Do we expect a more exciting, interactive worklife because it’s necessary, or because that’s what we’re conditioned to expect from the nine-to-five jobs we all take after college? The article cites examples of people who can’t deal with the lack of structure in the work-at-home model, including someone who “enjoys the reassuring cadences of the nine-to-five world.” I get this, as I like to rely heavily on structure, but I also find it a little disappointing.

I got an office for many of the reasons mentioned in the article. I needed separation between work life and home life, and I wanted the comraderie that comes with sharing an office with nine others. But then a funny thing happened. I find that the most productive times of my week are when I leave both venues and take my laptop to a coffeeshop. Comraderie—either live or over IM —is a nice short term pleasure, but as a constant presence, it can seriously cut into productivity.

So, on the one hand, you’ve got the working-at-home life, which leads to boredom and ennui. On the other, you’ve got office life, which leads to distraction. The key, at least as far as I’ve found, is embracing the flexibility of choosing between the two on a daily basis. Being my own boss means being able to decide when I go into the office, when I stay at home to work, and when it’s time to break out of the routine and hit a coffeeshop. It seems obvious, but it took me several months to realize that just because I was paying for space, I didn’t have to use it for eight hours a day. Indeed, I should be used for exactly as many hours as are needed to be most efficient. No less, and certainly no more.

It’s easy to believe that we have to choose between one model or the other—work at home or work at the office. Yet going independent is supposed to allow us to break the shackles of the nine-to-five world. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how many shackles that really entails.

The truth is, I have a perfectly good office at home. We’ve got three bedrooms in our condo, much bigger than we need, and it’d had been an office since well before I quit my job to go solo. With a little dedication and focus, I probably could have stayed there and run a successful web design shop for a good while. Plenty of others have done the same.

The key is that little word “focus.” I seem to lose grip of it with more frequency than I’d like. Working in that home office, with its cozy surrounding and close proximity to my kitchen, was not the right kind of environment for me. The line that divided home life—relaxed and full of kitty belly—from work life—focused and full of getting shit done—was blurry and getting blurrier.

Scott, who had gone freelance at about same time as me, proposed the idea of getting an office. I pushed back at first, thinking I had a good thing going, and not seeing the expense as something I could justify. I still looked around, in case something staggeringly cool presented itself. I didn’t know what that was at the time. I do now: it’s an office that not only gets me out of the house and into a workspace every day, but also one that I get to share with a half-dozen really sharp, creative minds, minds that I get to tap with a mere twist of the head and shout across the room.

It’s been just five days, and already I feel my productivity waxing. Those minutes that I spent idly making lunch, or getting up at coffeshops to ask the clerk to cycle the router, are now seamlessly stitched together with all the other minutes, forming long, continuous chains of productive work time.

The office itself still has a ways to go before it resembles a real workspace, and not simply the results of an IKEA shopping spree. Every day new pieces arrive. Monday it was a toaster; today we got our first water delivery. Andrew’s talking about getting an aquarium, which I hear does wonders for your feng shui. Scott’s on his way back now from Home Depot right now with some plants. No talk of a foosball table yet, though I have heard rumor of a Playstation. (Anyone who even metions the words “dot-com” or “bubble” will be taken out back and pummelled with our collection of corporate-branded stress balls.)

No office or team photos yet—our Sears Portrait Studio appointment isn’t until next week—so for the time being I leave you with this, a video Scott shot with his MacBook of our setting-up day. It answers the age-old question: How many college graduates does it take to assemble one IKEA Galant desk? Enjoy.

What does it take to be relevant, as a storyteller, in 2007? I’m not sure Syd was worried about this question as much as I or his kids were. For us, there was one answer that was becoming more and more obvious: Syd needed a podcast.

Over his long career telling stories, Syd has recorded 14 albums, which he sold mostly at festivals and through his online store. Sales had picked up since the site launched, but were still modest. It became obvious to us—and soon to Syd—that there’d be little to lose from releasing all of his tracks for free online. What money Syd would (possibly) lose in album revenue would hopefully be countered by greater exposure, which would lead to more lucrative—and more frequent—commissions and appearances.

And I’m not even sure I’m right about the dip in revenue. As free (cost- and DRM-) as these tracks will be—and they couldn’t be freer—they still can’t be held in your hand like a CD. Or popped into a living room or car stereo. One is often tempted to think of free content being incompatible with sales, especially is one works in the record industry, but one can forget that not everyone has an MP3 player. Or even knows what an MP3 is. In the Venn diagram that maps iPod Owners against People Who Are or May Be Fans of Syd, the crossover area is small enough to make you realize CDs still matter.

I realized this immediately as Syd and I started discussing how all this would be presented on the site. In my mind, it’d be primarily a podcast, with an online archive of all the tracks he’d already released. Syd’s response: “What’s a podcast?” Oh right. Obviously, most of Syd’s audience would have the same reaction. With this in mind, we ended up making the podcast just one option on the page. The main focus was to be the currently featured album, along with a tool that let anyone listen to the track directly on the page.

Meanwhile, I didn’t want to forget the impetus behind this whole endeavor, the podcast. I wanted to bring Syd’s work to a whole new crowd. The phenomenon of podcasting is ascending, and as it does, the potential audience for any new genre of podcast grows, and rapidly. I can’t tell you the raw numbers of people out there who’d be interested in downloading a funny, touching, personal, professionally recorded story every few days, for free, but I’m betting it’s big enough to make it worth it.

We launched a little over a week ago, and so far, things are going well. According to Feedburner, we’re up to 22 subscribers to the podcast. Meanwhile, we’re logging several hundred listens per track, either via the in-line MP3 player or direct download. And that’s with very little promotion. I expect the numbers to only go up from here.

I encourage you to try it out. Listen to a story or two from the site, and if you like it, subscribe to the podcast and tell some friends, especially if they have blogs, or run large, well-endowed non-profits and are looking for commissioned storytelling work. I’ll thank you, Syd will thank you, and who knows, maybe he’ll write a story about you someday.

Syd Lieberman is an internationally acclaimed storyteller. He also happens to be my father-in-law. AND he also happens to have performed at my Bar Mitzvah, 17 years ago, in Indianapolis. (Long story.) About 16 months ago, just before I was to quit my job and go freelance, he asked me to design and produce a website for him. I was pretty thrilled. I looked around—the field of storytelling websites left a lot to be desired. There was potential to do some cool stuff.

We discussed what Syd wanted to get out of the site. For the most part, the answer was publicity. Syd’s work is more than just telling and recording stories—he leads workshops and writes commission-based pieces, and he needed a focal point online to present himself. Secondly, he wanted a way for fans to purchase his work. Practically his only method for selling merchandise was at festivals; a website would give him another outlet for that business.

With that in mind, we built the site. We went for fall colors, browns and oranges, evoking the warm feeling that comes with good storytelling. Interesting fact: Syd’s color blind. Reds and oranges to him are a shade of beige. Meaning that, in addition to designing for a color-capable audience, I had to make sure the scheme worked for those with protanopia. I was thankful to find a cool app, SimDaltonism, which let me see my computer screen as a color-blind person would. Chalk up another lesson in accessibility. Challenge number one.

The site was an immediate success. Not only was the client pleased with the design, but we started to earn accolades from a variety of design appreciation websites. This brought new traffic, most of whom had never heard of Syd before. Some of them even bought some CDs. (A nice side effect of all this is I can now point potential clients to the quantitative benefits of spending money on good design.)

The store was also successful. I don’t think I’m at liberty to disclose any specific numbers, but I’m pretty sure his sales figures for the first year doubled because of online sales. The Paypal connection was not too difficult to set up, but still, it was something I’d never done before. Challenge number two.

After it had been up for a while, we realized how silly it was to have a storytelling website without any actual audio clips of the storyteller telling stories. We didn’t want to give up too much, for fear of not leaving customers any incentive to make the purchase. So I cut out some audio clips from each of his albums and added them to the store page, giving customers a chance to sample before they bought.

And that’s how it stood, a solid brochure for a storytelling master, for about eight months, as old fans and new listeners found the site, read about Syd, and, on occasion, sent Syd an invitation to come speak at their event. The site was doing it’s job, and all parties were happy.

But had it really tapped into all the potential the web offered as a medium? Some of us thought not. It was late in 2006 when a seed got planted in Syd’s brain on how to use his new platform and vast oeuvre to really drum up some attention.

To be continued…

Or, I Got Fireballed On My Blog’s First Day Out and all I Got Were These Lousy Statistics.

I decided on the name Methodtree back in December. I registered the domain and threw up a temporary homepage. I also installed Wordpress, knowing I’d want a place to write. I called it Branches and left it at that. Other priorities took over.

After I got back from SXSW and found myself needing to write down some thoughts that had been percolating, I logged into Branches and spat it out. I didn’t really expect anyone to read it, though I did throw in some outgoing links to friends’ sites, expecting a few of them to find me in their referral logs. I also included a link to Daring Fireball. It was attached to the phrase “websites that I admire.” Then I went to bed.

When I checked my stats the next morning, I did so mostly because I had just installed Mint and wanted to see it in action. I didn’t expect to find this:

Let me tell you what it does to your self-confidence to have your very first post out of the gate be picked up by Mr. Gruber. It spikes it off the chart. It makes you go back and re-read your post, making sure every word is properly chosen. It makes you wonder if it was really smart to publicaly announce that kind of promise to yourself about the goals you’re going to meet in the next year, and what kind of a schmuck you’re going to look like if you fall short.

It also makes you wonder if sometimes it’s not a good idea to properly design your site before throwing it out there, just in case someone happens to think you’re worth the attention. I appreciate the Getting Real ethic and all, but in this case, it would have been nice to use something other than a stock (albeit nicely designed) Wordpress template.

So, first project on the list: finish methodtree.com. Can’t have a web design company without a respectable website, you know?

Interesting aside: having 100% of your traffic driven to you from a Mac Nerdery blog produces some entertaining results in your browser statistics.

Internet Explorer at 2% … in fourth place … after Camino! I’d give up my right mouse button to see these kind of stats persist for all of eternity.

It took four years to get back to Austin. This time I was at the University of Chicago. Our professional development budget was modest, so I had to forgo most other conference opportunities to get myself down there. I was happy to do so. This time was different: I was older, wiser, more socially graceful (I had nowhere to go but up), and I had a job that I felt I could affect with all the knowledge I’d bring back. The result was five days of sublimity. I made a host of new friends, most of whom I remain very close to two years later. I learned a lot. But the main effect was a buzz of energy that I was working in an exciting time, with the potential to do exciting things, if I just put my mind to it.

The reality, of which I was reminded before my coffee was cold on the first day back, was that I was employed by a university, whose adaptability to change could make Archie Bunker look progressive. The buzz soon wore off, but not enough to keep me from signing up to go back the next year.

As a result, SXSW 06 wasn’t as much of a rush. The shine had worn off, and while the machine underneath was still a sexy motherfucker, it wasn’t as sexy as the first time I glimpsed her. Many panels felt rote, like they were just recycling the same material. Yet, in the same way I would head back to summer camp between high school years and slip right into the same alternate-life friendships, it was great to meet up with my old South-by buddies. This is truly the real value of the conference: the energy of four days and nights spend with people who are just like you, whose interests line up exactly with yours, and who send you home with the passion to break out of the rut and go do something cool.

And yet, again, the buzz died off quickly. The job just wasn’t offering me the room to grow that SXSW prooved I needed. I had harbored some fantasies about building something cool in my off-time, but that just wasn’t going to happen while at the U of C. Work drained all my daily energy.

So I quit.

I realized that I either had to stop getting my hopes up every March, or I had to stop letting them get quashed every April. I chose the latter, and decided it was time to get moving on my own terms.

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, and SXSW 07. I’m finally back in Austin, for the first time on my own dime, and ready to suck up the excitement without anything getting in the way. I was stunned to find myself facing a sobering reality check. It’s not to say the energy wasn’t there—it was, in spades. I saw all my old chums, and met scads more, many of whom work at companies or publish websites that I admire. The energy was there for the taking. My feeling was that I had nothing to offer in exchange.

I started working on my own in October. By any measure of success, my first five months have been a solid showing. Things look promising. I like my clients, and I’m excited about the work. But it’s nothing world-changing. It’s not even neighborhood-changing. In Austin, when asked about what I do, I couldn’t offer anything more than simply “you know, websites.” I learned of the work my contemporaries were doing, and the awe I felt was tinged with the embarrassment that I was standing there empty-handed. This may have been the same case in years previous, but this time I had no one to blame but myself.

The final day of SXSW, I made a pact with myself. In the 360 days until the next conference, I’d produce something. It had to be…

• Something I wanted to do because I thought it was cool, not because a client asked me to do it.


• Something I’d feel proud to show off at SXSW 08.

That’s it, two criteria. If I could fulfill those those two things, it’d go a long way to making SXSW —or really, my career as an independent developer—much more worthwhile.

My favorite panel at SXSW this year was a talk by Jim Coudal and Brendan Dawes. The topic was ostensibly about Making Your Short Attention Span Pay Big Dividends, or so it was titled. More accurately, it was a testimonial to the value of following your passion. This tenet is actually built into the job at Coudal Partners. They brainstorm crazy ideas and run with them, just because they can. Sometimes they work out and turn into products (see Jewelboxing, Lowercase Tee), and sometimes they crash and burn—but even those experiences are chock full of value. I found myself thinking, “Man, I wished I worked somewhere like that.”

Oh wait, I do. Or I could, if I wanted to. This is why I left my job, why I go to SXSW, why I formed my own business—because I want to grow and learn and exhaust my own potential as a designer, as a developer, as a builder of things. SXSW ended five days ago; I have 355 days to make it happen.