Many dot com moguls, freelance writers, and other people who work from home are prone to burnout, because it is far too easy to accept more work than you can handle. Work-at-home professionals can suffer from an illusion of freedom, leading to a guilt trip if they are not working at every possible opportunity. Burnout is one of those things that sneaks up on you without you really realizing it, and that’s why you need to keep an eye out for signs that you are suffering from burnout.

After recognizing that you may be overworking yourself, how can you go about rectifying the situation? What I have outlined below are five key strategies that you can try to minimize the effects of burnout and to ultimately overcome it.

Exercise
Research has shown that regular exercise can be just as effective as antidepressants, helping to improve both your mood and your energy levels. By participating in physical activity on a regular basis — particularly cardiovascular exercise — you will generally be happier and more energetic. This will help you get through your day a little easier and you won’t feel as exhausted all the time. You have no excuse for not exercising regularly. Don’t forget to get plenty of sleep too!

Get a Hobby
I’ve talked before about the importance of taking well-deserved breaks and these are a great way to combat burnout. It doesn’t really matter what your hobby is, so long as it does a good job of getting your mind off of work for a few hours each week. Join a sports team, start collecting stamps, watch a movie, or play some Wii. Whatever it is, don’t forget to maintain that healthy life-work balance.

Learn to Say No
Working from home is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, your income is theoretically only limited by how much you want to work. On the other hand, if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. As a result, many freelancers start to take on any projects that are offered to them and they end over-extending themselves. You don’t need to accept every paying gig! You’d be amazed how liberating it is to just say no. Subject matter doesn’t interest you? Payout level is too low? Just say no and find more interesting (and better paying) work elsewhere.

Set Your Schedule
This may or may not be a good strategy for everyone, but if you have a hard time convincing yourself to start work in the morning or you find yourself working well into the wee hours of the night, it might be a good idea to give yourself a set working schedule. Yes, I realize that part of the appeal of working from home is that your schedule is much more flexible, but if you don’t have the mindset and self-control, you might need a set working schedule. This also works for freelancers who feel they don’t work enough.

Family and Friends
Serving as your checks and balances, it is often a good idea to get the third party perspective from your friends and family. You naturally have a huge vested interest in yourself and in your business, so ask those around you if they think you are working too much or working too little. Ask if you’ve appeared more restless, lethargic, or disgruntled lately. These sobering views can remind you of the importance of spending time with these people; don’t chase money for its own sake.

If you’re anything like me, then you probably have multiple email addresses. You might have one that you use for business purposes, another for personal contacts, and another “junk” email address that you use to sign up for various online services. You might also use email as a way to subscribe to Beyond the Rhetoric. There are clearly reasons why someone would want to have several email addresses, but accessing them all on a daily basis can seriously stunt your productivity.

You may have also noticed that Google dominates my life, because I’ve come to rely on several of their services above and beyond the search engine. The most notable (and useful) is Gmail. I love how it can arrange all your messages into threaded conversations. I love how you can “tag” your messages, instead of shoving them into discrete folders. The only problem is that I don’t want everyone to know my Gmail address. So, how can one go about “hiding” this?

You can actually use Gmail to manage all of your email addresses. What I mean by this is that you can send out a message from the Gmail interface, but have the “from” field contain your other email address, perhaps from your own domain or a Gmail competitor. By having messages sent to these other addresses forwarded to your Gmail, you effectively get a one-stop shop for all your emails. Handy, right? Let’s go through the setup process.

1. Forward your email to your Gmail address: You may or may not want to do this with all your email addresses, so I’ll leave that to your own discretion.
 

2. Log into your Gmail account: That’s obvious enough.
 

3. Click on Settings: Located in the top-right corner.

 

4. Click on Accounts

 

5. Add Another Email Address: By clicking on the link highlighted with the red arrow, you will open up another window with the next step in the process. Note the dialog pointed out by the blue arrow. I recommend that you tick the first option, because this makes it so that if an email is originally sent to abc@domain.com, for example, your reply will look like it’s coming from abc@domain.com instead of your Gmail address. This makes it seamless for the person on the other end of the conversation.

 

6. Enter Your Email Address: It is also here that you would set your outgoing name and a different “reply-to” address (optional)

 

7. Send Verification: Confirm that you have entered the correct email address and then click on the button marked ‘Send Verification’.

 

8. Click on Verification Link: A message is dispatched to your email of choice. In that message, you will see both a confirmation code and a verification link. Click on the link to verify your email address or enter the confirmation code in the window that results after step 7 above.

 

And you’re done! This very simple process can seriously streamline your day, because you no longer have to check all of your different email addresses.

 
You think you have mad ping pong skills? These guys take a passion and turn it into an obsession, bouncing ping pong balls off of walls, sugar containers and anything else you can imagine, getting the little white ball to land in the smallest of cups. Talk about dedication! I wonder how many takes it took to complete the four-minute clip…

I love taking the opportunity each week to provide some link love back to the blogosphere. Because I work from home, I don’t get much in terms of office politics, but it also means that it’s a little harder to develop a sense of community. That’s why dot com moguls still need the real world, but even if you don’t have the chance to leave your home office each day, you can still network with like-minded individuals.

Here are a few posts from blogs that I read on a regular basis. Thanks for the sanity!

Chris Bibey is a freelance writer like me and I have nothing but the utmost respect for him. We approach our respective businesses in a slightly different way, attracting different clientele, but it’s great to know that there’s another freelance writer out there going through much the same issues as I do. Chris recently came to recognize that the majority of affiliate marketers are male and then he came to wonder whether there were more male or female freelance writers. Because of the rising work-at-home-mom population, I’m inclined to think it’s the latter. I personally know more female freelance writers than males.

David Pitlyuk is one sneaky bugger. He entered a contest hosted by Derek Semmler, wherein the site that referred the most traffic to Derek’s blog would win $106.34. Some people tried banners. Other tried blog posts. David did those, but the way he won the contest involved a different strategy altogether. Learn how he took the cash from Derek. Evil!

Mike Huang of Blogging-Ads recognizes the importance of approaching a niche, sure, but he also feels that rambling posts will be a hit. Take Beyond the Rhetoric, for example. The tagline to this blog says that I’ll talk about freelance writing and personal development, which I do, but I also ramble on movies, food, video games and other topics. Rambling posts give your visitor’s a better look at you as a complete individual.

Courtney Tuttle is a well-respected expert in the area of Internet marketing, but that didn’t make him immune from the PageRank smackdown a short while back. After some adjustments, Courtney was able to get a PageRank refund from Google, but he also noticed that John Chow’s PR got slapped even harder.

Derek Semmler of Dad Balance, the same guy who awarded the $100+ to David Pitlyuk, reminds us that happiness is priceless. Most of us work hard for our money, but you shouldn’t forget about the little things that make you happy. Even though there is no Folgers in his cup, Derek is happier than ever now that his wife has transitioned to being a stay-at-home mom (SAHM) again. And so is she.

It goes without saying that Google Adsense is one of the most popular monetization methods for all kinds of websites and Google knows it. As such, they have imposed an update to their terms of service agreement on us. When you log into your Adsense account, you will be presented with the screen above, getting you to agree to the new terms.

Normally, something like this would fly under the radar and most people wouldn’t notice. However, this new TOS agreement includes a stipulation that will affect all web publishers: we all now need an explicitly stated privacy policy on all of our sites that use Google Adsense. More specifically, we need to tell all of our visitors that third parties, like Adsense, may be placing cookies on their computers without their knowledge and then we have to inform them of their different cookie management options.

In the new Google Adsense Terms and Conditions agreement it reads:

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that complies with applicable privacy and data protection laws and that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

You don’t need to have a privacy policy published on your blog right now, but you will soon. Scrolling to the bottom of the TOS, you’ll see this:

In case you can’t read that, you have until May 25, 2008 to accept the new TOS. I don’t have a problem with this, per se, but wouldn’t it have been nice if Google provided their publishers with a sample privacy policy? Most of us aren’t legal types, so we may or may not know exactly what needs to be included in a proper privacy policy.

The other major announcement in the Adsense TOS involves what they call Gadget Ads. These are “rich media” ads that incorporate “data feeds, maps, images, audio, video, Flash, HTML or JavaScript in a single creative.” Yup, that’s what we need… more flashing banners selling us on Zwinky, smilies, and MySpace templates.

Digg is probably one of the most popular social bookmarking sites on the ‘net, especially among the more technologically-inclined. If you manage to get one of your blog posts onto the front page of Digg, you will be on the receiving end of a massive deluge of traffic. That’s why people have even coined the term “Digg effect”, typically referring to how your server will likely crash from the number of visitors accessing your site. That effect is usually bigger than what StumbleUpon can provide in terms of site traffic.

As it turns out, Yahoo! wants a piece of this pie as well, but they’re not submitting a story to Digg (though I wouldn’t doubt that a few stories about this development will show up on Digg). Quite the opposite, in fact, because they have officially launched the open beta of Yahoo! Buzz. In their own words…

Yahoo! Buzz features the most popular stories right now, determined by people around the Web. A story’s Buzz Score is based on your votes, searches, emails, and more. Stories with the highest Buzz Score may be displayed on the Yahoo! homepage.

Sounds familiar, right? That’s because Yahoo! Buzz is essentially a clone of Digg. You submit a story and hope it gets voted onto the front page. The critical difference is that the number of votes is not the only determining factor; as you can tell from the description above, Yahoo! also takes searches and emails into account. I can see how they’d keep track of the former, but how do they account for the latter? Do they scan all incoming and outgoing messages from Yahoo! Mail to see if a certain URL has been mentioned? Scary thought.

The layout of Buzz is in line with the rest of the Yahoo! corporate image and I personally find the interface to be more intuitive and “average Joe” friendly than Digg, but that’s probably not enough for Yahoo! Buzz to, if you’ll pardon the pun, generate any real buzz. I don’t know anyone who still uses Yahoo! for searches, news, or… anything, really. Google’s growth is just out of control.

I wonder, though, if this Microsoft-Yahoo deal goes through, will Microsoft pump some major funds into marketing the new social news service? Will the combined powers of Yahoo! and MSN Search be enough to topple the big G? On the flip side, should we be expecting a Digg clone from Google soon too? Nah, they’ll probably just buy Digg from Kevin Rose.