, of course. In reality, they're a knowledgeable bunch, with good interpersonal skills, well-versed in the art of understanding what customers need. But the biggest challenge facing IT salespeople today - and the industry trend that would leave a real-life, witless Gareth Cheeseman behind - is that customer needs are changing, dramatically.
Managed services is the cause of it all. With everything being offered as a service, the patterns of IT usage are changing. In Cheeseman's time (Coogan made the programme in 1995), IT salespeople sold hardware, and the software to run on that hardware. But as managed services take off, commentators believe that hardware sales to conventional customers will decline, even as it is bought in increasing quantities by third party service provides. Instead, IT departments will eventually buy managed services that they resell to their internal customers.
There will be iterative steps along this road, of course. Private clouds will create a class of managed services designed to run inside organizations, still administered by IT departments, using their own hardware. But a trusted cadre of sysadmins and business analysts are telling me that this will effectively be replaced by public clouds over time as IT departments simply turn more of their equipment off altogether.
What happens to the IT salesperson in this scenario?
Firstly, they will be selling to different people. Expect them to deal more directly with line of business managers in customer organisations, who have wrested budget away from IT to make their own purchases.
Secondly, commissions will change, because instead of selling servers and software licenses that require significant up-front capital investment, salespeople will be hawking contracts in which customer subscribe to online services for set periods of time. Customers will often pay for these services in smaller, more regular amounts, chalking them up as operational expenditure, which means that compensation packages for salespeople may change.
Perhaps over time, though, the biggest challenge facing IT salespeople is that they may not be needed at all. Don't get me wrong - there will still be some tigers out there, roaming around, clinching large, intricate corporate contracts. But if line of business managers end up buying a lot of their functionality online by simply purchasing a number of seats for an online service from a web site, that leaves the sales force out of a job - or at least selling to a far smaller number of specialist data centre operators. Are you exploring your options?