best-practices

For a decade, I’ve been working from home as part of a virtual team and as a freelancer. So purely in terms of work environment, for me, working virtually in self-isolation during this COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t required much of an adjustment. The emotional burden of the mass suffering, however, can be overwhelming. I’ve found myself in reactive mode, overstimulated by the horrific news every day, and feeling helpless. To maintain any kind of productivity, I’ve turned back to some freelancing best practices that provide a bit of structure or framework for getting things done....

This morning I was going through a working group’s internal documents about best practices, procedures, etc. for coordinating communications between all of the group’s members, who are scattered worldwide. At one point, on the topic of email netiquette, there was a recommendation to follow the rules of a rather emphatic post, “How to correctly quote e-mails and news posts,” which is “[p]artly written by Tom Sommer.” I think it was the “correctly” part that got me going here on this blog post....