Updated with more comments! The most important rules for today's workforce bar none
By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher
My three rules of today's workforce:
--Carry and use your own cell phone/number for business
The workforce now is mobile and temporary even if you have a salaried job. You need to be in control of the center of communications: you.
--Carry and use your own email address even at work
Otherwise your contacts and the relationships you build can be severed when you leave a job, and that is an investment that you have a right to maintain--as does your employer.
--Carry and use your own health insurance
Because otherwise, you will be stuck in a job that makes you sick just to keep the health insurance.
[I've followed these three rules for years...]
From Mitch Ratcliffe: Ratcliffe Blog
http://www.ratcliffeblog.com/archives/2005/11/new_rules_for_2.html
To Tom's rules, I'd add:Incorporate and work on contract rather than as an employee.
This allows you to negotiate the same kind of stock compensation while allowing you to keep your business costs, even the ones you can't get compensated for at work, on your own taxes while increasing the flexibility you have as a working person.
Carry and use your own hardware, building tech expenses into your compensation.
This prevents lock-in to a job through access to technology. Sure, you may have to work with a less impressive laptop, but you're also forced to think more like the people who really buy computers, software, services and so forth.
Update #2 thanks to Neville Hobson at NevOn, via David Newberger-The Geek Guy Rants
Create a blog and establish your personal presence in the new marketplaceIn this new age of global inter-connectivity, linking and influence, a blog is a prerequisite if you want to build your own credibility, be found easily and connect with others. Forget the static website. Forget the fancy brochure. Do a blog. It works - I speak from personal experience.
Join a business network like LinkedIn or OpenBC
However you actively use these or not, they can help establish your individual credibility and provide avenues of contact with others for mutual benefit.
Anybody have any more?