Flexible Working Life

Photo by Carrot Creative

So I just joined twitter.
I’ve been avoiding it, mostly because
a) I didn’t see the point.  I mean, who cares if I’m cooking curry for dinner, or washing my socks?  I hate those things on Facebook and besides, I can never think of anything amusing to say.

And…

b) I didn’t understand how it worked. I know that’s a really lame excuse, but put it together with point a) above and the motivation for understanding the programme is none existent.

Then two things happened.
The first is that my friend is about to have a baby, any day now.  And because I don’t see this friend in person on a daily basis, or call her on a daily basis, I won’t know exactly when she’s had her baby.  To solve this problem (my friend has a lot of on-line friends) she’s going to ‘tweet’ the announcement.  Now that really is something to twitter about, so it would be good to follow her on twitter.

The other thing that made me join twitter,  is that I’ve noticed that more and more freelancers seem to be using twitter as a platform for gaining more work.  This post in particular highlighted the potential to me, and also describes what to do in really simple terms.
I think the best points in the article are to ‘be helpful and kind,’ (always a winner) and I love the bit that explains how ‘work will find you.’
I understand that this is a slow transition and you need to work with twitter, follow people and offer interesting information, so I’m going to give it a go.  I have, however, just had my first stumbling block when I realised that my user name had been taken.