photo credit: mccheek

Whether you’re a freelancer or a company lifer, you’ll always have the chance to get work done offsite. In fact, working somewhere other than your cube, office, or home can add a lot to your understanding of work/life balance. New scenery and new people can have you coming up with new ideas pretty quickly.

Of course, many of us head to the patron saint of offsite working, St. Arbucks. It was her CEO that happily said,

We’re in the business of human connection and humanity, creating communities in a third place between home and work.

But now, these third places are cracking down on those of us who like to sit and type our day away, logging billable hours or scheduling meetings. Some, as the Wall Street Journal reports, are banning laptops during lunch hours. Other coffee shops are taking away free Wi-Fi altogether. What’s a geek to do?

Of course, business is business. Shop owners need to make money, and someone who needs lunch and a hot drink is bringing in more revenue than you are (per hour, at least).

So tell us: If your third place or workplace did away with free Wi-Fi or banned laptops, what would you do? Go crazy? Protest? Find another location?

photo credit: Mountain/Ash

They may not talk about it much, but deep down, every entrepreneur, freelancer and consultant confronts it at some point: loneliness.

When you’re out on the road speaking, or writing code from the confines of your home office, or slaving away with earphones in at the coffee shop, you can’t deny the fact that you’re isolated. You’re making it on your own, and as great as that is, part of you kind of craves human interaction other than the kind that comes from communicating with a client or speaking to a room full of accountants.

Corporate America with its miles of cube farms isn’t necessarily the antidote to this disease. You can feel just as isolated in a room full of 250 peers with similar name badges as you do by yourself on your sofa. So it’s not just that you want people around, it’s that you want the right kind of people around.

You want friendly water cooler banter. You want the practical joke or the staff birthday to celebrate. You want the brainstorming session, the creativity maelstrom or the high-level meeting where the real decisions get made.

Is there a way to take the good without the bad? Or are you just left with the facts of the corporate or the entrepreneurial life when it comes to finding community during your day job?

One concept that has taken root in many cities is that of coworking, where entrepreneurs and visionaries find refuge, solace and community under one roof. But is it a perfect solution? Or should someone who wants regular interaction and even friendship start applying for jobs at larger companies?

Tell us: what’s been your experience with coworking? Anyone out there been a part of one? Or, how do you make friends and influence people as an entrepreneur? Or as someone who’s part of a larger company?

photo credit: torres21

For some of us, creativity just spews from our core, touching everything we do, whether we design a newsletter, write a song or paint a bedroom. For others of us, it may come a bit more slowly as we wait for inspiration to strike or a skill to develop.

Whether you work alone, at a small shop or for a big corporation, you’ll often have the chance to collaborate with other people. And, whether that collaboration takes the form of a strategic partnership, a volunteer committee or a special project team, there is an art to making sure that the group inspires action and change, rather than prohibits it.

Sure, group think and stagnation can set in. Or, the collective wisdom and inspiration of a particular assortment of people can raise the level of everyone’s participation and performance.

For example, I recently participated in Nashville’s 48 Hour Film Project. A group of friends and I had just two full days to write, create, shoot, edit and produce a 7-minute film that used a required character name, prop and line of dialog.

Like many things, inertia was key. Things started slowly, but in no time (once the pizza and beer arrived on Friday night), ideas were shared, improved upon and agreed on. Each team member made the others better and come Sunday afternoon, we had a product that we were proud of – and one that was a lot of fun to make.

There’s a difference between making a movie on the weekend and working on something for the boss. But, we’re wondering this weekend: Do you think teams inspire or kill creativity?

Tell us in the comments, or even weigh in on the following questions:

• How do you keep your team creative?
• Are teams better when participation is voluntary, as opposed to required?
• How do you decide when teams are worth using in the creative process?
• When is it time for a team to call it quits?

photo credit: Mooganic

Working from home, or remotely at all, seems to be an on-again, off-again trend in business blogging. The disadvantages are often cited, such as the chance you’ll be “out of sight, out of mind” and possibly passed over for promotion or lumped in with layoffs even if you are contributing a great deal of value.

But the merits are many, from work-life balance benefits to cost savings to increased productivity.

On the surface, it seems like a risk worth weighing. The question for you is, are you one of the many who work remote work into your routine? How often do you work from home? What techniques do you use to minimize the risks of being overlooked? Share your tips in the comments.

photo credit: Shyald

So often, it’s one little word that defines what we are doing.

For about a year now I’ve been thinking about adding a small structure to my property– such as the ones found here — so I can go from working at home to working from home. The distinction is significant.

My existing house is not very big, and my family uses every square inch for pure living. I want to do two things: 1) Carve out my own work space and really define it as an environment for creativity and productivity; and 2) Preserve my home as the place where we gather and eat and sleep and play as a family. I’ve always cringed at the home offices where someone is still physically in the house, but unavailable to be engaged in the business of family life.

More and more of us need to be able to work from home. Employers are cutting costs by reducing office space and requiring employees to be off-site. In addition, many people no longer have a traditional employer, but work for themselves on a contract basis with multiple clients.

The idea of working from home has a legendary appeal. The key is to recognize that it may turn out to be just a legend unless you honor the important differences between work and home as spaces with unique requirements and functions. Be honest with yourself about what you need to get work done, and be purposeful about creating both that space and time.

Being successful in the new world of work is about more than a wireless connection and bunny slippers. It’s about being able to perform well in alternative settings, and it is a big advantage to acknowledge that those spaces still need to be conducive to work/life balance as well as getting the job done.

Image credit: MikeSchinkel, via flickr

Over at WebWorkerDaily, there’s an interview with Stephanie Booth, the founder of Eclau coworking space in Lausanne, Switzerland. Coworking seems to be getting a fair share of attention lately, and for good reason: it appears to be a great way for people seeking largely non-traditional work arrangements to have at least some of the advantages of a traditional workspace:

Comparing life at eclau with my years as an employee in a big company, where we also had an open office, I find that coworking brings out the advantages of sharing a space with “colleagues” like having people available to bounce ideas off, company for lunch or sometimes breakfast, without having the disadvantages like not being able to go to lunch without “talking work”, bosses, and people you need to get back to when you go for coffee break.

What are your experiences with coworking? Is it something you’d like to try? Something you have tried? Let us know in the comments.