Tariro

A few months ago I was supporting a friend at an event she was speaking at, manning the table where we were showcasing and selling her book. As people were coming in and out of the event, someone who I know from the internet came through to the table, as we were taking a break, to greet her. My friend introduced us. I knew the person well…from the internet. So I immediately (and excitedly) made sure that’s known. Then my friend said to him: “This is Tariro. You know Tariro though right? She talks about remote work online” Immediately, his face lit up: “Tariro Makina? Of course! She inspired me to look for a remote role for myself” I cannot even begin to describe how star struck, humbled and honoured I felt all at the same time because this person built a platform that grew to become a major influential voice in Zim’s digital spaces since the days of expensive data bundles and slower internet. You know when I write these blog posts or record my podcast episodes, I have no idea where they will land. Sometimes I even fear how they will land. But I am always hoping that they lead someone to landing remote opportunities for themselves. This moment at this event was one of the highlights of my year, a year that’s not even over yet. Because this is exactly why I do what I do. Today, I want to talk about what led to this moment, this conversation. Relationships. If there is one thing I DID NOT want to do when I started out working online over a decade ago, it was talking to people. I honestly felt like it was a complete waste of my time. I remember I had a client who used to do a lot of events. I always used to cringe inside when she would want to introduce me to people at her events. Like why? Can’t I just sit in a corner and chew on some snacks please? Yet, a couple of these introductions would lead me to people who were interested in working with me. And those people would lead me to more people who were interested in working with me. The situation wasn’t any different even in my own inner circle of family and friends. I used to dread talking about how I was trying to get clients for my Virtual Assistant services at the time. Even though the people around me were so keen to, not just know more about this mysterious Virtual Assistant thing, but to also support me through referrals, sharing my posts or even just hyping me up for days on end. In the early days, the thought of asking for this level of support honestly made me feel some level of shame and embarrassment. Why? Because I would tell myself, Eish…people are going to think I am really struggling and desperate. Well, Sisi…you are struggling and desperate and you can do with all the support you can get. It took years for me to get over these nonsense thoughts and actually welcome the support of friends and family who would cheer me on, share my posts, refer me to their own friends and family, or hire me to work with them without me feeling like I was swallowing a bar of soap. It took years for me to realise that sometimes we look too far when seeking out opportunities, especially in the early stages of diving into these waters. There are so many opportunities around us. There are people we know who could use our skills to solve problems in their ventures. So, if you are looking to land your first remote work opportunity, why are you not leveraging those relationships? Now, maybe you’re reading this thinking, but Tariro, I don’t have a circle. No past clients, no warm contacts, nobody in my corner who works remotely. I hear you. But you can build your own circle from the ground. This is exactly what places like LinkedIn are for. Start following people who are already doing the kind of work you want to do. Join the communities, the groups, the WhatsApp spaces where remote workers gather. Comment on posts that speak to you. Reach out to someone walking the same path and simply say hi. Ask questions. You don’t need a network to start. You need to start and your network will grow from there. Some of my most valuable relationships began as nothing more than a comment, a reply, a DM or a “your post really spoke to me” message. Sometimes that’s all it takes to plant the first seed. So if your circle feels small or non-existent right now, your first move isn’t to leverage relationships you don’t have. It’s to go and find your people and then build and nurture relationships with them. When you’re new to remote work (and I’m especially seeing this post-pandemic) you think the whole game is applying to as many jobs as you possibly can. You fire off applications, refresh the job boards, and hope someone somewhere picks your CV out of a pile of three hundred. And please don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with this. You do need to apply. You do need to put yourself out there. But from my experience, some of the best opportunities I have ever gotten in over a decade of doing this did not come from a job board. They came from a person. Someone who had worked with me before. Someone who had seen me show up in a community. Someone who remembered a conversation we had, or a comment I left, or some small thing I helped them with months ago when there was nothing in it for me. Sometimes it was simply a cousin or a friend who knew what I did and mentioned my name to the right person at the right time. This is what we call a referral,

Over the past 18 or so months I have tried to be very intentional about having more conversations with people who are either working or aspiring to work remotely. The reason behind this is that when I started this blog back in March 2024, one of the areas I was so passionate about shedding light on and providing value in is remote work. Something I have noticed in many of these conversations is that a number of aspiring remote workers assume the transition from in-person to remote work is plug and play. The telling result of this is how they enter the remote opportunities space with the very same skillset (and probably mindset) that worked for them when they were looking for an in-person job. Unfortunately, they quickly get frustrated because they realise something: They are invisible. Nobody is responding to their applications or their efforts to promote their services. In the end, they start to wonder whether remote work isn’t just a myth. But unlike in-person roles, remote work demands a different set of skills in addition to what we have always known. The space is competitive for a start, so if you are going to get noticed, you are going to have to be creative in how you show up. And I’m not just talking about any skills in general today. I’m talking about digital skills. Before we go further, let me be clear about what I actually mean by “digital skills,” because the phrase gets thrown around a lot and people imagine something far more intimidating than the reality. I’m not talking about coding, or design, or anything that needs extensive training and a certificate. So what ARE these digital skills? In the context of remote work, digital skills simply means your ability to use everyday digital tools to do your work, share it, and communicate with people you may never meet in person. That’s it. It’s knowing how to collaborate on a document, organise files so others can find them, show up properly on a video call, and keep communication flowing when you can’t just turn to the person next to you. Because these are the ordinary, practical things that hold a remote team together and the good news is they’re completely learnable. You, like a lot of other people I have come across will probably be shocked by this: the most important ones aren’t complicated. They’re not expensive to acquire. And you almost certainly already have the door key in your pocket. Your Google Account. Yes! That account you use for Gmail, YouTube, the one tied to your smartphone (especially if you use an Android). Almost everyone with a phone or WhatsApp has one. What most people don’t realise is that single Google account gives you free access to an entire workspace that remote teams around the world use every single day. Google Docs. Google Sheets. Google Drive. Google Meet. Calendar. And this is to name just a few. Tools you ALREADY own and most likely aren’t using to even a fraction of their potential. I want you to realise the digital skills that are tied to tools inside your Google account that can support your remote work journey starting today. 1. Working in the cloud, where your team can actually reach you In an office, your work has a physical home. The file is on the central server or shared cabinet down the hall, or worse, it’s on your desktop and someone leans over to grab it. If you’re stuck, you turn your screen around. Proximity covers a lot of gaps. Remote work strips all of that away. Nobody is walking over to your desk, because there is no desk. If your work lives on your laptop’s hard drive, as far as your team is concerned, it doesn’t exist. This is the shift most people miss: your value isn’t just the work you produce, it’s whether your work is findable and shareable the moment someone needs it. That’s what a cloud document like Google Docs actually solves. Collaboration. Two or more people in different global locations editing the same paragraph on a document. Comments left overnight that you wake up to. A “suggesting” mode that lets your manager guide your work without rewriting it. In an office these things happen in conversation. Remotely, they tend to happen in the document. So the document is where you have to be fluent. 2. Organising shared space, so people aren’t waiting on you to find things In a physical office, disorganisation is forgivable because it’s recoverable. Someone can shout across the room, “where’s the March report?” and you’ll dig it out of a drawer. Remotely, that same question becomes a message that sits unanswered for three hours because of a time zone difference, and now an entire piece of work is stalled in Australia waiting on you to wake up in Zimbabwe. Multiply that across a week and you become the bottleneck everyone quietly feels. This is why knowing your way around Google Drive is not admin busywork. Can you share a folder instead of attaching fifteen documents? Can you set permissions so the right people have access and the wrong ones don’t? Can you build a folder structure someone else can navigate without you in the room? The person who does this well becomes quietly indispensable and “indispensable” is exactly what you want to be when teams are deciding who to keep. 3. Basic spreadsheets, because data is how remote teams stay on the same page Let me take the fear out of this one first: you do not need to be an analyst. You don’t need complicated formulas. In an office, a lot of tracking happens out loud. Who’s doing what, where things stand, what’s left and it gets sorted in a quick stand-up or a hallway catch-up. Remote teams can’t rely on that. The shared sheet becomes the conversation. It’s the live, single source of truth that everyone checks instead of asking. So

My conversations with aspiring remote professionals usually start out the same way: an anxious greeting, then a list of all their qualifications, then the most famous question in my DMs. “Tariro, what can I do with this?” I am sure a lot of them are surprised by my response, because I hardly ever talk about the qualifications they have just listed. Why? Because in the global remote work space, this hardly matters. What matters far more is what you can actually do, and how you can add value to people’s businesses and lives. Having a particular qualification doesn’t automatically qualify you for a particular job. Proving you can do the work, with evidence of real delivery, does that job far better. This usually gets people in a bind. “But Tariro, I want to do work around my degree.” I understand. I am sure you have been made to believe that this is how life works. I used to think that too. So let me tell you a short story about my own journey. How I Got Here I started working when I was around 12 or 13 years old. The job was to do anything my dad told me to do in the family event equipment hire business. And I mean anything. Over the years I was a receptionist, a cleaner, a customer service representative, a personal assistant, an executive assistant, a gatewoman, an IT support technician and a bookkeeper. When duty called, I would even go and help set up tents, tables and chairs. I did this for more than a decade, during school holidays and later during semester breaks at college. After college, having studied Computer Science, I landed my first “proper” job as a graduate trainee at a local bank. That became a career I eventually cut short, because starting an online business seemed like a good idea. A little over three years in, I walked away from that too and launched myself as a Virtual Assistant. A lot of people wondered why I would make such a transition. I was in middle management at a bank and my career appeared to be on the rise. I can tell you why for free. Being a Virtual Assistant let me use the skills I had gathered over the years in a far more creative way, and for a much wider audience. To be honest, I didn’t realise it at the time, but I wasn’t reaching for what I had learned as an IT Applications Manager. I was reaching all the way back to the skills I picked up sitting at the reception desk outside my father’s office, serving clients who were planning their events. The Mistake That Cost Me Years I had entered a space where nobody really cared that I had a Computer Science degree, or that I had worked through major banking system implementations, upgrades and integrations with some of the most influential financial platforms in the world. In fact, all of that confused people. So I found myself in a very strange place. Deep down, I knew I had what it took to serve as a VA. But I struggled to position myself as one, because my mind was so fixated on the degree and on what I thought the degree had qualified me to do. The result? In my first few years in business I struggled to find clients, because people simply could not understand what I was, or what I could do for them. A few years on, after learning from more seasoned Virtual Assistants, investing in coaching for myself, and quite simply trying again, I realised something. I had not been wrong to become a VA. I had been wrong about where I started the conversation. Every time I led with my qualifications, I buried the most important piece of the puzzle: what I actually knew. My skills, and how they could help people. That was where I was supposed to start all along. That was my point of strength. That was the zone I needed to serve from. “But Isn’t Computer Science What You Know?” At this point you might be wondering: but Tariro, surely Computer Science and your years as an IT Applications Manager are what you know? Isn’t that exactly the thing you should be leading with? My answer is both yes and no. Yes, because that training is real and it shaped how I think. Computer Science gave me a way of seeing systems, breaking problems down, and being patient with things that don’t work on the first try. I genuinely use that every single day to this day, in every role I have found myself in. But also no, because a degree is not the same as a skill. I can hold a Computer Science degree and not be able to write a single clean line of code, while someone who taught themselves code in their bedroom as a teenage hobby runs circles around me. The certificate proves I sat through a programme. It does not prove I can do the thing. Clients are not buying my programme. They are buying the thing. They are buying what you can do for them with the thing and how you can solve their problems with the thing. And the deeper truth is this: the most valuable thing I “know” was never on my transcript. It was learned at that reception desk long before university. It is knowing how to make a stressed client feel calm. How to listen for what someone actually needs versus what they first asked for. How to give a client what they ask for by probing into their desired outcomes. How to keep a dozen moving parts organised when everyone around me is panicking. That is what I was really selling. The degree was just the loudest line on my CV but it honestly was not the most useful. The Skills That Actually Travel When I finally looked honestly at my odd collection of

Today I woke up and didn’t feel like being here. At my desk I mean 😅 I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to take out my laptop. I just didn’t want to do anything all thanks to exhaustion. I have had a rough week thanks to sleep deprivation. Yeah, some days are like that. And today I want to talk about those days and other ugly parts of remote work and freelancing we don’t often talk about. If you have found yourself wondering or even asking whether it’s always rainbows and sunshine in the remote work world, the answer is ‘No’. Keep reading to find out the unspoken truths a lot of us quietly carry. Sleep Deprivation & Boundary Creep I figured let me start with this one because it’s poking at me the hardest right now. Working remotely on multiple projects with multiple clients singlehandedly can take its toll on you. If you are having to juggle client work across different timezones, its only a matter of time before you start experiencing some fatigue and risking burnout. Then there is the boundary creep. Let me explain this one. You know many of us remote work professionals like to talk about how we have so much freedom. But what many of us do not like to admit is how this freedom often backfires and translates to more time spent in our corner offices pouring in more hours into our work, and less and less into the life around us. This is often true of myself especially lately as I have been working on multiple projects with multiple clients. I have found myself working from around 9am to 9pm, only breaking to go pick up my son from school and sometimes even waking up in the middle of the night to meet some deadlines. The result of such a routine is not pleasant. Less quality time spent with my child even though we are living in the same house and that can also come with its own consequences. And don’t even get me started on how sluggish and irritable I feel when I haven’t slept well. The Pressure to Always Be On My clients in the US are most active in the later parts of the day. My clients Down Under are most active when I am supposed to be lost in my dreams. And with the rest of my clients in between we are trying to find the best time that is not lunchtime or school run for them or myself. Because I work from home and need to serve and show up for all of my clients, in the best and fairest way possible, I find myself struggling to seperate work and rest. Even when I do make time to rest, I have this guilt that tends to creep in and a little voice that seems to whisper that I could be doing more with my time. I feel like the pressure I put on myself sometimes is a little too much and I know I am not the only one who has realised that they have to try a little extra hard to be intentional about giving themselves that downtime. The Feast or Famine Cycle Unless you are employed in a full time position, income in remote work and freelancing can be quite inconsistent. One month you are literally turning down work, and another you are getting anxious over an invoice you sent 5 minutes ago and are already wondering whether it got lost in the wind. Even in good months, you can find yourself getting anxiety regarding what lies ahead in the coming months because bills are consistent and don’t stop piling up. This can make it difficult to make long term financial plans because you need to create a huge buffer for those down months and plan for expenses that would need to be covered. No matter how old you are in the freelancing and remote work scene, you know this cycle can drive you mad! OK, let me speak for myself on this one. It may not be true for everyone. Personally, sometimes it just makes me want to pull my hair out and it’s honestly nobody’s fault. It comes with the journey. Isolation and Disconnection Some time last year I went through an episode of loneliness in my work. I longed for networking and human connection real badly and this was actually one of the reasons I found myself applying to get into a postgrad degree program. When you work remotely, there are hardly any water cooler chats and sometimes we take those casual check ins for granted. It’s easy to go for days without any meaningful interaction, especially if you live alone. And before you know it, your mental health is taking a hit and you are wondering why you are chronically sad. It’s the disconnection from others and unless you are intentional about building relationships and connections with others beyond your laptop, you will find yourself battling loneliness at heightened levels. Unstable Support Systems I always tell my aspiring remoties that you are not just looking for remote work. You are running a business. And unfortunately, it’s the business of you by you, for you and most of the times, with just you. You have to do everything. If something breaks, crashes, or glitches… there’s no IT guy. There’s just you, Google and ChatGPT. You are your own tech support, admin, customer service, marketing, sales, even therapist! Juggling these multiple hats can be overwhelming. I have days when I just don’t want to create content for LinkedIn, when writing a post honestly feels like a chore. But guess what? That’s all on me. I can’t make anybody else accountable for that unless I am paying them to make that happen. The Illusion of Flexibility Do you remember my article, ‘Beyond the laptop on the beach‘? When people hear remote work, they immediately think FREEDOM. Sure, I

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post about How to Get Remote Work Clients in Zimbabwe. It garnered a lot of attention and if I’m being honest, it also stirred up a mix of emotions, both from others and myself. Some of it was excitement, some disbelief, some skepticism and a little bit of critique. But the reason I shared that post was really to offer ideas and insight into what has worked for me in the 10+ years I’ve been working remotely both as a full-time employee and a freelancer. What I probably didn’t share back in January was that I was actually transitioning again. I had just stepped out of a full-time remote role and was returning to full-time freelancing and running my Online Business Management (OBM) services under my own business. As far as client contracts go, I was pretty much back to starting from zero. Fast forward to the end of June, the halfway mark of the year, I found myself doing some deep reflection. In fact, I had started reflecting back in April because, as any business owner knows, you start seeing what’s working and what’s not possibly right there at the 3-4 month mark.  So, here we are. I’d like to share with you a behind-the-scenes look at how I generated income remotely in this first half of 2025, partly for transparency, but also just to show you what’s possible, diversity of income streams and also the power of community, networking and maintaining visibility.   A Little Context On My Life and Work Setup I live in Harare, Zimbabwe, and I’m a co-parent to a toddler. I work 100% from home in rented accommodation. My internet connection is from Liquid Technologies, and I use the Pay-As-You-Go fibre billing model which has been working well for me since I decided to be more intentional (read: strict) about how I use my internet in the home.   My workday typically starts at 8:30 AM after school drop-off and ends around 7 PM. In between, I take breaks for meals, errands, or the school run. Most days, I’m seated at my laptop for about 7–8 hours whether or not I have client projects I am working on. More of that last part on another day. Now, let’s dive into the remote work income sources that contributed to keeping the lights on for me.  Income Source 1: Expert AI Training (40%) What It Involved: I worked as an AI trainer and data labeller with a global organisation called Pareto. Each project had its own structure, but most involved reviewing, labelling, or generating content for AI training. Even though you are registered as an Independent Contractor with Pareto, you have to apply and qualify to join each project and most times, you start out in a trial phase. The work is paid based on approved submissions, so quality matters deeply. You can’t just submit mediocre or substandard work and hope that it will be approved.  AI Training and Data Labelling was new territory for me, but I jumped in with an open mind and learned as I went. The projects were quite challenging but I learnt a lot along the way.  How I Landed It: Sometime in February, I met with someone at the WIDB Digital Skills Training of Trainers event. Later after this event, she reached out to me having realised that I am into remote work and recommended that I follow a post that she found in a Facebook group where women from Zimbabwe were creating a community to discuss remote work opportunities. Following her encouragement, I joined a WhatsApp group for Zimbabwean women interested in remote work. About a month or so later, someone from that group shared a Pareto project opportunity. I nearly didn’t apply (imposter syndrome is the pits I tell you), but with some encouragement from the woman who posted it, I went for it and made it in. Since then, I’ve successfully joined three other Pareto projects and managed to work on them as an independent contractor. Pros: Cons: Income Source 2: Web Design (25%) What It Involved: I offered starter WordPress website design for small businesses and startups. Most sites were around five pages, designed to give businesses a professional online presence without overly complex features. I was targeting mostly businesses that were getting online for the first time and also those that had tried to DIY their websites but got overwhelmed along the way.  How I Landed It: At the start of the year, I told my network of friends and family that I was actively focused on growing my web design portfolio. I shared my offer directly in their WhatsApp DMs and they went on to share with their friends and connections. From there, the projects started coming in. Some came from people I knew directly, others from those they referred me to. It has been growing organically from simple conversations and follow-ups. Pros: Cons: Income Source 3: OBM Services (17%) What It Involved: This is actually my signature service offering. As an Online Business Manager (OBM), I help business owners run their day-to-day operations, manage their teams, and implement key projects. In the first half of the year, I led special projects for an online community, started working on a podcast launch project, and supported backend operations for a growing digital business. I use a range of project management, automation, time management, collaboration and workflow management tools to help deliver value for my clients.  How I Landed It: This work came through referrals: past clients, colleagues, and friends who know my skills and trusted me to deliver. They found out that I was offering these services through the posts I was putting up on my social media channels, mainly LinkedIn and WhatsApp.  Pros: Cons: Income Source 4: VA/Admin Services (8%) What It Involved: Not sure if you know this but let me say it again…just in case. I actually started out in remote work

If you’ve been wondering why I’ve been quiet for nearly a month, I explain it all in the podcast episode linked above. But, in the meantime, here’s the story of how, I, someone who helps founders and business owners bring clarity and momentum to their ideas, got tangled in a web of my own. The Year Started With So Much Hope (And Unexpected Fear 😰) As 2025 began, I was transitioning out of my full-time remote role and back into running my online business serving multiple clients. I was excited. I had missed the thrill of working on diverse projects with clients from around the world. I saw it as a chance to reconnect with the remote work scene, something I had been longing (and procrastinating) to do for a while. But I was also terrified. I was scared of the unknown. I was scared of not having a predictable and regular paycheck. I was scared of not knowing how I’d find new clients in this new algorithm, ATS, tips and tricks, game-the-system driven world. But I chose to show up anyway. I had been mentally preparing myself for a couple of weeks, and when the time came, I hit the ground running fast. OK, maybe a little too fast…😂 The Passion Projects That Nearly Burned Me Out One of the first things I pursued was something I’d been feeling called to do for a while: coaching and mentoring aspiring remote workers on a somewhat large scale or bigger platform. This is something I had been wanting to do since I relaunched this blog last year in March. I’ve worked remotely for over a decade, and I wanted to share everything I’ve learned. No gatekeeping. No fluff. Just the honest, unfiltered truth, lessons and advice. It felt like the right time to dive into this mission because, hey, I now had more time. So I opened up my calendar to free 30-minute calls with anyone curious about remote work, especially from Zimbabwe. I also had an invitation to those who were willing to work with me further as part of a paid group coaching class or one-on-one. The response for the 30-minute calls was overwhelming, especially after the post about finding remote clients in Zim gained traction. My inbox and calendar were filled up. Before I knew it, I had done nearly 50 calls in a very short space of time. I was exhausted! Something I had started with the hope of adding value to the remote work community fast became unsustainable. I scaled back to one call a day, and eventually removed the free coaching calls from my booking page altogether. That wasn’t all. If you remember, from my last post, I also started Digital Skills Training this year. Again, there was an amazing response from my community and I had over 150 women enrolled. We’re actually just wrapping up with the first cohort but I must confess, I underestimated what was required of me running this large cohort and have since decided to go on a break before starting the next one. I genuinely love helping others and always want to make time. I would hate for anyone to walk out of my coaching and training and feel like they wasted their time and got zero value. Of course, it’s inevitable because our expectations not always the same. But I try to give as much as I can. And I guess that is where it gets sticky sometimes… As much as I love helping others, I realised I had to draw boundaries. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be much of me left to show up for my client work. This is the work that is and should remain my priority at the moment. And this is honestly the work that pays the bills. That was the first big red flag: I was giving too much of myself to something that wasn’t supposed to be my full-time focus. Chasing Quick Wins and Losing Myself In The Process Next came the scramble to generate income. I started offering quick-turnaround services like web design projects, social media management, anything that could get me clients easily and quickly. And it worked… for a while. But slowly, it started to feel off. You see, I spent a lot of time and energy in seeking out these quick turnaround projects and completely neglected something important along the way. I was trying to be everywhere, do everything, serve everyone. Along the way, I lost clarity in all my messaging and completely neglected promoting the core value I knew I could deliver for business owners outside of these quick turnaround services. I started to experience stress, a little confusion and a lot of burnout. More than once, a long-time client, who I resumed working with at the beginning of the year, asked me, “Tariro, what exactly are you doing these days?” I didn’t have a clear answer. I tried to dodge her every time she would ask this because I did not want another long lecture. I did not want her to tell me the truth. So I would just give her some vague responses sprinkled with excuses. But deep down, I knew I was drifting…not sure to where. Even on LinkedIn, when I (finally) slowly started stepping out to clarify on the work I do as an Online Business Manager, I got comments like, “I didn’t realise this is what you did. I need you on my project!”. I have a friend who only recently found out I design websites and reacted: “Wait… why am I just hearing this now?” My honest answer to all these questions from people who know me, who have worked with me, who are ready to recommend my work and services any day: Because I was jumping from one idea to the next, running away from committing to the one thing I know I am capable of delivering great value in. The one thing that ties together all of my “quick