Pushing the envelope of completely losing yourself to your work

This article originally appeared on Dell’s Digital Nomads site.

Are you coming to dinner?” my wife asks after a long day for both of us.  Do I power down and hope to finish writing my report after she’s asleep and risk losing myself to sleep? Or, do I ask for another 30 minutes to complete my work, making her and the rest of the family finish up without me?  As a digital nomad, this tradeoff — the blurring of the boundary between where work ends and the rest of life begins — is one that needs to be continously addressed to ensure productivity remains high.

Facetime in traditional work settings

I define “facetime” as the unproductive time spent in the office trying to present oneself as being productive.  Whether working on Wall Street or in a software startup, much of traditional business is spent demonstrating one’s commitment to his job and his firm.  Many times, this committment is measured in hours spent at the office, regardless of actual production.

Productivity — real productivity — is no longer being held up to paradigm of the iron-man employee, working close to 60+ hours a week in the face of a personal life in shambles.  Hours spent at the office is no longer indicative of the real contribution an employee provides to the entreprise.  Just check out how much time is spent at work on non-work, non-productive activities.

Redefining productivity

I propose we define productivity in the post-facetime, digital nomad world as such:

Productivity = amount of completed work + impetus to complete future work

Modern businesses recognize that knowledge workers work best when stimulated by their work balanced with produtive lives outside of work (family, community, whatever).

Digital nomads have the best of both worlds.  No longer tethered to our desks, we face the ultimate challenge of defining our work and life spaces completely under our control.  While we’ve moved beyond the time-honored facetime required to progress in traditional business settings, though, we’re faced with the prospect of completely losing ourselves to our work.  If our home is our office, our struggle is working too much, not too little, as the lines between work and life are blurred.

How to avoid burnout on the work front

When facing a work day that has no beginning or end, a common digital nomad maladay is burnout.  Here are a few tips gleaned from web workers to stay fresh and productive.

• create a work schedule: without one, workers tend to work all day.  By scheduling work time and personal time into a hectic day, digital nomads maintain healthy boundaries.

• taking vacation time: digital nomads tend to thrive on worker hard and worker long hours.  There has to be some way to completely (or close to it) unplug.  Downtime is necessary for future productivity.

• convene team/group meetings: getting together in person with other team members helps to bring untethered workers back from work nevernever land.  It helps centers workers and put work into a social context.

• Google workers can appropriate some of their work time to work on projects that interest them personally.  Nomads should learn from the great GOOG.

How to avoid sacrificing your personal life on the altar of digital nomadism

While much ink is spilled over keeping productive on the work front, if we believe that a balanced life brings more productivity for the mobile worker, keeping a healthy personal life is just as important.

• all the previous points above help create delineation between work and life

• finding hobbies unrelated to work: many digital nomads take to hobbies that are quai-related to their day jobs, like blogging or podcasting.  While these pursuits are certainly admirable and fun, they are too contextually related to one’s day job to perform separation and recharge.

• exercise: you can’t work when you’re profusely sweating and breathing heavily.

• have kids (lots of ’em): kids keep you young.  kids keep you (extremely) busy.  Kids also help keep you centered and focused on what’s really important.

Bringing it all together

Balance is key.  Digital nomads are prone to sacrifice future productivity for current work.  Balancing work and life is essential in finding a groove for workers on the go.  Being able to define our working lives around our personal lives is a tremendous opportunity and challenge, but we really can have our cake and eat it too.  We just need to make sure we can pull ourselves away from work to really be able to enjoy it.

TheStreet.com and what it means for Investing 2.0

Good summary over at SeekingAlpha on TheStreet.com’s quarterly earnings.  The author’s main takeaway:

monetization of ads getting tougher as ad model struggle: This issue is facing every firm reliant on ads for revenues.  TheStreet.com’s CFO Eric Ashman said, “it is safe to say that we have very little visibility into online ad spend for the rest of the year or for 2009.” While online has held up better than offline, I think this is an important issue.  I’ve said before that firms like SeekingAlpha have created new content models but not revenue models.  Constrained by pageview growth and CPMs, these firms are no different from the predecessors in terms of generating advertising revenues.

TheStreet has pursued a strategy away from paid subscription growth to more ad support and the beginnings of a lead generation strategy.  Whether this works or not, I think the main issue is what innovation leading Finance 2.0 firms are going to market with that really pairs revenue recognition with the value of the service that these firms provide.  The closer the revenue recognition is to the actual consumption of the service, the more powerful model.

I don’t claim to know what this looks like.  Is it more a transactional model like Covestor and other expert community firms are headed towards which essentially turns these sites into trading platforms?  Maybe.  Is it more targeted IR opportunities for public firms looking to reach an ever-focused group of individuals?  Dunno.  Is it lead generation for financial advisors?  Could be.  I think it’s clear though that ad-supported models are going to be tougher and tougher to go to market with in terms of scaling. Ads allow a young company to get a product to market and immediately start monetizing it but ultimately to scale, the model has to change.

SEC announcement: (at least) financial blogs now mainstream

A potentially impactful accouncement was made yesterday by the SEC.  Under certain circumstances, companies can rely on relating information via their websites to satisfy Reg FD requirements.

According to an IR expert in new technologies, Dominic Jones, “The move is significant as it could cut disclosure costs for many companies that today use paid PR wire services to distribute their disclosures. It could also encourage companies to make investments to improve their investor relations websites and facilitate the use of blogs for communications with investors.”

Dominc’s analysis of the landmark release is worth the read as his insight and perspective into the industry in unrivaled. It’s worth a read and to follow his analysis as he makes his way through the announcement.

Regardless of what comes next, it’s clear that the SEC envisions that blogs and web technologies

• make it easier for companies to communicate
• provide a forum for communication in which investors, given more info and links to outside info, can make better sense of financial communications

This also boosts the prominence of long-tail aggregation sites like SeekingAlpha as methods to aggregate and edit all this info sitting on the edge.

TheStreet.com: good quarter but what about helping investors?

PaidContent.org has a great post early on in TheStreet.com’s (TSCM) quarterly conference call.  TheStreet.com posted a pretty good quarter and the stock is up over 12%.  See what we wrote recently about theStreet’s search for a new managing editor for MainStreet.com here.

Couple of salient points:

• CEO Tom Clarke attributed strong ad sales performance to diversification away form financial advertisers.
• TheStreet is looking for more M&A (they’ve been on the block themselves for years with no takers).
• looking to buik up in video content

What’s missing? I dunno, maybe coming out with new/better technology/content to help investors make more money and/or manage their portfolios better.  Very little talk about that other than the new subscription newsletter written by Lenny “The Nails” Dykstra.

I think this is a continuation of a growing trend in financial media.  Noticed I said media.  TheStreet.com and Jim Cramer are media plays looking to grow their businesses as media firms do in other verticals.  So, that means, increasing pageviews, premium content and higher CPM (the price charged advertisers per 1k pageviews).  Users and investors of these sites need to know that they are dealing with media companies and what the proprietor of that information is looking to get out of the relationship.  That’s all.