ALT Equals Remote Holiday 🪅

In keeping with the traditions of the ancient Norse, Happy Frigg's Day or Frigedæg!

Frigg was the goddess of love, beauty, and fertility. Frigg's Day evolved to Friday in english and was thought to be a lucky day associated with good fortune.

Friday is a day to celebrate in many cultures and faiths. It marks the start of the weekend and our days of rest. Well at least in theory, because for so many, the weekend isn't exactly as restful as it should be.

But, that's ok! Embrace it, accept it, and lean in.

Some things you can do to make it easier include being more intentional about your time. Think of all the things you'd love to do on the weekend, but have no frigging chance of doing, then accept defeat.

We suggest a hybrid approach. Schedule a long(er) lunch. Or a not-so-quiet meal with your in-laws. We're embracing reality, while landing a couple of counter-jabs.

Fun fact: Members of the Hey Rebekah team started practicing a 4-day workweek more than a decade ago. For the most part, no one ever noticed. Then, we continuously improved to a 2.9 day and now we're averaging a mediocre 1.7-1.9 days.

Our team is 100% remote. It's a conscious choice, and one we relish. Remote work allows us to escape the oft soul-crushing confines of an office in exchange for the purported comforts of our home.

There's no commute, which can take an average of 55 minutes a day. That equates to 23 hours a month or 12 days a year in saved time. A frigging vacation!

For some, avoiding long-winded stories about their colleagues' kids, weekends, or pets, is a bonus too. What about office politics you say? Well, the jury's still out on that one. Damned #watercooler channel in Slack.

Nevertheless, there are a bunch of pros and cons of remote work depending on your situation.

For so many self-employed professionals, working from home is a default setting. The thinking goes that productivity is going to thrive and we're going to magically get our entire backlog of work done.

Well, yes and no. Because at home, inevitably, life kicks in. It can be hard to find an interlude.

For us, the key to effective remote work is a system. We each need our own, because this isn't a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. Yours has to help you find the right balance between flow, never ending video calls, and the joy of being interrupted every 5 minutes.

Not to mention keeping our ADHD tendencies at bay.

These tools have both free and premium tiers. What's your productivity stack?

Ah, spreadsheets. For most, dreadful. Unless, you focus on accounting/finance or have a business consulting practice. Then, spreadsheets are your bread and butter.

But let's be real, they're not exactly user-friendly and haven't changed much in 40 years either.

Have you ever spent hours trying to figure out why your formulas aren't working? Or consolidating data from one sheet to the other and have the entire workbook crash? 🤦🏿‍♀️ We know we have.

For Hey Rebekah, we're looking for ways to improve the aggregation and analysis of our data. Not just to run the business, or keep track of money, but to mostly improve the product experience for our readers.

For this, we've been exploring Equals. It's a pretty cool way to collaborate on a data-integrated sheet. In our use case, we'll be able to connect directly to our Big Query data warehouse and perform analysis. It's inclusive too, in that it's for people who know SQL and for those with No SQL. See what we did there?

In the past, when working with high-growth companies and startups, we'd depend on more static financial models like this one here. Boring!

In the right scenario, Equals makes these static models obsolete with real-time data connections. It makes it easy for anyone to access and analyze the data. This is a huge opportunity to consider for your accounting/finance, data analysis, and or data science practice too. The applications are endless.

Head over to Equals and let us know what you think. We'll be open sourcing our Equals playbook soon, and will share specific examples on how you can make money with that.

ALT text. The HTML tag that some seem to use for keyword stuffing. But let's be real, that's not what it's really for and we need to do better.

ALT text (short for "alternative text") is used to describe images to people who are unable to see them on a screen. It's a way to make websites more accessible to people with visual impairments, who rely solely on screen readers.

While we've taken creative liberties with the ALT text in the example above, it remains a more appropriate description for accessibility than, anti-aging eye-cream.

Accessibility signals are increasing in SERP algorithms and it's a good idea for us to adapt. Especially since it improves the user experience for our friends with visual impairments.

It's that time of year again when we stop to enjoy the winter break. Some of us may be celebrating Christmas, or Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and even Festivus.

We wish everyone a very warm, slow, and special holiday season.

To you and yours, from us, and ours. We're grateful for your support and being a part of our journey. 👏🏽 ❤️ 🙌🏾

We'll be back to glow-up your inboxes on January 3, 2023. <Sign off with your own cheesy dad joke here>