Photo by AlphaTangoBravo / Adam Baker.

There’s a conspiracy against you, and everyone is in on it. Your friends, your roommates, your significant other, your co-workers (if you’re only freelancing part-time), hell, even that guy sitting a few tables away from you at the café you like to do work in. They’re all slowing you down.

Here’s the kicker, though: they don’t know what their doing. They’re just pawns in this game. So who’s the mastermind behind this nefarious plot to kill your productivity?

Your own brain. Continue Reading

Confession time: I kind of, sort of, almost miss my 9-to-5 office grind. Granted, my home office comes equipped with a bottle of scotch and I’m not stuck using Internet Explorer, but there are some things a staff position at an established magazine or company can offer freelancers that harder to come by on our own.

What I miss most about going to the office every day are the people in all those departments that are usually ignored, but are so integral to the smooth turning of the gears: Legal, Accounting, Tech Support, Reception, the list goes on. Whether there was trouble with a libel suit or just a printer problem, it was easy to find an expert with an answer somewhere down the hall. Freelancers aren’t lost though, since there’s a wealth of online resources that’ll act as your support staff and help you through the workday.

Tech Support

Protonic.com is run by a staff of tech-savvy volunteers that offer free answers to questions about hardware, software, operating systems, or even a kink in your CSS. An answer can often take a day or so to make its way to you, but sometimes you’ll get answers within an hour. It’s the next best thing to sending a support ticket to the IT guys on the third floor.

If you’re willing to exert just a little bit of effort, you may want to browse the forums at Tech Support Guy. Chances are, your question has already been asked and discussed at length. If you’re worried about taking the advice of a stranger who might not know what they’re talking about, forum posters are ranked from Junior up to Distinguished Member, and their posts give a little bit of info about their experience and skills.

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Independents Hall – An opensource workspace for freelancers

I like to think of Ben Franklin as a proto-freelancer. That is, when he wrote, whether it was an op-ed piece or a political cartoon for a colonial paper, or a piece for Poor Richard’s Almanac, he did like the rest of us: at home in his pajamas with his feet up on the desk.

Now that’s the father of my country!

If Franklin’s work day did look anything like mine does, he no doubt got tired of it, great as it is, just like I am. The freelance life is lonely, and sooner or later the bedroom office starts to feel a little too cramped, the washing machine gets a little too loud and all that “research” you’re doing on Digg starts to eat away your whole day.

So Franklin put on some pants and got out of the house. He started a group called the Junto, a loose collection of colonists devoted to self-improvement through improving their community. Through that group, Franklin created America’s first volunteer firefighting company and first public hospital.

Alex Hillman, founder of Independents HallSkip ahead 200 years, and Philadelphia is still full of freelancers sitting at their desks without pants, yearning for human contact and a chance to actually get some work done. Enter Alex Hillman, 23, who started working in tech support at the ripe old age of 10. “I walked into a computer shop and bought a motherboard and the guy was like, ‘what are you going to do with a motherboard?’ and I said ‘this is exactly what I’m gonna do with a motherboard,’ and he said ‘do you want a job?’” he explains.

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