10 virtually instant ways to improve your life - lifehack.org. Rolling Your Own Online Office. I've done a lot of telecommuting in my life. My first real writing gig came when I was 16 as a freelancer for a computer magazine whose offices were 3,000 miles from my house, and since then I've worked for a number of blogs, web startups, and computer game companies in an online, virtual office environment. During that time I've found that the key to a successful distributed team is communication.
The difference between the ventures that failed and those that succeeded was how well set up the communication structure was for the team. We all love Basecamp, which I think is an invaluable app for distributed teams (we use it here at Read/WriteWeb). Email We already tend to think of email as an antiquated form of communication. Forum Taking asynchronous communication to another level, forums usually command a starring role in any groupware solution (the 'Messages' feature that anchors the communication tools in Basecamp, for example). Don't like Simple Machines Forum? Wiki Chat Flowcharting. The Power of Yes: A Simple Way to Get More Out of Life ∞ Get Rich Slowly. Inside the Mind of the Modern American Boss. Possibly, your boss is a truly fine person—wise, kind, perceptive, capable, understanding, the all-seeing director of the office sitcom, the sort of individual one might like to have, in an ideal world, as a parent or a confidant. Or not. In the real world, bosses are known to suffer from a long list of social pathologies: naked aggression, credit hogging, micromanaging, bullying, you name it.
According to one report, 60 to 75 percent of employees—it doesn’t matter the organization—say the worst aspect of their job is their boss. It’s not difficult to believe, as one office expert concludes, that “every employed adult will have to work for a bad boss for some significant period.” In the natural world, there are brutal processes by which, say, one especially vicious bull walrus ends up on the rock, with all the females, while all the others are forced to skulk around the periphery. In search of an answer, I began to explore the vast and ever-growing field of office psychology.