How to survive working on the internet

If you spend your working life on the internet then sometimes things can become a little challenging, especially if you're working from home. Without the structure of an office job you can easily get sucked down the electric rabbit holes of YouTube, Wikipedia and Reddit, and even when you manage to get some work done, if it attracts attention then you can find yourself on the receiving end of non-stop spam, recruiter emails and the inevitable LinkedIn notifications.  

In this talk from Generate New York in April, Tim Holman reveals some of his unlikely techniques for coping with life on the internet. A sarcastic Australian with a love for all things strange and quirky online, he notes that on the web deal with a lot of odd things every day that our ancestral neanderthalic instincts haven't evolved to handle, but he does his best to handle them anyway.

Over the next 40 minutes you'll learn some of his excellent tricks for dealing with day-to-day life on the internet, including how he messed with recruiters by sending out fake resumes for Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker, and by setting up RecruiterCatcher.com to try to get them to pay to bypass his spam filters.

He also reveals his strategy for avoiding cabin fever while working home: creating Buddy, a sarcastic talking Chrome plugin that commented on whatever web pages he had open, and then inviting his friends to add actions to its database. You can guess how that worked out.

Tim also reveals his current project: Procrastodoro, similar to the Pomodoro Technique, but as an aid to procrastination, which he views as a vital tool in his working life as well as a great way to keep the house clean.

Watch this video and at the very least you'll come away with the knowledge that you're not the only person who blows off a lot of their working life on pointless rubbish, and just maybe you'll feel a bit better about yourself. 

And if it's maybe inspired you to take control of the part of the day when you're not procrastinating or just staring into space, get yourself to Generate London on 21-23 September, when you can take in practical workshops and insightful talks from some of the biggest names in web design and frontend development, including Jeff Veen, Mike Kus, Ida Aalen and Brendan Dawes.

Best of all, if you book on Thursday 4 August, you can take advantage of our flash sale and get 50% off your ticket price. Learn more at the Generate London site, or head to the main Generate site to find out about other upcoming events.