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Connect! A Guide to A New Way of Working – a book review
We asked K Sawyer Paul of Gredunza Press to do an honest review of Web Worker Daily’s Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working. Here’s what he had to say about it:
There are a good number of self-help books out there for people who want to be productive and active in the workplace, but there aren’t a whole lot that deal with the workplace of the 21st century. The internet has created a space where people can actually work productively and keep track of one another in ways that are, in some ways, superior to working in a standard office. But what is the protocol for such a workplace? The answer to this question is answered to various degrees of success in Connect! A Guide to A New Way of Working by Anne Truitt Zelenka (with Judi Sohn).
The book does a passable job at explaining what the new workplace is–virtually anywhere you can access the internet and type–but does little to explain why. I would have liked to see a little historical context as to why the workplace is changing–surely no laws have passed, for instance–but it may simply come down to cost. It is cheaper to have employees work from home, and companies are finding that the positives are stalwartly outweighing the negatives?
The book is an easy to understand piece: lists and examples about modern workflow, from which word processor to choose from to which blogging software to choose from (there’s a lot of choice online, and these lists are useful for people who are new to each sector). Zelenka also tries to warn against activities such as instant messaging and Twitter, although these technologies can provide useful pieces to an employee’s workflow (I have a friend in Chicago who works from home and timestamps his assignments by auto-posting to Twitter so his boss can check on him). This is one of the few complaints I have against this book: so many applications online can be used for both productive and time-wasting activities. One person’s Facebook break can be another’s networking, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference.
The best advice in the book comes seemingly from left field. For instance, Zelenka’s mention of coworking on page 37, the idea of groups of at-home employees gathering in a place just like their old offices, except they all work for different people, and none of their bosses are there:
“Coworking puts a twist on café work. Instead of a café where you can work, it’s a shared office with café-like qualities. It differs from other multitenant office services in its emphasis on community and collaboration.”
Other excellent notes include vanity searches, where you have a news alert feed, such as Google Alerts, notify you when your name appears online. Zelenka gets the change in perspective perfectly here. Instead of thinking about it in terms of vanity, one sees these notifications as a way of being aware of their public image, which is crucial in an always-connected world. The 30 day list is genius. Instead of immediately purchasing something you want online, make an ongoing list. If 30 days have gone by and you still want this item, go ahead and get it.
The book only dips in quality when the advice becomes a little difficult to swallow. It’s one thing to learn how to make a set of online bookmarks (page 116, Surfing Tools), but it’s entirely another to suggest that the at-home employee buy themselves a 30-inch display for productivities’ sake (page 46, Displays). In Zelenka’s defense, she shrugs the advice by suggesting that, “many web workers find that two separate moderately-sized monitors are better than one monstrously huge (and expensive) one.” It’s still costly advice. On the next page she also suggests getting fiber optic internet, which is not only insanely expensive but also unavailable to most people right now.
Speaking of unavailable, I have one further bit of criticism, though it has nothing to do with the author and everything to do with physical geography imposing on the virtual space. It is important to remember that some online applications (such as mint.com, mentioned on page 232 as a solid money management system) are only available in certain countries and not others. Connect! is an American book, and it’s very likely that Zelenka simply was not aware of this geographic limitation. It’s not her fault, but it’s a good footnote to remember: if you plan to work remotely, you should know precisely what is possible from there.
Connect! does a more than decent job at answering the important questions: where to work, how to work, and when to work. Café’s, coworking facilities, and at-home offices are all explained in solid detail. Productivity programs, networking applications, and even time-wasting activities are covered well enough for anyone to learn something new. And Zelenka spends ample time reminding us that working from home means getting the job done, not sitting at a desk from 9-5 playing solitaire. The book slips only when answering the last two: why work at home, and who to work for. It seems the question of why working at home is superior is left unanswered is because it is obvious to the author (and somewhat obvious to me), but it is certainly not obvious to everyone, and as I mentioned earlier, a little context would go a long way. Equally left out is who to work for, as the book appears ready to suit both the self-employed as well as the corporate consultant.
Lastly, the index is strikingly useful if you only need advice on one or two items (though Dodgeball, on page 147, is an online application and not the game of dodgeball), and accidentally humorous in a few spots, particularly how internet addiction sits right above browser add-ons.
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K Sawyer Paul and Éisee Sylvester are co-owners of Gredunza Press. They assist new authors in finding information, advice, and the best routes to modern publishing and provide publishing services that will improve the marketability of their books.
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