Somewhere: Opening up the world of work

Burnout, the top self-inflicted illness of the 21st century.

We have all suffered from it at some point. One of my recent burn out’s even caused me to throw in the towel for a few months. I almost completely gave up on marketing even though I love it and it comes naturally to me.

It’s scary how extreme burnout can become when left unchecked.

But even though this condition is very familiar to our generation, there is still no “official definition”. Furthermore, did you know that there aredifferent types of burnout?

Overload burnout — You’re working long hours and it catches up with you until you start venting to everyone who’d agree to listen to you.

Boredom burnout — It stems from lack of personal development at work and results in you distancing yourself from it and not caring.

Worn-out burnout — You’re the type that gives up in the face of stress. You don’t like to admit it, but your motivation tends to sizzle…

Check, check, aaaaand check. Which one have you had?

In terms of dealing with burnout, we asked our community of digital creatives and future of work pioneers, and here’s what they said…

Burnout is a personal crisis.

Rodrigo Passarelli - Burnout is a personal crisis. And crises are a great to change old thinking. www.somewhere.com

There is absolutely no point in sugar-coating it. It really is a personal crisis because it indicates that you have not been handling your energy properly. It’s too bad they don’t teach us how to do it in school because most of us tend to keep going until something forces us to stop and recharge.

Have you ever had a burnout that felt like a personal crisis?

Maybe you’ve changed your job and you’re trying hard, but it’s just not working, or you’ve started a new business, but you’re not seeing results, which makes you push harder and burn faster. Whatever situation you’re in, it’s important to recognize that you caused it — not the “situation” — and therefore you have the power to fix it.

The only way to get back on top is to dig deep and ask WHY. Often there are reasons behind things failing that we don’ see are there. For example, the mere stress burnout you’re experiencing may be a sign that you’re not moving in the right direction. Maybe that’s your body’s — and your gut’s — way of telling you it’s time for change. It’s important to take these signs seriously because if you don’t it only gets worse.

Be selfish if you want to heal.

Duncan Gough - Be selfish. Be greedy. Make time and space for yourself. Do whatever it takes to help yourself. www.somewhere.com

They say one of the most effective strategies in running a business is delegating. And one of the most effective strategies in conserving energy is…

Saying NO.

Saying NO allows you to pick and choose which projects and tasks you have enough energy to do/finish and which ones are beyond your “battery life”. You can’t help everyone when you have so much work in the day and you don’t have to. You’ll see that in time, you’ll not only get used to saying no, but you’ll also notice that people understand when you explain your reasons in a rational and human way. People are awesome that way.

Here, I’ll give you some of my tricks to stay fully-charged:

Delegate. If you don’t have time or energy or desire to do something, and you know it’s going to drain you, just pay someone else to do it.

Write up “NO scripts”, meaning the text you’re going to give/email people when they ask you to do something you cannot do.

Develop systems that allocate tasks to certain times of the day/week and go according to schedule. It’s a smart way of managing your time.

Take breaks every 2/3 hours. This is a must because if you’re like me, you can soldier on for 10 hours, but we both know this isn’t healthy.

Avoid stress by doing tomorrow’s work today. Stress is a big contributor to burnout, and this trick completely removes stress from your work day.

Do you have any tricks for avoiding/dealing with burnout?

And you, adrenaline junkies.

carmem saito — I kind of enjoy the adrenaline from it. But I do alternate it with nice food and spontaneous traveling. www.somewhere.com

We got a couple of answers from adrenaline junkies, too. By this I mean people who enjoy the fast-paced life, the hustle, and even the stress! It really is addictive, once you get “hooked” on it, there’s no going back.

I can certainly relate. Sometimes I forget to eat between work tasks or stay up late to work or even forget appointments in the “real world”. Now, if you’re a master juggler, this fast-paced existence and work overload may not be such a problem for you, but if you’re like me and you’re an all-or-nothing kind of person, you have to start taking care of yourself.

Take care of your body, your energy, your mind, and your heart. Take care of the part of you that needs balance. Because we all have that part.

I have a lot of entrepreneur friends who laugh it off, “Oh, I don’t have a life.” It’s funny when you’re in a group that gets it, but when you step away, you realize life could be much better. We’re meant to live in abundance, not sacrifice one part of life for another. Not to mention —

A lot of successful people attribute their success to being able to unplug with mindfulness and meditation.

So think about the parts you’re sacrificing — write it down — and think of ways to find time for those parts. Delegate your life just like you did with work earlier. Because you’ll never enjoy work as much as the person who has a rich private/social life. Life surpasses ambition.

In conclusion.

So you got this far! How much did you relate to this article? Do you think burnout is one of the top self-inflicted illnesses of the 21'st century?

To wrap up, I’ll just outline the takeaways below:

There are several types of burnout, so “diagnose” yourself first.

Burnout is a personal crisis, not just a sign that you’re overworking yourself. Dig deep and ask WHY you’re experiencing this.

Say NO when you don’t have the time or energy to help someone. Be human about it and they will understand.

As “fun” as the fast-track can be, make sure you’re not getting ill and/or missing out on a fully abundant life.

Success has a lot to do with the ability to unplug from work.

I hope so! Because I just jumped into the cold water…

But seriously, how can you find this elusive being that will both bring money and fulfillment AND you’ll call it work? If you think about it, a lot of things are construed as work because they take time and energy, but there’s something most people forget, too — what you do in your spare time used to be called a hobby and what brings you the money is called work.

So the REAL question is, Can you love your work?

Let’s see what our community said (and the thoughts they inspired) when we asked them how one could find work that both feeds and fulfills them.

A quote.

Life is not about finding yourself, but creating yourself.

These days a lot of people follow Mr. George Bernard Shaw’s advice. And why wouldn’t they? Why should we wander and wait for clarity and happiness to find us? Isn’t it our responsibility to get there?

I think it is. And our friend Frederik Hautain agrees:

I’ve always looked for opportunities that put me in the driver’s seat. Steering where you go tops waiting for your time to come.

YES! So many people spend their lives in the waiting place. And if you read what Dr. Seuss’s wrote about it, you’ll want to get out from there ASAP.

It’s a crowded and sad place. Nobody should stay there.

Which is why I encourage you to get off your butt and create your life the way you want it to be. And if you do, there is nothing that could stop you from finding that special work that feeds and fulfills you.

A different perspective.

Our friend Jonathan Cook says:

Work that fails to fulfill also fails to feed. In my research of commercial culture, I’ve seen that financial success follows dedication to authenticity. Cutting corners alienates customers and workers alike. So, I pursue work with deeper meaning.

Of course you wouldn’t be great at the job you’re not really into! No great thing was ever done without passion, and passion comes from purpose, a.k.a. meaning. When your work fulfills you, you give it your best. And your best then gets a lot of money as a nice little bonus.

On the contrary, if you constantly pursue work that kills your brain cells, and worse yet, procrastinate on doing the work that does excite you, then all you’ll have to show at the end is a bunch of checks. Gone, that is.

I have one rule — fight for that which lasts. Money doesn’t really last, but meaning does. And even though you should not compromise one for the other, you should not skimp on either one either.

A wise approach.

A LOT of people do this these days. In the words of Nicole:

Start making the work that fulfills you as self initiated sideline to your paid work. As your clients discover your passionate practice you are more likely to be commissioned to do that type of work. So you get paid to do the work you love.

You probably have a friend or maybe it’s you who has a paid job and hustles on the side. You know the kind — always busy, tired (unless you meditate), and yet, they have something going for them. They have a spark.

The spark is the hope that the side hustle will grow into a full time gig.

In fact, one of my favorite online personalities — Marie Forleo — says that hustling on the side has three main benefits:

It gives you structure, and you actually become more productive when you have several things to juggle, not less.

It gives you ample opportunity to meet people “in the real world”.

It gives you enough money to invest in your new business.

So you can consult on the side, you can write on the side, and so on, but whatever you do, don’t say “one day” when you talk about your passion. I have noticed that “one day” is the excuse we attach to what should be deadlines and projects we are working day in and day out on.

One day beats the purpose of “start today”.

New Provocation on Somewhere:

Last time we explored the concept of working “for free” and why anyone would do it. Namely, it is something people with creative professions suffer from most and also victims of the “money is evil” ploy.

This time we’re going to focus on the alternatives and also charging your worth if you feel like you’re selling yourself short.

If not money, what?

Many people agree, “money is not everything”.

If you don’t necessarily care about money and you’re happy side-hustling it up, then you should at least strive to get something else in return.

Like passion! Lots of people do stuff for free when it is for passion. The secret is to at least try to eventually make some profit out of it. Unless you’re also working something else that you happen to love.

We should always get something in exchange for your time and work: if not money, then experience, or expertise, or professional relationships and references, or education, or some combination of these. — Jason Rubenstein

After all, we are not slaves.

If not money, what? There are so many ways we can gain value from using our skills — from new connections to barter deals to learning experiences. If you’re a new consultant and you just want to learn to be great at it and get some awesome testimonials, it makes sense to offer free sessions.

The key is to find the balance — what you’re comfortable giving away and what you absolutely want to charge for.

Within this balance lies your financial happiness.

And your peace of mind.

Volunteering is something else.

It warmed up our hearts to see how many people agreed that volunteering is the only acceptable way to work for free. Obviously, you don’t get paid for volunteering and that’s OK because you volunteered your time and skills.

That implies that you willingly gave away what you do, not that somebody made you do it or you did it out of necessity.

You should never work for free because you have to. If you choose to volunteer or do it as a favor, then it’s completely different. Saying no to free work you don’t feel comfortable with will save you a lot of headaches. — Aurelie Chazal

So the key point here is: Never do free work because you “have to”, do it because you “want to”, which is kind of what we covered in the previous section. It’s like this —

If you see free work as a necessary evil, you won’t gain any value from it. But if you see it as a learning experience, you’ll gain everything.

So it’s all about your perspective really! There needn’t be any bad guys in this story. Only people who make their own career choices.

Ask yourself: What have you/will you gain from your choices today?

Charge your worth.

Provided that you do want to make a career out of your passion and you don’t want to end up eating cereal all month or having to sell all of your books to make rent, let’s talk about how much you’re charging.

Because if you have a feeling that you’re undercharging, you’re probably right. And I know what you’re thinking: “nobody would pay that much” and “I’ll lose out on customers”. Regarding the first objection, there are people who pay a lot for specialized services and those “crazies” would actually paymore just to get a better service. Believe it or not, that’s the majority of people who look for products and services online.

Because you buy the perceived value, not the product itself.

Regarding the second objection, you don’t want to be hoarding customers, especially if they’re the wrong ones. You need to be targeting a specific subset of your wider target audience, and you definitely want to enjoy the process of working with them, not end up with a bunch of people who pay you but don’t appreciate or agree with the way you work.

You need to stop making excuses and start valuing yourself and your work more. When you value your work, you end up doing a better job, attracting the right people, and finally, you make a living from something you love.

And if you’re not charging your worth (remember, this goes back to self-worth), I want you to remember this quote:

“The courage for charging for what you do comes from charging for what you do.”@marieforleo

Or in the wise words of Yoda…

Now, if you enjoyed this article, feel free to recommend and share it. And if you liked our members’ insights, we’d love to have you join our expanding community of digital creatives who live in the future of work.

This is for any creative out there who is giving away their time and talents.

Short answer: no. Longer answer…

It all started with an article — We are not exploitable.

This is an extremely important subject for creatives all over because we know that people tend to: a) undervalue art and b) take advantage of young, inexperienced people by asking them to provide work for free.

To which you should really say what our friend Myron says:

People are always asking for a quick sketch or even a major work because they think that doing art is fun or relaxing. My answer is “Sorry. I am in this game for the money.” — Myron Gilbert

The reactions to the aforementioned article were so strong that we decided to ask our community of digital creatives what they thought. Below is an outline of the issue at hand and what thy had to say about it.

Define “free”.

Obviously your answer will depend on your definition of free.

For example, if you’re doing work that you love and you’re making great connections and learning a lot… you might not need to make money from it also — provided your rent is paid for the foreseeable future. OR you could be a side hustler who extracts joy from what you do.

So if it’s not money, you have to gain some kind of value from your work. (Like how volunteering brings you inner satisfaction.) Otherwise the answer is still a big fat NO, you should not work for “free”.

Reminds me of the line from Mad Men: “You sure put the free in freelance”. — Peter Bruinsma

It starts internally.

Truth is, nobody can make you work for free if you don’t let them.

So we don’t start by blaming companies or individual employers for this, but we turn inwards — to our self-worth system.

Many people don’t charge for their work or provide amazing work for $5 onFiverr or generally don’t charge enough. They say there’s so much competition nowadays and everyone’s doing what you’re doing.

But nobody can do what you do exactly like you do it.

Which is why your unique value proposition and your unfair advantage should be YOU. As long as you learn to value your own skills and put a fair price on them, you’ll begin to make the money you want to be making.

The money you deserve to be making.

The “money is evil” viewpoint.

Now, if you consider money as something that actually devalues your work — something only miserable, 9-to-5, shallow people make, then you’re probably going to argue.

Like our friend, Richard Meikshan:

I think EVERYONE should work for free. Nobody should work FOR money. Money should never be the motivator as it is too short-term to even be considered as one. One should work for joy as it is the only way you get actual results.

So it’s about motivation, is it? I personally don’t know anyone who’s solely motivated by money. But it is a guidepost to how well we are doing. So more money — we’re doing great, less money — something is wrong.

If money’s not your sole motivator but the guidepost against which you measure your “success” or “progress”, you’re a professional.

But if you’re thinking that money’s overrated, that the truly valuable things in life are free, and so on, you’ll always struggle to make money.

I have those friends. In fact, most of my creative friends started out by doing “jobs” and doing work they loved in their free time. That’s absolutely fine and commendable if you like doing jobs and side hustles at the same time. In fact, I envy you because I never could!

But I want to give a little disclaimer here: Working for free and doing what you love don’t have to be the same thing. And if you look at money as something you don’t want to associate with your passion…

I’m sorry but you may never end up making money from your passion.

How sad would it be if you published your book and nobody bought it? Or if you made this beautiful app that nobody used?

All I’m saying is, the way we associate things is the way things work in our lives. And money is not evil — far from it. Life is meant to be abundant and that can’t happen without money. If you’re spiritually happy but poor, how is this wealth and abundance? I believe there needs to be a balance.

Wouldn’t it be so much better if you were on good terms with money and you saw it as something you deserve for the effort you put in? Wouldn’t it be great if both you and everybody else acknowledged your time and talents with some sort of payment that allowed you to have even more time to do what makes you awesome? Let us know what you think!

Meanwhile, we’ve decided to make a series out of this and offer helpful suggestions for those of you who do want to charge your worth and be on good terms with money. Stay tuned here.

tl;dr plenty of likes, some decent traffic, and enough negative comments to make us think twice about doing it again.

As a visual work sharing company we’ve been excited to try out Instagram ads for some time. We’ve read the tea-leaves and configured our Facebook Business Manager and then, just like that on Friday, a new menu item appeared which allowed us to start creating Instagram ads. No fanfare, no notifications, just a very soft launch.

It felt like we spent all day setting up our Facebook/Instagram ad until everything lined up and our ad was waiting for approval with a daily limit of £10.

This morning I woke up to find my phone dead. Not a surprise since it’s a loyal iPhone 3Gs and the concept of battery is almost entirely theoretical at this stage. Still, I plugged it in and it buzzed constantly with Instagram notifications, so it’s clear that our ad went live sometime on Saturday night.

Here it is, in all its let’s-give-this-go-with-some-basic-copy glory:

The future of work is visual work sharing. Start showing the world what you're working on.

At the time of writing we’ve had ~2,300 likes, about 10 very negative comments (why is this in my feed? GTFO, etc), and some decent traffic, which is why we advertised, after all.

Using the Facebook tools, I can see that we’ve reached ~80k people at the cost of £0.01/click and our ad has a Relevancy of 10, which seems unusually high.

But, I’m not sure if we’ll continue to advertise on Instagram but this has been an interesting experiment. Likes don’t count for much, while the negative comments make it clear people don’t want ads in their streams, and that’s very understandable.

As softly as Instagram have launched their ad network, it now feels like all that time and effort was spent on integrating with Facebook and warming up potential advertisers, without telling their community that this was coming, and giving them tools to make their voice heard.

Let’s start the week by finding out how people finish things:

Let’s talk about work. The best way to learn is to share, and on Somewhere we’re asking questions about work each week. Like today - what’s your pre-launch strategy?

Tech recruitment is easy.

You have skills and experience - 4 years experience of Ruby, 3 years experience as a Technical Architect, 2 years as a Senior Developer.

And you have keywords — angular.js, responsive design, mobile, iOS, Android, Java, Python, Scaling, Postgres, MysQL, AWS, S3, Docker, node.js.

It’s easy. It’s an easy problem to solve.

Even more so when you realise that the technology stacks we’ve built are ideally suited to solving the problem of technical recruitment. It’s a feedback loop.

We have the tools to build software which matches individuals by scanning relatively structured documents, like CVs or resumes, for keywords. Of course we do, those tools were built largely by the same developers those tools would uncover.

But what about community managers? What about copywriters? What about people who specialise in sales, growth, marketing, copy writing? What about people whose skills are their ability to connect and empathise with people?

What would a recruitment startup look like if it were built by community managers? What would getting a job feel like if it was tailored for an illustrator?

What would LinkedIn look like if it were a mix of Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter? And it didn’t suck.

There are a lot of startups in the tech recruitment space not just because tech recruitment is hot, but because it’s a definable problem with a proven marketplace. The supply and demand is evident. The product/market fit is already proven. There’s very little risk. It’s a race to the bottom, and it’s getting us nowhere.

Somewhere, on the other hand, is an open platform for sharing your work. We’re a community of people who care enough about what they do to seek out and use a service like ours, to help them learn, show and establish their skills.

This is what recruitment looks like for all the other digital professions, where the interview process takes place over a longer period of time, where your skills and experience are evidenced by Sparks, and you find people to work with, not companies to be employed by.

Our latest Provocation to get you thinking about work:

You’ll learn about prioritization, design & development, and speaking with authority. Everything you need in this crazy modern age!

It seems there are a lot of autodidacts these days. With the rise of online courses and the fall of college (sorry, professors), we’re seeing a new era of individuals who gobble knowledge up from the most available and not always reliable source — the Internet. Maybe it’s because there is something intrinsically satisfying about knowing you’ve done it yourself.

But first things first. What’s an autodidact?

History is full of examples, like Shakespeare, Hemingway, da Vinci, the Wright Brothers, Benjamin Franklin, and Elon Musk.

Today the numbers are growing as things like remote working, MOOCs, andPeter Thiel’s scholarship have come into being.

So we asked our community of digital creatives what they’ve had to teach themselves and what resources they recommend.

While the answers were diverse, we’ll outline the top 3 for you.

“Prioritisation and going towards the goal without getting lost in the vast amount of available distractions.”

Richard Meikshan

Distractions, eh? Whatever do you mean? Only the constant buzzing of your phone, the annoying notifications from Slack, the strange desire to check social media… must I go on?

It’s true, we have entered a distraction-filled era, and it’s of the utmost importance to teach ourselves to deal with it.

When we asked Richard to elaborate, he sent us this list:

Honesty is the key — you need to be honest with yourself. Go through the things you do / the things you like / the things you would like to do and understand what matters to you the most. Example: how much time you spend with people on weekly basis and how important each of them is to you. If you have not seen your mom in 2 weeks but met some 3 random people from work — in my scale, something is not right, but again that depends on the person.

There is a saying that you should never be a penny wise but a dollar stupidso bring that into your life not only money wise but also the company you keep, things in which you invest time, things you do in your free time.

But above everything truly ask yourself —

Does it make me feel happy? Or does it serve somebody else?

4. And yes, learn to say “no” to people and they will start appreciating your “yes” a lot more as it will not be taken for granted.

It’s easy to get lost in things we think we “should” be doing, but every once and again we must all invest more time and energy in the things we “must” do because we love them and because they propel us forward.

“ I mostly had to teach myself design skills and a bit of coding skills.”

Aurelie Chazal

Design and coding skills must be today’s top two required skills. Face it, tech is running the world and if you can contribute to this madness, you might end up landing your dream job and being paid very handsomely.

But not only designers and developers need these skills. Aurelie, for example, picked them up to help with her marketing. And if you work in tech, you know that every skill will help. Now let’s look at Aurelie’s story and recommendations.

For design:

When I started working for CustomerIcare and had to create some basic graphics for the blog, I just started using Keynote’s vector drawing tool. It’s enough for what I need to do and it’s super simple to use.

I learned a lot creating presentations for Slideshare. I used pictures at the beginning but it’s tricky to find good pics that are free to use for commercial use. Of course, you can buy stocks but they’re not unique so I started creating my own vector shapes inside Keynote. I really learned by doing and I haven’t seen any super useful tutorial on this (thinking about creating my own right now).

[Somewhere’s note: There are a lot of free photos here and here and here.]

What helps me a lot to learn is to look for inspiration daily.

Here are some good resources I’d recommend everyone check out:

- About PowerPoint presentations;

- The Muzli Chrome extension for daily inspiration;

- The Canva design school;

- I also run searches for “flat icons” on Google Image to get inspired.

For HTML and CSS:

I started with CodeAcademy as I had zero coding knowledge whatsoever. Their introduction course on html and CSS is amazing and really fun.

Once I had the basics I started experimenting in WordPress by creating a new draft page and using some in-line CSS to test the result.

Now I’m also looking at the source code of other websites to learn (I do this in Google Chrome with the “inspect element” option: right click on any part of a page and click “inspect element” and it shows you the html and CSS code).

The W3Schools Tutorials are also amazing.

The best advice I could give is to just start doing stuff and learn along the way.

If you encounter a problem, google it and you’ll likely find the answer on a forum somewhere. And I think that’s how you learn.

P. S. Thanks, Aurelie! We certainly hope this helps someone with their own unique learning experience.

“Projecting “leadership presence” comes naturally to a few, but not to most. Speaking w/ authority is often a self-taught behavior.”

Elias Jones

Now that’s a challenge if we ever saw one! Can you imagine being thrown into the lion’s den without a chair and everyone’s expecting you to tame them? Well, there must be a trick, right?

Let’s see what Elias has to say.

A wonderful project manager gave me a priceless tip — research! Conducting just a half hour of extra research on a subject you’ll be speaking about loosens you up and boosts your confidence. I also studied behavior profiles using DISC, through which I learned to adjust my communication style to meet others’ expectations.

And those are only a few of the answers we got. See more on the site.