Get A Raise: 11 Do's And Don'ts For IT Pros

We all carry them. They're the backpacks, messenger bags, and attaché cases into which we stuff the tools of our daily work lives.

IT professionals share all sorts of tips and tricks, but we rarely get into long conversations about the contents of our bags.

Some of this silence is due to thinking that no one cares about our bags. We think that's wrong. Some of the silence is due to thinking that our bags are personal -- that little enclosed space that is fully ours in an environment that includes things like cubicles, shared desks, and office hoteling. We think that's understandable and unfortunate.

It's unfortunate because many of us are forever searching for "The Perfect Bag," a magical container that will help us keep our stuff safe, organized, and available while also causing as little physical pain and fashion-based humiliation as possible. And that's why we're asking for the community's help.

We'd like to know about your daily IT professional bag. What kind of bag is it? And what do you put into it? We'd like to know -- and we'd like to show the rest of the InformationWeek community how their peers are making bags work. Let's show you a couple of examples of what we're talking about, taken from InformationWeek staffers ...

And since I don't want to ask anyone to do something I wouldn't do ...

Editor's Bag, Take 2

So how can you join us in sharing your daily bag with the rest of the InformationWeek community? There are a couple of ways: You can post a photo to Instagram with the hashtag #iwk_it_bag or head to Flickr and post a photo in the InformationWeek IT Pro Daily Bag group. In either case, we'd love to see what you carry with you to get your job done -- and have you join the conversation about what works, and what doesn't, for mobile IT pros.