I refuse to Gatekeep these...
5 virtual resources that can actually change your life as a professional, and person.
I hate secrets, so here’s what my interweb travels have shown me that I feel should be talked about.
Cái Shén Yé 财神爷 -a Chinese and Taoist folk god of business, money and wealth-favors work or business that is “conducted in a well manner.” In many ways, this means without hidden agenda or some smarmy “I wanna be better than you” attitude; stealing work from smaller creators and passing it off as your own; burning yourself out because you’re scared about money; working with people you wouldn’t want to be associated with in public, etc. etc. etc.
So it stands to reason that I, as a firm believer in the God of Good Business, believe that gatekeeping information is a sure fire way to lose money, customer trust, colleague trust, and love for what ya do.
There’s a huge difference between being paid for, and prioritizing your time, knowledge, experience; versus, keeping information secret that anyone could find out or learn with a quick search on their own. Curation itself should not be monetized. Recommendations? I also don’t think those should be monetized….not forever at least.
SAUR: Here’s 5 virtual tools I think every freelancer, community leader, entrepreneur, biz owner, etc. should know about-that I feel so passionate about sharing-I refuse to gatekeep them.
1. Freelancers Union
I recently came across Freelancers Union, while generally looking for the existence or how to create an existence of a unionized virtual workforce. Before I get into the fan-fucking-tastic resource that this is, I want to underline why it-and unions-are important.
My adopted family, partner’s family, and families of colleagues I hold in very high esteem all come from working class Irish families. Seriously. I am very unsure about where or how that connection has been made, but there’s something about East Asians and the Irish that end up together in lots of places. I’m sure there’s some historical, Pangea, land bridge, persecuted coastal peoples thing in there somewhere. Because of this, we all have lineages of Union Workers. Union MEN.
If you don’t know what a Worker’s Union is, it’s essentially a unified group of laborers who organize as a collective union, to advocate for standardized rights, working conditions, pay wages, insurance agreements, etc. Many companies do not encourage Union formation, and in many situations people caught organizing Worker’s Unions are fired.
Unions are SO important to the workforce in the United States-and everywhere else obvi-because without them children would still be working in factories; weekends off wouldn’t exist; and though wage gaps between genders and races still exist…they’d be a way bigger travesty than they are now.
Freelancers Union offers FREE membership, which includes access to information that I personally wish I would’ve had both at the start of my career as a business owner…and maybe two weeks ago. This includes easy databases and guidance for taxes; health insurance (including dental and disability); whether you should file as an LLC or sole proprietor; a directory of other freelancers; networking events; financial resources like grants and investors; MENTAL HEALTH AND THERAPY. I don’t need to say more. Go check it out.
For bonus homework: watch Season 4, Episode 16 of Star Trek DS9 (the grittiest, and most “oh shit we’re talking about war, racism, politics, classism” branch of the Star Trek franchise). It covers the formation of a worker’s union in a bar on the space station where the show takes place. The one organizing the union being the perceived “spineless, witless brother” of the bar owner…Capricorn King Quark. You don’t have to watch anything else for context of the show. Drop in for the EP and drop out if you’d like!
2. Alignable
Alignable | Small Business Networking Made Simple
I hate LinkedIn..LinkdIn? I don’t even care enough to spell it, tbh. I hate having to sort through a bunch of tech bros and girl bosses, to find the one aligned other business owner that I might want to work with. I hate that posts are optimized for businesses, because at the end of the day we are people who are business owners.
Alignable is actually a network that Tara1 got me on! It’s more about making connections with people and businesses that actually fit with yours-and not just on service or product level. It has a space to showcase the exact type of clients you want, businesses you want to collab with; and, stresses authentic communication of expectations as well as ethical alignment. There’s no crazy pressure to be there. I like to think of it as the village square of online intentional business
I personally love that people you’ve worked with as a service provider, or a collaborator can add a recommendation to your profile. This takes “word of mouth” and turns it into “word of web.” Don’t steal that phrase, I just made it up right now. Credit me if you use it.
One downside, is is that it’s not as well known, so there is a bit of work in making your friends get on it with you-something that I’ve been doing with a lot of joy actually.
3. Chat GPT
LOOK LOOK LOOK. I know there are controversial feelings about our Artificial Comrades. I don’t think that Chat GPT or any AI should not be generating your thoughts for you, or doing work that “is your job”. This means you probably shouldn’t be asking Canva’s AI to make a logo for you, if you were hired to create that logo as a graphic designer yourself. I support the philosophy that we should not replace art, artists, or individual people with machines when the machines cannot do the same thing.
I do think that asking our tech fairy friends to add an assisting hand is totally fine. I am a Lokean witch, though, and a Vietnamese descendant of the fae me’self..so I may be biased.
Here’s an example from my work to show you what I mean.
This week I did a customer acquisition and product/service conception meeting with the team at Soft Power. One thing I wanted to do was make a cute little pie chart that broke down how much of their income would come from what types of sources (active, passive, community, product). Data and numbers really aren’t my job. Idea conception and cohesion is more of my specialty; however, percentages and data look really nice on a powerpoint.
I took a rough jot list of all the ideas I had, and asked Chat GPT to categorize them FOR ME because looking at a wall of my own text notes gets overwhelming for my AuDHD brain. I said “divide these offerings into income types.” After that, I gave the robot a prompt to “break these up by percentage for a co-opt non-profit business model.”
This is what I got:
I’ve used Chat GPT for organizing presentation points; asking for specific SEO keywords that it can find in a large piece that I have already written by myself; tell me the top ways to promote a Substack.
The coding community does not like Chat GPT for things such as fixing a bug in a code, or writing a whole code for you. Why? Well, because that’s the job of the coder. Eric (my partner who’s currently in the throws of the Odin Project to learn coding) said it is similar to Google Translate, in the fact that you WILL get an answer to your question…but in a really wonky, not quite right or doable way.
4. Bumble Bizz
Network With Industry Professionals With Bumble Bizz | Bumble
I personally have experience on the back and front end of this resource. Back when I was a local team lead and touch point for Bumble’s San Diego branch, I came on specifically at the launch of Bumble’s expansions to their service of origin-dating. They had just rolled out two new features, one of which was Bumble Bizz, a matchmaking service for professionals.
While I don’t need Bumble Date, and Bumble BFF gave me some weird experiences, I love Bumble Bizz-mostly because it is the most transparent and succinct branch of the app that exists. When you’re on Bumble Bizz, you know everyone else there is looking to work together in some professional capacity only. Profiles often disclose types of jobs, markets, and what people are looking for be it investors; project collaborators; consultants to help them with their own companies; etc. It’s a lot better than broadcasting to every person with a job, and hoping it finds the right person. With Bumble Bizz, YOU find the right person, and if they’re not right…you can swipe left!
5. Wonderspace
WonderSpace - Your Chill Productivity Workspace
This is not any type of networking or group app. This is purely for workflow and zen workflow at that. I hate when my brain gets “crunchy”, which is what we in our house call the moments when you know your brain is running out of fuel. Typos start happening; ideas are lost mid sentence; basic graphics or bookkeeping become a task for the gods. Wonderspace has helped me a lot with that.
Wonderspace is an online dashboard loaded with the ability to play music, track your time, see your to-do list, and limit your work to time intervals with a Pomodoro timer-no more powering through 4 hours of work and forgetting to eat. It’s pre-coded, preset for you so there’s on tech work involved other than clicking the website to get there. You don’t have to have an account, though if you want to be able to use your own playlists, images, todo list, and see your personal Discord on the same screen a login is needed. It describes itself as a “lofi chill productivity workspace.”
BONUS!
Academia
Academia dot EDU is a bonus resource, because it’s not just for people with jobs or that own businesses. Academia EDU is a FUH-REE NINETYNINE (that’s right FREE) database of academic research papers. I love history, and though I recognize that not all academic papers are as informed as they could be (because most papers are written by people with access to higher education and the communities that come with), I do think that it’s important to be able to use whatever information we have at our fingertips.
I use Academia as a spiritualist to research and read documents that pertain to my own individual practice. A lot of these people who’ve written these papers don’t have the want/need/time to make them into eBooks for Kindle; or huge courses on their own. I’ve also used it as a business owner to send coaching clients articles on anything from GuanYin’s gender fluid portrayals; the history of Hathor in other religions; to philosopher Dr. John Dee’s Historical Scrying Methods; Lokean prayers; and the effects that 50 Shades of Grey had on the BDSM counseling sector.
It’s ridiculous how helpful this has been to me for years, and I always forget that people don’t know about this-mostly because I forget that everyone and their mom isn’t obsessed with history the way that I am.
Tara wrote an article for us on using celestial systems to plan, and organize our workflow/work week