freelancing

“Work-life balance, says Nigel Marsh, is too important to be left in the hands of your employer. At TEDxSydney, Marsh lays out an ideal day balanced between family time, personal time and productivity — and offers some stirring encouragement to make it happen.”

Nigel Marsh is a renowned performance coach who has worked with a great variety of businesses during his career, including some of the world’s top companies. In this TED talk, Nigel speaks from direct personal experience, giving his views on how to get the best out of business, life and those around you.

Enjoy

About this talk: “In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to just ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes to getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones.”

Dropbox is a Web-based file hosting service operated by Dropbox, Inc. that uses cloud computing to enable users to store and share files and folders online using file synchronization. The tool has great potential: No more fumbling for lost or damaged storage devices and always up to date with the latest file versions. Alternatives: Zumo or SugarSync.

“…your files follow you to whichever device you happen to be working on.”

Maintaining and growing a steady stream of clients and job leads is without a doubt the most important aspect of an online worker’s career. Andrew Neitlich, co-author of Guerrilla Marketing for a Bulletproof Career, shares his tips on growing your stream of clients and jobs.

“One of the most important ways to succeed as a freelancer is to understand and get into the opportunity flow…”

Human resources usually describes the individuals who comprise the workforce of an organization; often its most valuable asset. Therefore, the strategies and policies relating to the management of individuals are very important factors for most businesses.

Apparently, human resource professionals are still hesitant and critical when it comes to anything technology related, including applicant recruitment and employee selection through social media. However, social medias’ popularity and possibilities have forced H&R professionals to give the medium a second thought.

This post on mashable discusses the issue and looks at how social media is affecting the human resources field.

What are your experiences?

According to a new survey by projektwerk’s U.S. counterpart Elance, more people are choosing to live the life of a freelancer, as opposed to traditional employment. Elance sampled more than 700 freelancers. The survey revealed that 70% are happier working independently than when they were full-time employees. Also, the report found many more reasons, other than for example economic downturns, driving professionals to start a freelance career. Read the full post on NYTimes.

Do you have specific reasons for freelancing? If so, please share them with us.

Nowadays, the term “workspace” does not merely relate to a physical location but has to be stretched to include virtual workspaces as well. Thanks to many online collaboration solutions, finding the right workspace for your business has become a challenging task. Provided an internet connection and a tiny budget, online collaborations can be just as productive as working together in traditional office settings.

This great post by mashable discusses different office strategies and provides some advice on choosing the right workspace…

Coworking is increasingly becoming a major issue. Therefore projektwerk has created a summary of coworking spaces in Germany. Soon there will be a more detailed representation of individual spaces, including specific offers for projektwerk users.

the list can be found here.

not surprisingly, the u.s. is still far ahead of germany and the rest of the world in terms of entrepreneurship. this interesting chart, produced by grasshopper, compares the u.s. portion of gdp (gross domestic product) that comes from entrepreneurship against that of major european countries.

entrepreneural activity in the u.s. (as a percentage of gdp) lies at 11.3%, compared to 6.3% in germany for example. also worth mentioning is how “would-be” entrepreneurs perceive starting a new business in the current economy: according to the data provided, entrepreneurs in the u.s. feel far more optimistic about starting a new business in the near future and foster much less fear of failure.

in addition, the graphic depicts the percentage of enterprises by size, native vs. foreign-born self-employed and the overall difficulty entrepreneurs face when starting a new business.

image by theeducatedentrepreneur.com

check out the full size infographic here.

as the nytimes reports, the workforce is becoming increasingly comfortable with the changing nature of work as it is…”becoming more temporary and project-based, with workers increasingly functioning as free agents and no longer being governed by traditional long-term employer-employee relationships…”. it’s a development that first began in the 90′s but recently gained some momentum.