A Hitchhiker's Guide to
Internet Tips for working in global cyberspace By David Leonhardt"Where do you work?"
"Planet Earth."
Sound familiar? No? Well, it should. More and more people are working from home on Internet, and there are two things you should know about your office when you work on Internet.
First, your office will be very, very small and very, very lonely, as I chronicled in my hermit trilogy.
Second, your office will be very, very big and full of many, many people from every corner of planet, mostly trying to sell things to each other. That is because when you work from home, Planet Earth is your office and theirs.
For instance, would you believe that a man on Internet in Ukraine delivers local weather forecast in Sydney to Chicago? So much for sticking your head out window.
I have a client in UK who sells machine parts through his ball bearings website to every country in world ... except UK, of course. Doesn't that make local hardware store redundant?.
With so many clients crowding into my office, I could use some stress relief tips around now.
Office Politics in Global Office
My clients live on almost every continent, and only thing that occasionally gets in way of seamless communication are time-zone differences. (If Columbus would have minded his own business, we wouldn't face even that challenge!)
What's more, my clients are not always English-speaking, and neither are all of my clients' websites. Can you say netzwerküberwachung und netzwerk überwachung? I do search engine optimization in four languages - English, French, Spanish and German - which tells you something about global office in which some of my clients sit.
