Comments on: 5 Lessons from a 2-Month Remote Work Experiment

By: Your Chance to Write a Guest Post (El Niño Edition) - Free Pursuits

Your Chance to Write a Guest Post (El Niño Edition) - Free Pursuits — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:03:06 +0000

[...] at least) were also guest posts, like Are You Putting Off Life Until Later? by Chris Garrett, 5 Lessons from a 2-Month Remote Work Experiment by Tim Leffel and The Smart Ass Guide to Dealing with Dream Zappers by Ashley [...]

By: Modernape

Modernape — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:24:31 +0000

I’d say another essential if you’re working remotely for long periods of time is to have back-up plans, including what you’ll do if your hard drive suddenly fails, if you lose your credit cards, if your laptop is stolen, etc.
Be prepared.

By: Rasheed Hooda

Rasheed Hooda — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:05:06 +0000

Great article, Tim!

I like 4 and 5. I need to work on getting them to be a part of my daily life.

@Corbett, Thanks for yet another great guest author.

Rasheed

By: Renato

Renato — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:12:59 +0000

Great post Tim (as most of your posts on Cheapest Destinations!) I totally agree on 1, often underestimated: after almost a year of remote working I could not handle the entire working day using bars, coffee shops and free wifi. They are great for a couple of hours a day when I need a break, but they will kill me if they were the only option. Still not 100% convinced about virtual assistants or actually when is the time to hire them. Maybe I have not enough to do (is that good or bad?) but I think the bar should be a little bit higher than simply offloading the low-return tasks that don’t require special skills.

By: Tim L.

Tim L. — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:01:31 +0000

Thanks for the feedback everyone! Yes, if you get one lesson out of The 4-hour Workweek and ditch the rest, this should be it: figure out what an hour of your time is really worth and then offload the low-return tasks that don’t require your own special skills. I saw something on CNBC one time saying if you earn more than $16 an hour, for instance, you shouldn’t mow your own lawn unless you really enjoy it. It’s far cheaper to pay a service. Scale that up to your whole business week and you can get a lot more done. People look at my output and think I don’t sleep, but I really get a good 7-8 hours of quality sleep every night. (Otherwise I get cranky…)