There are a lot of ways one could write this piece: a list of principles (something of a penchant of mine), a set of examples (I started to) or, in this case, a history of what I’ve worked up to. I selected the latter, because one of the key points is that, for most of us, it will be a gradual transition rather than an instantly comprehensive one. And perhaps it will be more sustainable because of that. Our commitment needn’t be less and needn’t waver, because it is implemented over time.

Personally, I started with animal cruelty. Right there, I’ve lost some of you. Our cultural obsession with meat borders on the pathological. Most people haven’t considered the emotional conditions its constant consumption produces, and the addictive capacity of those conditions. And if we can’t consider the consumables we take into our own bodies, what basis do we have for considering external consumables? I started with chicken. I won’t go into detail about the ethics of poultry production; this information is already well known and certainly readily available. And you don’t have to go to PETA to get it. They’re just making book and bank off of well-known realities.

In fact, one of the reasons this is such a candidate for a starting place is what I call the sausage principle. We prefer not to think about what goes into it, where it comes from, or what it takes to produce it. We prefer not to think about the source of the stimulation we receive from it. We want the good feeling apart from facts or their aesthetic significance, much less their ethical significance. But that’s just the point, whether we’re talking about boycotting or ethical use of wealth - if we prefer not to consider the source, we’re denying ethics at the outset - we’re saying our pleasures our immune to ethical considerations - and that, frankly, separates us in such a way that I think (if that’s you) you’re reading the wrong blog. I knowI say that a l ot, but work is about meaning, and meaning is partly about ethics.

So I stopped eating chicken, mostly, and switched to cage-free eggs. I’d like to eat free-range, which is better.

What next?

We quit using Walmart. I know that’s part of the boycotting post, but that was huge. It was a matter of principle. They’re ubiquitous, and families will sometimes spend 80% of their disposable income there. I reduced us from 50% to 1%.

Just being exposed to shopping at other places opened up other avenues of ethical purchasing for us. Now, at Target, and even at Crest, we’re seeing organic cow’s milk, for instance, which we promptly switched to, along with soymilk.

Next I cut MSG from our diets. I cut out chemical based foods almost altogether. That was huge. I don’t like that it makes you stupid, that’s for sure. But I also don’t like it out of principle. It isn’t food - it’s simulated food and addictive drugs and neurostimulators. We started using organic broth, cereal, etc. (got them at Buy for Less), and we’d read ingredient labels.

That’s the thing. Ethics and health are like piety - they involve taking little pains. They involve some degree of precision. They involve attention, thought, and integrity. Again, if you’re not interested in that, I’ve not much to say to you about work, either.

We switched to a more balanced diet overall - more vegetables, smaller portions of meat, when we have meat (which is not at every meal), and excellent soy products and other non-meat sources of protein are part of our diet (like hummus and tofu - which we were already eating - and Boca Burgers). It’s so inexpensive to steam some vegetables, oor put together a healthy gourmet meal with a few minutes and a few ingredients that, after a while, that’s just how we live now. It’s the norm for us.

We switched to fair trade tea and coffee. Sure, we try to avoid sweat shop goods - but thats on the negative side. We also try to buy products that keep people out of near-slavery. Fair trade is a non-brainer. And frankly, we get better coffee and tea because of it. It’s less than Starbucks prices, too.

We went to toothpaste (Tom’s) that isn’t tested on animals. Incidentally, they don’t brush their teeth with it - the testing is cruel. Tom’s toothpase is excellent, by the way, comes in multi-care and tartar control varieties, and we get ours at Target or Walgreens.

We went to organic deodorant, too. Jason tea tree oil deodorant. The stuff is excellent. No aluminum to cause brain problems, no parafins (it doesn’t crumble, and it’s not chalky and visible under your arm), and it works better than anything else at it’s primary job. Tom’s deodorant, frankly, didn’t do the trick. Jason is odorless and doesn’t rely on covering up smells with other strong smells, like a lot of them, or drying you out completely like the heavy chemicals do. I have extremely sensitive skin, and I can use Jason daily. Again, we get it at Target.

This is another point about Walmart. You just won’t find this kind of stuff there, so changing what you buy really does require changing where you buy. If you’re only exposed to products that are willing to cut their margins and play Walmart’s game, you’re going to use mostly the usual crap.

I’ve already talked about the shift to a smaller fuel-efficient car. We’re working on saving utility use, too.

The key point I’m always learning about this stuff is that it involves thinking, again, about where everything comes from - what it takes to put it in your hands - the chain of events from creation to delivery. In that sense, you could say it’s a Christian undertaking - Christianity is partly about creation and redemption, origin and ethics.

It’s also a classic capitalist undertaking. Adam Smith, in Wealth of Nations, the capitalist bible, advance the labor theory of value (something immediately poo-pooed in university, and forgotten by those who claim to follow his precepts). The labor theory of value asserts that the value of a thing is the labor it takes to produce it. In other words the blood, sweat, and tears - the very lives of people - spent in time and energy - spent in the conditions necessary - to produce an item and deliver it into your hands. When you pay for an item, you’re paying for a life, in degrees and increments, and subsidizing a kind of existence. You’re purchasing the conditions under which something is created and delivered. The remaining question is whether that act on your part is subject to ethics at all. And you know what I’d say about that.

It’s extra effort, it’s extra time, thinking about these things, considering your purchases. I could make the argument, quite successfully that you’ll recoup all or most of that, perhaps more than once over. I could point out that if you’re willing to do it for prices, why not other reasons? Why not multi-task? Why not look at the total picture, not price alone - the latter is bad economics. I’ll bet I pay less for my $6 deodorant than you pay for your $2 deodorant - but that’s another conversation. The point is that I’m not denying it takes effort or thought - I’m saying it’s worth your effort and your thought. I’m saying that ethics is, that meaning is, that people are, and that you are - and the kind of person you want to be and the kind of life you want to live. If not, what the hell are you reading this for? Go get an issue of Maxim and think no farther.

I know I can sound preachy - at least in a culture that’s saturated with “oughts”, and bombarded by nihilism at the same time (”there is no ought, there’s only is”) But I really can’t identify with people who want to make money for no point and no thought other than comfort. I don’t identify with the leisure class, or the aspiration to join it. If we’re talking about work, therefore, and we’re colleagues at all, we’re talking about a much broader spectrum of life.

So, I’m not going to justify this post this time by appealing to a principle of work. I could, I can, but I also already have, a number of times. You either get it by now, or you don’t. I’m not trying to convert anyone. My audience is my peers. You know who you are. You know why you work and what you think about. And I feel you out there, even as I listen to you when you talk back to me. A lot of you are my clients.

So this has been a post about work, about the lives it produces, and about its point and purpose. It has its own flavour. It’s my version, if you will. This is how we do it. Your way may be better. But I think it’s a reasonable chip off the prototype. If you agree, purchase accordingly.

Frankly, I feel sorry for anyone who finds work to be a simple matter of math. I want to work at things that possess me with intriguing problems and enticing challenges. If it was just about getting paid, I’d cave to the highest bidder, right? But when it’s everything I have, when I’ve spent all the sweat I can muster, the last thing on my mind is “Oh well I was adequately compensated.”

Adequately compensated? Nothing can compensate for the most productive hours of the best years of your life. They can’t be purchased with anything of like value - they’re invaluable - rather they are meant to purchase something else - meaning. If all that expenditure means is that transitory little check in the bank, well ho hum I might as well sell my tail on some sidewalk in Vegas, because it sure would be less hassle, not to mention more lucrative. That’s right, I’ve still got it. So let’s not play nihilistic little mind games - payroll is the basic expense reimbursement for living in such a way that you’re available to dedicate your mind at all. It’s not the point, any more than gasoline is the point of an automobile.

Work is about meaning, and people that talk about the check being everything don’t believe anything means anything. Mercenary nihilists - that’s what they are. They wouldn’t know the work that amounts to heroism, much less genius, or its value, if it bit them. At times, I work for the passion of it, and at times I work for my family, but I’ll be damned if I work like I work for a few extra digits. I want the digits, but I want everything else, too.

I want the awe, the applause, the sympathy, or whatever else goes to heroes - not for its own sake, but because it’s appropriate whenever I’m that freaking amazing. When I do in a few days what would normally take three people a week, and I can barely feel my brain as I fall down to sleep, I’m a freaking monster and, while I don’t necessarily need everyone else to realize it all the time (I’m a man; I’m used to people not realizing it), I’m certainly not going to lose sight of it. If not applause, then aplomb.

“You got a check - that’s all that matters” is just the flipside of “You got my time, that’s all that matters”. Saying it’s just about cash is the same as me saying it’s just about punching the clock. Ever been with a woman who wasn’t feeling anything? Yeah, work without meaning, work without desire, work without more than a check, is just like that. It’s pretty far from amazing. Again, I want the awe…

On top of that, 2hrs may not be enough, given the lines in poorer neighborhoods (like the lines at the post office, they’re longer the farther you get from the cul de sac). And again, while a salaried worker or a desk worker may be able to be flexible, make up the time, or whatever, a poor hourly worker may have to leave the lines without voting just to get back to work on time, or risk getting written up or fired.

Votes, like so much else, belong to the everyone but the poor.

Personally, I don’t vote. I’m not interested in US politics, except as an external, cultural phenomenon. But depriving the poor of a vote, while the middle class, with “nicer” jobs or “Joe the plumber” self-employment can do their civic duty, is obscene. If you’re an employer, however small, and you’re thinking like Mr. “Can’t afford it”, I’ll say this to you: If you’ve got any ethical and moral sense - hell, if you’re worried about them faking the time, and you’ve got any sense - you’ll drive your people to the polls if they want to go.

It’s fundamentally contrary to the American legal and political system, and to ethics and morality, to deprive the poor of a vote in this society, and businesses that reap the rewards of existing in it should be shamed, boycotted, spat upon, and driven out, who do not provide adequate and reasonable means to ensure all their employees may vote.

If they really don’t want to vote, our system provides for that too. More power to them. But if they do, and you’re holding them back, you’ve blasphemed against the thing from which you draw your existence and your own livelihood, and may it turn on you and devour you accordingly.

The poor are one of the chief reasons, ends, and meanings of work. To relieve, uphold, and sustain the poor is the singular priviledge and responsibility of those who receive the blessings of prosperity. This is, perhaps, never more clearly played out than on election day on which, at least ostensibly, the poor are allowed to determine their destiny. Work ensures this, and work must defend and protect this.

That’s the ugliness of Windows. I used to run it *inside* of OS/2 in the old days. I ran Windows software through Wine in Linux. When the primary OS is something other than Windows, and Windows crashes, it doesn’t take you with it. It’s when you’re “in” Windows that the fun occurs.

So I’m going to Ubuntu Linux, and decided that, for similar reasons, I’d never gone back to DOS when I wanted to, and I’m tackling that at the same time. I now have a 500meg DOS partition flying high, and am about to add Windows XP-SP3 and then Ubuntu, and triple boot.

Technie Note: For anyone else who tries this: if you get a message in DOS or DOS FDISK: “no fixed disks present” or else DOS just won’t boot, not even off the floppy - save yourself some time: DOS won’t run if there’s a logical NTFS partition (NTFS in an extended partition) anywhere on any connected hard drive. Turn them into primaries, like I did, or convert them all to FAT32. I spent an entire day figuring this out.

LESSON 1: BLOAT IS BIGGER BUT WILL ALWAYS BE OUTNUMBERED. Microsoft decides to abandon Vista and yield a “lightweight” (yeah, right) Windows 7 that’s runs in browsers and uses online resources. Sound familiar? Yep - Windows isn’t losing to Macintosh, it’s losing to Google. Not since Cornwallis tried to surrender to the French instead of Washington… But seriously, Mac (and Ubuntu, the Linux whose time has come, for that matter) are kicking Microsoft’s ass for the Operating System, Firefox (and Google’s Chrome, and Opera are jointly) kicking its ass for the web browser, and Google is single-handly kicking its ass for the Office suite (because Google never bought into Microsoft’s definition of a document). It’s a three way beat down of epic proportions, with the big beast being pulled down on all sides. If you try to own and dictate a function too entirely, someone will ask your clients what they really want, and feel free to build it for them.

LESSON 2: FAKING IT CAN’T LAST FOREVER. We just don’t need Microsoft for an OS, a browser, or an office suite. They never did build solid ones, secure ones, stable ones, or sensible ones. From the beginning, when they cannibalized IBM’s PC DOS and hammed it into MS DOS, we knew it was going to get ugly. Windows just never made it. 3.1 was a joke - most of us returned to the command line. 95 and 98 were more programs than an Operating System (Amiga made more sense) - Windows became little more than a gaming platform for some people, which is a prophetic insult that Microsoft never quite grasped. The OS was unsatisfying as much else - most people ran one program at a time (might as well be the DOS versions) and didn’t even attempt the multi-tasking capabilities. 2000 was decent, if you’d put up with a lot of broken promises. XP as a repackaged 2000 (cartoonish like Mac) and more intrusive (phoning home) showed they still weren’t thinking in Redmond - they tried to shove the same stuff down our throats that pissed us off when Netscape sold out (required online profile), giving Firefox the lead. Then Vista confirmed that no one important is listening anymore, except the remaining cronies in the hardware business who shlep out Bill’s latest like doctors owned by the Pharmaceudical industry. The only people who haven’t grown tired of it are the next generation of gamers who never look up from their monitors, and install what they’re told, and the new users who buy their stuff preinstalled and don’t know where it comes from.

Mohave was the ultimate end-game of repackaging - repackaging it all as pure marketing. It was the consummate expression of the Microsoft mind. And it ended up punking itself. You can’t actually sell bullshit, if it’s clearly labeled as bullshit, even if you call it misunderstood. In the end, Microsoft, unless they change culturally, is doomed. And no one is really showing up for Scrooge’s funeral. He gave us the finger one too many times.

LESSON 3: STOP AND SMELL THE MARKET SOMETIMES. At the same time, the Christian Science Monitor is pissing off newspapers everywhere by killing their daily, and switching it to online-only. Brilliant! Hailed by bloggers, everywhere - in other words, by those who get it - who get what media is and will be tomorrow. The industry is blathering on about how newspapers will never die, because there’s too much advertising money to be made. Sound like Microsoft? Yep - same top down nonsense. “If we tell people they should buy it, they’ll buy it.” Yeah, for a while. CSM realized the world has already changed.

LESSON 4: SAY NO TO THE POWERFUL AND WIN EVERYONE ELSE. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are collaborating on a global code of conduct to resist governments’ broad requests (not specific requests) for information that generally violates privacy. Yahoo had previously sold out Chinese dissidents to their government. Microsoft is Microsoft. And Google, who gave the finger to the Chinese while Yahoo dropped trou, nonetheless agrees to filter search results in China (which isn’t the same thing, really, if you realize that the alternative is no search results at all). I don’t think these belong in bed together, but after Yahoo tried to sell itself to anyone and everyone, and Microsoft’s ongoing stream of Vista/Mohave/whatever fiascos… it seems like Google is leading the way in ethics too. “Dont be evil” is their company motto. The others are emboldened by the courage of a company that actually thought to say ‘no’.

LESSON 5: RISE TO THE GOOD AND DIVIDE (and change) THE WORLD. Skype sold out its Chinese users, by the way, allowing sessions to be logged by a Chinese corporation. Deeply disappointing. AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint Nextel, of the “won immunity because we got caught helping the Bush-Rove-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration spy on you” are not signed on. That would be a bit like Madonna doing a chastity tour, anyway. But the divide really underscores a key difference between companies that are bigger than government, because their ethics are big, and companies that will always be the tools and pawns of government, and therefore never transcend anything. Google matters, in a world-changing way. Sprint? That opportunity has been lost.

LESSON 6: BUY SOMETHING NO ONE ELSE THOUGHT TO BUY. Lastly, Google struck an agreement to satisfy authors financially so that crazy gazillions of books can be not only available, but especially preserved and memorialized online (Google has specialized in scanning countless out-of-print books and now has a model for all the rest of them, shortly to be emulated by major bookselling chains). Google’s also (from past news) looking at buying the old cell bands from Congress - massive wireless broadband channels. The future is Google. Google gets it.

Notice how all these things are vaguely or directly related. And when things are related, rules are present. Principles. Protocols. Meaning. The difference between some companies and others is simply that some seek meaning and others don’t.

References:

Windows 7

Google Book Settlement

CSM drops daily for the net

Tech companies share ethical bed

Phone calls: how much time can you spend on the phone and still be productive? The phone call is still the standard for personalized contact, but so is calling people Mister and Ma’am and using their last name. In other words, its a vestige of perception from a previous era that is already past. The phone is the bow tie and the cuff link of the near future.

Sure, for people willing to pay premium rates for full service, the phone is a good primary tool. For a certain rate, for that matter, you can fly to them and set up shop on-site. It’s a higher rate, these days. But time is also a premium commodity - especially time in which you must focus on one thing and do little else - synchronous time - on-demand time. It’s time that’s worth three times your normal rate, because it’s time in which you can’t multi-task, or you can only multi-task for one client at a time. It’s exclusive time.

Sure, you can postpone synchronous communication by sending clients to an answering service or voice mail, but it’s still premium time  you’re promising, even if you return the calls after the prime time of your work day (and what do you do if your work day never ends?). Quite simply, wherever you move it around on the plate, the more time you spend on the phone, the less time you can be fully productive, and the more you have to charge each client. It’s not “included” in the sense of being “free”, it’s not just the cost of doing business - it’s the business cost you pass on to the client, because 10hrs/week of phone time is 10 more hours you have to work to make up for being exclusively available. Phone time is to the independent professional what meetings are to the denizens of corporate cubicles. The more meetings, the more you stay late. Why do you think so many of those folk are exempt (salaried)? Minimizing phone time, today, is a key aspect of staying profitable (or even staying in business).

Occasionally, we hear “I don’t do business w. people I can’t get on the phone when I want them”, and some of us have decided that this means that client goes to the other guy, who will charge them $750 for a $350 service and include all those reassuring phone conversations, and be available for the friendly hand-holding. How can we do that?

There comes a time to decide how many hours you really want to work, what rates you want to charge, what demographic you want to reach, and to limit your clientelle accordingly, effectively deciding what kind of business you want to run. The author of “The 4-Hour Work Week” knows this. Many of us are finding that the old “sky’s the limit” pattern of endless growth doesn’t fit with the lifestyle of meaningful work we’re constructing, nor into how work fits meaningfully into our lives as a whole. Frankly, I couldn’t afford to work at the rates I do for people who need it as much as do some of my clients, if I was following the endless growth pattern. I’d have to send them to someone who does less for them and charges more money, if I didn’t stay off the damned phone as much as I do. And personally, I’d rather do fewer jobs for people who get it and make it go smoothly, than twice as many jobs for clients who constantly need synchronous attention.

Instant Messenger: Do you really want to be on-call every moment you’re working online? Then add your short-term clients as IM “buddies”. It’s one thing if you’re doing a 10-month contract gig. It’s another fi you’re doing a 2-week job for them. Might as well give out a pager number and carry a beeper. Sure you can go unavailable all the time, but what’s the point of that - the joy of disappointment? That’s like turning on those instant “chat with me” widgets on your web site and then never being around to chat.

E-mail: E-mail is beautiful. You address it when you can, so it lets you integrate communications as one task in a multi-tasking environment. In fact, unlike the phone, it’s ideally suited to a multi-job, multi-contract environment. Sure, you can get 10 phone lines, but how many geniuses can you take away from their work to put on the phone? With e-mail, you have time to think through your answers, time to think of better answers and better solutions, or alternate possibilities. And it’s documented. If you’re really sharp, you develop some canned paragraphs you can personalize to explain common issues. For instance, if someone asks about the importance of blogging - whether it’s really necessary to marketing, I can reach out for the same paragraph I used the last time that was asked.

Sometimes, you hear “I’m just really a phone kind of guy.” If that’s your client talking, that’s perfectly OK, he can be a phone call kind of guy. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a phone-driven kind of business. I tend to respond to voice mails with e-mails. If I just get a “call me asap”, with no information on why, I’m even less impressed - you have to ask yourself, do you really want to be THAT available? I usually email an “I’m working on something at the moment. What’ up?” It’s always true, and it makes two points at once: 1.) I’m working all the time and, in order to stay working, I have to stay off the phone. 2.) I am available, I’m not unreachable, I just need to evaluate priorities - what’s your need? The client who treats every observation, thought, idea, or need as a top-priority, immediate need, is asking for a premium service. You’ve got to bill for it accordingly, or you’ve got to clarify how much consultation the job includes, and how much of that is phone time.

If you’re primary clientelle is welders who are buying welding gloves, I can understand the need for phone time, but I also understand (in that case) that you can put any reasonably polite and intelligent person on the phone to answer it for you. If, however, you’re offering a technology product or service, you need the brains bent over the circuit boards or the keyboards, and you don’t want someone who isn’t as well-educated, truly-informed, or deeply-involved fielding client queries. If you’re dealing with technology, your clients need to get used to e-mail. Yes, big companies provide highly-trained call-center support teams and, if you’re a big company, that makes sense. You also bill for that as a support contract, or built it, for a certain amount of time, into the premium price of your product or service. And if clients want to go to a big company, and pay those prices, let them; if you don’t have something going that big companies can’t easily duplicate (a niche, a specific clientelle, an added value service, etc.), you’re probably in the wrong business, or you won’t be in business long.  For most of us, though, when it’s based on high-expertise, electronic deliverables (forms, documents, web sites, etc.), we should be communicating asynchronously through e-mail.

Webinars: These are great, under the right conditions. If you’re getting paid, that’s the first thing - it gives you a fixed broadcast time for a fixed fee, if you manage it well. If you control and provide the agenda, and avoid mission-creep (On a web site training session: “can you help me figure out this one error message I get sometimes with my antivirus?”), and if you keep the agreed broadcast time, and bill for it even if your client no-shows. It’s tough, but again, do you want to get paid for your time? I guarantee they do. Time is the only true commodity. An appraiser does 10hrs of work and issues a report, and the client says “well the deal fell through, I don’t need it any more”. That doesn’t change the price of the work that was done. Get paid, or it’s not worth doing.

That’s another thing about phone time - it’s often un-billed time - it’s considered charity, gravy, icing, a freebie. But if you let it run like that, it can become half the job and, more significantly, half  your work. Is that what you want to do for a living? If not, then why would you do it for free? Your clients want to be paid by their clients, but even if their business model bleeds them through hemorrhaging synchronous contacts, that doesn’t mean yours should. The moment someone says you should consider it an act of charity, let them be the one that funds that charity. Then you’re golden. Make what you give away your own business.

Tweets: I use a tweet service (Twitter) to keep my clients informed on what I’m doing - it keeps them from wondering if I’m working on their project or not. Again, it keeps me off the phone. Go to one of my appropriate sites, check the appropriate page, and you know exactly what I’m doing at any moment. I use IM to update the tweet, so it’s synchronous (for me), but one-way. Neat, huh? If you’re not familiar, tweets are like mini-blog posts. Just a sentence that says what you’re doing. It updates a page and/or a feed or sidebar (or whatever else you want). People eye and follow tweets as they wish. My IM client is on all the time, but mostly I use it for this kind of asynchronous purpose rather than getting all kinds of incoming pop up windows when I’m trying to get a design job done.

Blogs: Don’t send answers, send links - it’ll make you a better blogger. I find a lot of the discussions I have with clients (by whatever means) inspire blog posts, and this means that when later clients ask the same questions, or raise the same issues, I can send a link to a well-articulated blog post, with links to more detail and resources, so I give a highly-effective answer and save us all time. And if I don’t have an appropriate post in one of my blogs, I can stop and write one, or I can do a blog search and grab a link from someone else who has. Of course, with blogging comes podcasting, and other blog-like technologies that accomplish similar things. In short, teach once, inform once, explain once, then go about growing your business, Use what I call the “ibid. method” (ibid. = “see previous answer”).

Extranets: Having an online shared repository for document sharing, project tracking, contacts, etc. can be great if the project really needs it (e.g. if the project involves more than a half dozen people). Or it can be your worst nightmare. Not every job should be a forum, and upload management environment, and a whole separate web site. Build these carefully, only when you really need them (not because they’re cool), and only build them to suit the type of team you’re running. Extranets have the power to reshape group communications, so use them carefully, or they’ll undo the professionalism you’ve built up. That said, in the right contexts, it’s stupid to go to work without them. I’ve seen it both ways.

So what about the “I was raised to make a personal phone call” culture? Nothing wrong with that. That may be your business. Let’s just not pretend you don”t have to charge for it, that you don’t build that cost in and bill it back. And let’s not pretend it doesn’t consume a great deal of time. Anyone who returns all their own phone call requests is working ‘makeup’ hours or to compensate. Outsourcing is great to handle the burden, but you can’t outsource genius. So if both the work and the conversation require astute clarity, technical information, and creative input, you’re just not going to get as far with someone else doing it.

The time has come. Look around at the culture. Kids obsessed with their little boxes, having endless text-message conversations about nothing important. Parking lots and streets clogged with horrible drivers engrossed in meaningless cell chatter. People on the phone at the cashier in front of you, fishing for bills and holding up the line while broadcasting the “he said, and then she said”. Phones aren’t making us ladies and gentlemen; phones are making us inattentive, unproductive, and stupid.

By contrast, online ordering, electronic forms, and the host of communications technologies that these presume (blogs, tweets, e-mail) - which have nothing to do with phones or chatting - these are making us more effective, empowering us, and extending our reach.

We may have thought it was a big switch to go to cell and dump the land line. And it is nice to have a cell that has land-line quality - especially for those whose businesses aren’t tied to one location. The bigger switch is to let people graduate to the realization that it’s either offshore call centers or you’ve got to stop monopolizing the time of brain-workers who need to multi-task (and multi-job) to make a living. If you insist on exclusive time, you pay first class. High maintenance is high cost, and making your guy stop and focus on only one thing is the most expensive maintenance there is.

We’ve got to communicate the value of e-communication, specifically asynchronous communication, and remember that it’s our edge, too - with it, we can do more work in less time, cut costs and pass on savings, and reach more people - and, yes, necessarily be more selective, but also have the freedom to do so.

One illustration: how many times has a client asked for a consultation, agreed with you on a certain time, and left you with a cleared hour on your calendar, but then just wasn’t available? Was it good for either of you? Same thing happens with webinars, right? One more illustration: whats more effective in the long run - a phone walk-thru of the design build you’ve just done, or a PDF e-book with screenshots, arrows, circles,  links, and explanations of what you’ve done - something they can take with them and look at and think about and refer back to? Someone will say *both* - that’s fine - nothing wrong with that - just charge for both. An e-mail that actually happens - a communication that actually takes place - beats any “personal” (synchronous) communication that doesn’t actually come about.

FYI: I am available by phone, but it’s part of the timesheet. The first consultation is free - after that, especially for “what *else* do you think I need?” or “What should I do about x?”, I’m serving as a consultant, and we’re into billing. Whether they’re price-shopping or wanting the free-diagnostic so they can do it themselves, time is the one valuable thing I can either trade or take away from something else. It’s also a fixed commodity. There’s just so much of it, unlike creativity, so you’ve got to parcel it out to things that matter most (e.g. the work), to things that keep the business alive (40/60 phone calls to work can kill a lot of businesses), and to things that pay directly (indirect pay is all well and good, if you’re really getting paid - if it’s not being billed, do it differently).

Asynchronous Communication: The time has come to move on from the lazy ease and ubiquitous ringing of constant phone calls.

It no longer matters what kind of computer I have: - PC or Mac, because it’s the same internet. Once I’m online, it’s no longer relevant.

It no longer matters much how much processor speed and memory I have, along with the bigtime power supply to power it and numerous fans to keep it cool. What matters is connectivity. Bandwidth is everything. What matters is virtual.

For a portable computer, I just bought a netbook - in this case, the Asus Eee PC 900a: $300 with 1024×600 screen, 1.6ghz (a for)atom processor (ultra-low power requirement and ultra-low heat signature), 1gig ram, and linux instead of windows. Windows is dead - Windows has nothing left to say. It comes with a super-easy linux front end, but I switched it to the more powerful advanced mode and installed the KDE desktop. Now it’s a sophisticated little bugger with a regular less-toylike X-desktop.

No hard drive - it runs on solid-state SD, so it’s shock proof. It’s also consequently lighter than my alarm clock (the battery is the weight - the rest is like a paperback book). Thin LCD screen (e-paper is obviously the future) and ultralight keyboard.

At night, I reach over and finish up that last thing I was doing before I decide ‘enough is enough’ and go to sleep. In the car, I pull over at any hotspot and check e-mail and IM someone. This is truly internet you take anywhere. My focus will be to use it to work on e-books. I want my books (in progress) with me wherever I go.

This is not a computer you’d use to do your taxes or web design. It’s for blogging, e-book writing, e-mail, writing of any kind, and synchronous communication with clients. The parts of your work that are design-oriented, numerically intensive, etc. will require a full-sized monitor (I require three - productivity is precious.). You could connect one, of course (it provides for that), so you could make a docking station for it, but realistically, if you can afford one, you’ll want a dedicated workstation for the other stuff - a netbook that’s docked defeats the purpose - it’ll tend to never leave the dock. Still, the “box” version of the Asus EeePC is about the size of an external hard drive, and may suit for many purposes.

Backups: I no longer keep stuff one one kind of hardware (main hard drive) and back it up on other hardware (external hard drive). Instead, I keep it online, where I work on it, share it, publish it, collaborate on it, etc. The meaning of a document isn’t ownership, it’s interaction. And I back it up to an external USB drive. I remember the days of online backup services. Now I’m the backup service, and the originals are online.

Transferring Files: For fast file large file transfer between PCs not on the same network, I no longer burn DVD-ROMs, I either send it through an online service or spit it out to a flash drive in my pocket. They’re large-capacity, cheap, and fast, and USB ports are ubiquitous. Optical drives like CD and DVD hold no more appeal. I never use mine. The future is card media.

Printing: What the heck is printing? Well, I don’t have a GPS, so I’ll print directions from Google Maps, but that’s about it. I have a laser printer but, at this point, I’d rather just toss someone a $5 USB drive than buy ink and paper.

All of this and ubiquitous wi-fi conspires to do several things:

• Convince us, now more than ever, to have a paperless office. Scan all your old piles and organize, and any paper someone sends you. Shred it all. Scan and shred.
• Reduce the space and energy we need for the office. A stationary office can occupy a bedside table. Sure, I like my leather chairs, but I’m beginning to prefer to make the whole house the office - anywhere is the office.
• Make the office inherently portable, if with a slightly reduced productity (e.g. my 3 screens can’t go with me). You can toss the heart of your office, if you’re a webeneuer, onto your front seat, into your glove box, or tuck it in a pouch or book cover.
• Reduce the cost of a self-sustained office. $300 for an onramp, with free wifi nearly everywhere, and you’re working like a jetsetter.

And the result is…

Now, more than ever before, we can open a business in the closet of a hallway or at a borrowed table at your local hippy coffee shop (buy Fair Trade!), with little cost, little dependency, and high mobility. The life of work and liberty formerly available only to the operators of pushcarts or to jetsetters is widely available to the man with an idea and one paycheck.

This has already come to pass, even if we don’t realize it. This and more - increasingly, you can do whatever is in your mind, as technology becomes, not our superpower, but the vehicle of it. Whether there’s anything in people’s minds for it to extend, aid, and make prosper is another question entirely, and one each of us must answer.

Almost every culture has a large segment of people it has consigned, like the Moorlocks of HG Wells, to blind toil. Almost every society has attempted to convert a very large number of its own people or its neighbors into machines. Deep below the decks, slaving in the steam. Behind the wall in the cloth cutter’s shop, from dark to dark, in misery. Bought as children and given a tenuous thread to a painful existence in the stinking alleyways. Coopted as abandoned, widowed, or unprotected women and exploited, chained by the intentions of others to a vacant survival. Dashed hopes. Betrayed trusts. Pressed into jars like commodities. Nearly every culture still derives its prim face and proper makeup from the invisible suffering of slaves.

In my view, we owe. We owe even if we fancy ourselves ‘innocent’. We owe because the world is big, and somewhere someone is rinsing from a plate some sauce or gravy they will never afford to eat, and the act of that machine, that turning of their arms, over and over like a perpetual turbine, is holding up the system that allows me to sell anything to anyone. I owe. And so, i think, do you.

I also think we deny the meaning of what we do when we do not strive to secure meaning for the work of others. The indomitable humans in the chicken factories, isolated places of ofal and gore that we might complain to be down wind of - they are the tall people, and we become less human by the measure of our neglect, indifference, and unwillingness to discomfort ourselves to protect the meaning of work for all.

I’ve no one charity to point at; I’ve already pointed before. I’m willing to make unpopular statements and make them even less popular by not tying them to an easily dismissed passing of the offering plate. This is a blog about work. Not just about making a profit, tho that’s certainly a good idea. It’s a blog about work, and it is as much, for that, a blog about meaning. So I merely point out that the meaning of what we do is just theater, just a simulation, unless it compels and enables us to relieve the poor. If not for that, I have nothing else to say, and all work - yours and mine - is just arbitrary, inherently uninteresting, and frankly at best a form of narcissism and masturbation. Sure, our families eat, but what’s so important about that, really? - what does that really mean if families and their endeavours aren’t important in general?

One of the all-time, inviolable purposes of work is the same as one of the primary purposes of fasting: it enables us to have something to give to the poor.

What must it be like to look in the mirror? What do such people see in their mind’s eyes, thinking of themselves? They’ve denied the world of meaning, and are looking at life as a cold crypt. I can’t imagine.

I wouldn’t be able to stomach it. I watch people who get by or pad their bank accounts and their lifestyles by ripping other people off, and I just get sick to my stomach trying to imagine myself in their place. I’m partly in business for myself because it frees me to live ethically. It doesn’t make me superior - it just makes me more human in that way than I would be otherwise. It keeps me from getting sick.

The thing I learned from a friend that has consistently inspired my business endeavours is: if you can’t find the good in what you’re being asked to do, then do what you need to yourself, for yourself, make it yourself, start it yourself - begin with you, and only then can you move out from there to each person you can include who wants the same thing. But if it doesn’t begin with you, it won’t happen anywhere else in the world that you’ll ever find. “For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert.” To me, that translates into a business.

Sometimes I think that people who derisively apply the term “small” simply can’t see the landscape at all.

Two products I’ve mentioned here have been the Motofone F3 and the Mazda 3. So how are they holding up?

M3: There are four key things I love about my Mazda 3:

• leanness: I get over 30mpg in mixed driving, It takes up very little room, and it’s big on the inside.
• response: Stick shift, so it moves with me - no waiting for it - it keeps pace like a lover.
• air: The moon-roof is the ultimate accessory. It’s all about airflow. The brain needs O2, for thought, for recuperation, and for pleasure. With the windows down and the roof open, you get a lot of the pleasure of a convertible w/o the drawbacks. Driving home is a form of rejuvenation.
• black: Did I mention it’s black inside and out? I look good in this car. What’s more, I feel good in it. It’s a kind of portable, comfortable, womb of steel and leather with instruments and wheels.

F3: The Motophone F3 is still the best phone ever:

• leanness: It’s super thin, super light, and does only what I need - one key control, and it’s $40 free and clear - no dotted line.
• response: It’s got the loudest ring (but gentle at first), the loudest volume, the best reception, clearest screen in direct light (it’s e-paper), and super-long battery life. It’s also ultra-portable (slam in a sim card and go). Meters (battery & reception) are external and always on. Suitable for your primary phone. It doesn’t do music and photos, but neither does a landline, and this goes anywhere. Goes great with a Mazda3.
• black: Seems like a fine suit. It’s equipment, not a toy.

That’s it. Both of the above products are going strong. Excellent purchases, and I recommend them highly.