The woman standing next to me on the platform finished checking her email, and I smiled knowingly. It was my afternoon off, all my clients knew it, but I still felt compelled to acknowledge a couple of messages myself.

She…

I thought the great thing about workshifting is that you don’t have to sit in an office all day. You can grab your computer-tablet-Smartphone and get to work at your favorite coffee shop, or in the park, on an airplane,…

I’m no neat freak, but every now and then I am compelled to do something about all the paper in my “paperless” office.
Some stuff is easy to get rid of. During the great office purge of 2009, I threw…

The only problem with short commutes is not having one.

My commute is 10 feet. I get up, wander into my office, reach down and hit the “Start Me Up” button on my desktop.

I do this daily, except for…

You know those days when you’re hopelessly unproductive?

How do you respond? Come on. Tell the truth. Do you agonize over the research project all day hoping a “eureka” moment will break through? Do you sit there shuffling papers, reading,…

Sorry Basecamp. Stay away QuickBooks. No thanks, Harvest, because I’m a paper girl at heart. Maybe it’s my roots with my dad’s old college typewriter, the non-electric one in which you had to pound the keys one by one so…

I’m a pacing queen. Not of hallways and offices, but of miles on my feet at a steady, predictable clip that can stretch for hours. I’m a believer in watches, and chrono settings, and perfectly spaced intervals of pathway.

Then…

Workshifters are an independent lot. We have to be, since we’re writing the rules for the way we work–and likely the way more and more people will work in the future. Yet lots of people don’t get it, don’t get…

Did you know that hospitals have great wifi?

Granted, a hospital is a weird place to workshift. But it can be done. Of course, I don’t recommend a steady dose of it, because it tends to mean that you or…

Could you work in an office? Not your office, but the kind that requires you to be somewhere else from 9 to 5. With people tracking your comings and goings, your lunch breaks, and how often you appear to be…

I’ve had a funky Target-designed surge protector in my living room for a while. It’s cute, it’s functional, and it gives me a safe place to plug in a laptop. But, until the other day, it was located in exactly…

How do you start your workshifting day?

I’ve been asked a lot of questions over the years about working from home, being my own boss, finding the time or the discipline to do everything, and so forth. But it took…

The great thing about being a workshifter is that I’m unencumbered by the formal trappings of the corporate office. Well, I don’t actually have a corporate office, but you get the idea.

The downside, of course, is that I don’t…

Before my flight to Chicago took off the other day, the woman in 3C was talking business on her mobile. She was suggesting that her caller contact John Doe, who was a good employee but a tad indiscreet. And to…

What is the biggest myth about workshifting?

I posed this question to my LinkedIn network recently, and got some familiar answers and a couple responses that just might surprise you.

Myth #1: Workshifters Are Less Productive Than Office Workers

Several…

Emergent Research is studying the impact of co-working on Americans, including independent consultants, small business owners, and other workshifters. As part of that research, they’ve identified over 250 co-working spaces in the United States. The requirements for the spaces included…

As a child, I loved Paris-Charles de Gaulle for its space age bubble with the escalators going in all directions. It was avant garde with a touch of Star Trek before I knew about Star Trek. And it belonged to…

I’ve been workshifting for a long time. I started out with pens and paper and dimes for the payphone – long before e-mail was ordinary and mobile phones were ubiquitous. I embraced technology at every step, and my business life is…

I came across this thought-provoking article on BNET the other day about the impact of gender on how men’s brains and women’s brains function–and the impact this has on how we work. The article cites Sally Helgesen, co-author of The…