A web agency weblog

Update: My new book is already available for purchase. Get your copy of Telework People now.

I’ve started working in a book about teleworking. I already told some friends and got many nice messages from all over the world offering help with feedback and translations, thank you all! It will be a really challenging project, a global book, and I’m sure it will be fun.

I would like to ask for your help; I’d like to know a little more about your teleworking experiences. I am including my own and a basic list of questions that you could use as guidelines.

Plese feel free to let the Shakespeare in you go wild and tell us all of what you think is relevant about your life as a teleworker.

The Questions

• When did you start teleworking?
• Why did you start teleworking?
• What do you do? Tell us a little about your work
• Was it hard?
• What were your first steps?
• What do your friends, family and co-workers think about you as a teleworker?
• What do you think is the best part of teleworking?
• Do you miss the human “physical” contact?
• Where are you going? What are your future plans as a teleworker?
• Where do you think the world is going? (this is kind of hard to tell but I’m just curious)

My Experiences As A Teleworker

I’ve been connected since the middle 80’s, of course we didn’t have the Internet, as we know it today, in those days. We had these things called BBS’s (bulletin board systems) and most of us were just having fun.

I met the real Internet on 1991 and logged in from my some old mainframe terminals at my university. I was just another user online until 1998, when I started thinking of Internet as a new way to run my business, that is the year I started teleworking.

I was an independent IT consultant for around 7 years. I specialized in networking and things were going ok, however, I got tired of spending all my time in my clients’s offices, struggling all the time with their computers and having lunch (if I could) at weird times.

I also wanted to keep learning new things and avoid getting stuck in the same routine. I just wanted to be at home. When my daughter was born, a few years later, I realized that becoming a teleworker was the correct choice. Now I can’t imagine my life spending 8, or more, hours a day away from my wife and daughter.

When I started teleworking I had a very different idea of what I wanted to do. My first attempt was trying to create a technology oriented content web site and make profits from selling advertisement space (silly me, I know). It was a really bad idea between 1998 and 1999, and living in Peru where Internet usage was very low at the time.

Then a friend of mine told me:

“You have learned a lot trying to make your own web site, why don’t you try making web sites for other people?”

I discarded the idea at once, no way!, I wanted to be the next Jeff Bezos and not just another guy making web sites, but when the lack of money became a bigger problem and somebody asked:

“Alexis, could you design our web site?”

“Hell yeah!” was an almost automatic response.

Now I’m a still a guy making web sites. I’ve learned a lot since 1998. Now I focus on helping people and small businesses in many countries to be successful online and I feel very proud of it.

In the beginning, however, the change was quite difficult, the first 6 months I still visited my old job clients because teleworking didn’t produce any income. At some time I had to decide that this had to be an all or nothing change, I referred most of my clients to my ex-partner and even stopped answering the phone for a while.

I spent almost one year learning some new skills until I got my first client. Those were difficult days but I survived.

When I decided to make the jump, and add the tele to my worker title, the first thing I did was creating a business plan, a very rough one. I had a list of services I wanted to sell and based on that I decided the new skills I had to learn. Being a self-taught person helped a lot with that.

Most of my friends think that working at home is great, however, they just laugh at me when I tell them that they can also do it. I think maybe they would miss their regular jobs.

My wife, who works with me now, and my daughter, are very happy to have daddy always at home, although they hate me sometimes for being a workaholic.

(Note to myself: wife looking at me right now, I have to stop writing this soon, it’s almost 10pm and we have a movie waiting for us)

I think other members in my family don’t have an idea of what I do. My mother just can’t understand it and my father in law doesn’t care as long as his daugther and granddaughter are fine. I could be mistaken but, anyway, I don’t think they will read this. (Just in case: hi mom!, love you too)

I think the best part of teleworking is being free. You can decide what you want to do with your life, if you are a self-employeed teleworker the better, and how to manage your time. Freedom is a human basic need.

Being at home with my family, watching my daugther growing, is another great thing of being a teleworker. I wouldn’t change that for anything.

I don’t really miss the human contact, now I talk with more people than I used to when I had a regular job. Thinking that a teleworker is a lonely and isolated person is a big misconception. Now we have so many tools available and we can be in touch with everybody at anytime.

I don’t know where I’m going. Of course I have goals and plans, and I like to be organized, but I don’t want to miss the fun of new challenges, like this book I’m currently writing. I want to know new places, learn new things, meet new people. I can be everywhere and do what I like from there. I just want to be free and have a good life, nothing fancy really, but that’s just me.

It’s even more difficult guessing where our world is going; I just know the world is changing and I’m sure, as Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge have reminded us many times, that the Singularity is coming, yes, in our lifetime, and the world as we know it (if the bad guys don’t get us all killed before) will be a very different place to live 30 years from now.

The Teleworking Book

Well, that’s it! Now you know a little more about me and have some ideas about what I’d like to know of most teleworkers.

I’m sure sharing our experiences will be a great excercise and I’ll try to get the best of it included in the book.

Share the fun, let us know about your life as a teleworker.