I did some organizing over the weekend and found this in a box of random stuff. Remember when everything was on these 3.5″ disks? It wasn’t even all that long ago that we were still using them.

I remember my college roommate installing Windows 95 on his fancy new laptop computer back in 1995 (of course). CD drives weren’t even standard yet so he installed the complete OS using about 20 of these 3.5″ disks. Unbelievable!

These things hold 1.40 MB. ONE POINT FOUR ZERO MBs!!! I don’t think I have a single song in my entire music collection that would fit on one of these.

My point is this: Don’t be a 3.5″ disk.

Well, not literally. But continually have a plan to do what you do…better. It doesn’t have to be anything major, but it can be something as simple as setting aside an hour per week to research new trends in your field.

If you’re a programmer, learn the ins and outs of a new plugin or API. If you’re a writer, challenge yourself to write about something you’d normally consider too difficult or complex. Heck, write a book! If you’re a designer, spend some time each week going through a tutorial for a new method in Illustrator. Just commit to improving your skills a little bit at a time.

It doesn’t even need to take much planning ahead of time. Try out a new app and just tinker with it for an hour or two. Relax, you’ve built the time into your schedule. Use this opportunity for a little “sandbox time.”

Don’t be the freelancer or employee who is stuck with a 3.5″ floppy skill-set in a 16 GB USB flash drive world. You’ll find yourself tossed quickly.

Unless you end up in my box of junk that never gets thrown out.

Take a walk with me through the woods while I debate whether having a smartphone and data plan are worth it for me. While trying to simplify, cut down distractions, and lessen the noise in my daily life, I am unsure if having a web-enabled device in my pocket at all times is necessarily a good thing.

For some, it’s a requirement. But I work from home or wifi-enabled public locations. If I’m neither of those places, I don’t want to be working or tempted to work. I want to be catching fish, focusing on my family, or just enjoying whatever moment is presented to me.

There are three main areas where I question whether having the web available at all times is good for me:

1. I want to spend less time on the internet, not more. By subscribing to a monthly data plan, I’d feel like I was wasting my money if I wasn’t using it.
2. I’m trying to reduce the number of “in-boxes” in my life and the number of times I check my email daily. Mobile web/email would add at least one more.
3. When I’m not working, I want to focus on not working. If I’m in my canoe, going for a hike, or out on a date with my wife, I want to enjoy those things for what they are at that moment, not how they’ll sound in a Twitter update.

What do you think? If you use a web-enabled smartphone, does it simplify your life?

We’re all different and what works for one person might not work for another. I’m just debating what makes sense for my lifestyle today. Smartphones are everywhere and I even had one for a short while a few years ago. I realized it didn’t make sense for me then and I’m still not sure if I really need one. I’m the AnywhereMan, not the EverywhereMan.

And yes, I will probably change my mind on all of this next week.

Friends of AnywhereMan.com are doing some exciting things in the next few months and I want to share a couple of them that you need to check out.

Where Do You Work Naked?

First, Lisa Kanarek of WorkingNaked.net (see my interview with Lisa) is doing a month-long contest called “Where do you work naked?” and she wants photos and a quick description of your home office. She’s giving away some excellent home-office related prizes and it’ll be worth your while to go and enter the contest. Be sure to subscribe to her blog, too. She’s always sharing helpful tips for working from home.

Market Your Business On The Web

Next, Aaron Weiche of Five Technology is helping put on half-day Local University seminar in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area that will help you and your small business better understand marketing on the web. Representatives from both Google and Bing will be there to discuss their respective search engines as well.

I will say this about Aaron: The guy knows his stuff. I keep my eye on the way he interacts on the web and he’s getting a huge amount of ROI with minimal effort, right down to the things he shares on Twitter. I know that the ROI of you attending this workshop will be equally impressive.

Oh yeah, you probably want to know about the deal. Aaron is giving AnywhereMan readers $40 off the price of the seminar, cutting the price from $129 down to $89. Visit the Local University Twin Cities page and use code “anywhere2010″ at checkout to receive the discount. I might try to make the 3.5 hour drive down there myself!

Got Good Deals Or Events?

If anybody else has something useful or fun going on that might be of interest to my users, just let me know. Please don’t be offended if your event or promotion doesn’t make the cut, but it never hurts to ask.

Lately, the virtual version of me has been hanging out on a few other sites. AnywhereMan.com is my main blogging/video home, but in the past few weeks some very exciting opportunities have been presented.

First, I am on a month-long trial as a contributor for a popular web app/software website called MakeUseOf.com. The site has lots of tips, tweaks, and reviews and I’ll be writing there a few times as they test me out (i.e. until they realize I’m just a wannabe blogger!). My first article was published this past weekend and was entitled “3 Ways To Use Google Reader As An Online Archive.” It’s been a fun experience thus far. I mean, I’m writing about web apps and even getting paid to do it. Perfect!

Next, you’ll recall that last week I did the first AnywhereMan interview with Lisa Kanarek. It was a blast! Much of the process of setting up the interview and recording it was made known to me through Andrew Warner at Mixergy.com: home of the ambitious upstart. Andrew’s a great and super bright guy, and my wife and I were lucky enough to spend some time with him when we were at BizConf last summer.

Well, Andrew took a look at my interview with Lisa and the next day one of his guests was unavailable at the last minute. He graciously invited me on his live program to discuss my interview experience and use it as an opportunity to emphasize to his audience the importance of doing interviews. He gave some awesome tips and I learned a lot from him describing some of the things he’s observed. You owe it to yourself to follow Andrew and his future interviews. He’s interviewed some amazing guests like Gary Vaynerchuk, Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss…and he’s just getting started.

Thank you, Andrew, for the opportunity! Folks, stay tuned for a future AnywhereMan interview with Andrew as he is definitely a fellow AnywhereMan (He’s currently doing all of his interviews from Argentina). Here’s my appearance with him last week:

I don’t remember where I first learned this trick, but in today’s video I show you how I clean my keyboards, computers, and related components. No need for a can of air or a big, heavy air compressor. You might just have this useful tool in your garage.

My keyboard was definitely due for a good cleaning.

I have no idea how to accurately title this post. Last night I was going through some of the amazing videos on Vimeo’s Documentary channel and came across this one. Just watch it (it’s about 5 minutes long) and comment back with any words you can think of to describe it.

Whatever you’d call this, it inspires me to ignore temporary or even permanent setbacks in pursuit of an end goal. Kudos to Sean Mullens for a well-done mini-documentary.

Lisa Kanarek wins the AnywhereMan Award for my favorite blog title: Working Naked. Lisa is a home office expert who puts on seminars, writes books, and offers consulting to companies and individuals wishing to have an aspect of working from home in their operations.

Lisa is also the subject of my first AnywhereMan interview. I’ve had the privilege of getting to know her a little bit better through her blog, this interview, and even a guest post I wrote for her last week. She truly is a working-from-home expert and I think you’ll really enjoy this interview…minus me, the newbie, learning how to facilitate an interview. Good thing Lisa is a seasoned pro!

Here’s a bit more about Lisa from her site:

Lisa Kanarek is one of the nation’s leading home office experts and the author of several books including Home Office Solutions, Organizing Your Home Office For Success and 101 Home Office Success Secrets. She is the founder of HomeOfficeLife, a firm that advises corporations and individuals on all aspects of working from home and is founder of this blog.

Kanarek has been a guest on several national programs including Good Morning America, CNN Financial News, CBS Up-to-the-Minute, CNBC, American Public Radio, Movie & a Makeover, Public Radio’s Marketplace and Voice of America radio. Kanarek has been featured—as an author and in interviews—in hundreds of publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, Success, Money, Entrepreneur, Cosmopolitan, Dwell, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Marie Claire and Redbook.

Whoa! Well, add “AnywhereMan.com” to that impressive list. Thanks for your time and fantastic insights, Lisa!

For the past month or so, I’ve been using ShutterCal to upload a daily photo. ShutterCal then displays photos in an actual calendar format making it easy to look back over the past month of photos. As a person who works from home, I discovered some really neat advantages to doing this that I hadn’t thought of prior to using it:

• It forces me to get out of my PJs and into “real” clothes every day as well as comb my hair. Well, maybe not comb my hair. But I can look back and figure out when I last had a haircut. No more going two months between cuts.
• It acts as a daily journal. I can go back and look at past days and look at the context of the photo for an idea of what I did that day.
• It gets my creative juices flowing…easily. Most of the time I shoot my daily photo simply using the webcam on my MacBook. Easy, but creatively challenging to make each photo different somehow.
• It gets me out and about. Looking back over a monthly calendar of photos, it’s easy to spot trends. If too many photos in a row are me sitting in my house, then it’s time to get out.

These are all great things for someone working from home. If you decide to join me on ShutterCal, you’ll find my calendar here. Let’s be friends!

Last week my wife went cross-country skiing down on the lake by our house. When we made it to the far end of the lake, we stopped for a breather and I noticed an area on the shore where a beaver had been hard at work. There were a few trees down and I decided to take a closer look at its handiwork. I snapped the above photo as I explored.

Looking at this photo, I realize how much of an artist a beaver is. From huts and dams right down to the pattern of teeth marks on a downed tree, the evidence of the beaver’s hard work is beautiful. Beavers were made for chewing and building. They excel at that, and thus their job-well-done becomes a work of art.

I love experiencing the final result of people doing what they do best. Something as simple as the pancakes made by the top cook at the local cafe to the skyscraper designed by a famous architect to the simple but powerful WordPress plugin developed by a tinkering high-school student. Experiencing excellence, whether simple or complex, never gets old.

People (and animals) doing what they do best results in a masterpiece.

The awesome folks at XShot recently sent me one of their “XShot 2.0″ hand-held video/photo accessories. It allows you to place a smaller camera or flip-style camcorder on the end and extend it out a few feet in front of you, thus eliminating the need to hold your arm out when trying to do a self portrait. It actually extends further than your arm would allow (unless you’re Manute Bol), thus allowing for a very natural shot.

In today’s video, I take it out for a test session. This thing is going to be great for upcoming AnywhereMan vids, not to mention outings with my wife when we want to snap a pic of the two of us together.

For another review of the XShot, check out Phil Montero’s video on TheAnywhereOffice.com. He gives a nice description of how the XShot functions.

If you’re interested in buying one, just visit the XShot website and you can purchase it directly from them.