Adventures in home working

Of course some people do get a lot of email and need to read a lot of blogs, but it’s also a great place to hide away from doing what you really need to be doing.  I have noticed the following types of avoidance behaviour (the example below are not always avoidance behaviour of course):

• Taking lots of notes (hiding away from the purpose of the meeting)
• Making very long lists of “things to do” and fine tuning the list and the priorities of the tasks on the list (hiding away from doing the tasks on the list)
• Reading hundreds of blog posts (making yourself feel very busy)
• Languishing in hundreds of emails (when  you should be asking yourself – what are you doing wrong, not delegating, not journalling, not managing expectations, not creating process etc)
• Making lots of blog posts (when you should be working)

So how do I score on this list:

• Note taking, pretty good, I have always believed it is better to focus on the meeting rather than my notes and been lucky enough to have a memory that’s good enough to remember stuff that’s important.  Of course it doesn’t always work and I have tried several times to take notes, but its not for me.
• Making long lists, fairly good,  I find I do pretty well without lists but I tend to find that I do not live a very balanced life.  I am using Life Balance to try and improve that and it’s been working pretty well.  It sort of gives you permission to forget stuff that is not that important!
• Reading blogs,  not very well, they certainly consume a lot of my time.  I know they add value but I need to take some steps to create groups of the key blogs and just Mark All Read the rest when I don’t have time.
• Emails, pretty good, I work hard to reduce the number of emails I get and always ask myself is there a better way.  Getting blogging software at work would be a big help.  However I do still find myself looking for new emails to divert myself with when I am getting fed up!
• Blog posts, pretty good, I don’t post anything unless I have something to say (I never just link to others).  I use my blog to capture issues and events and commentary that is important to my understanding of the IT world.  I would love to be able to keep a work journal in the way I have described, unfortunately though I am not able to keep it in public and it takes time to change big companies .

CNN has a short but worrying article on the perils of email addiction:

The constant interruptions reduce productivity and leave people feeling tired and lethargic, according to a survey carried out by TNS Research and commissioned by Hewlett Packard.

The survey of 1,100 Britons showed:

Almost two out three people check their electronic messages out of office hours and when on holiday

Half of all workers respond to an e-mail within 60 minutes of receiving one

One in five will break off from a business or social engagement to respond to a message.

Nine out of 10 people thought colleagues who answered messages during face-to-face meetings were rude, while three out of 10 believed it was not only acceptable, but a sign of diligence and efficiency.

But the mental impact of trying to balance a steady inflow of messages with getting on with normal work took its toll, the UK’s Press Association reported.

In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King’s College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day.

He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points — the equivalent to missing a whole night’s sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana.

There are some great books written on this subject, this post by Marc talks to some of them and gives some good advice on email and task management:

1. Processing techniques: There are a growing number of texts and seminars that will teach you techniques for efficiently processing what comes into your Inbox. I’m a big fan of David Allen and Sally McGhee in this regard (they were early collaborators on what ultimately became Getting Things Done and Take Back Your Life). The key element in their approaches, relative to this discussion, is the idea that you separate the time you spend processing email from the time you spend acting on what’s actionable in the messages. I’d suggest that Fred look into the workflow ideas they offer and use the ones that work best. But processing technique alone will not solve the inundation issue by itself.
2. Software: Throwing software at the Inbox problem can also help. I’ve written about dozens of tools that can help by automating aspects of the processing, filing, and retrieval pieces of the puzzle. Scoble is having some success with ClearContext. Other email victims I know swear by NEO Pro. Getting Things Done fans get good results using the NetCentrics GTD add-in. ActiveWords can assist with creating auto-response text that can generate a stock reply with a single keystroke, as can Bells & Whistles and You Perform. Anagram can intelligently extract critical information from incoming email with a keystroke. Desktop search tools can assist with retrieval. One or more of these tools can make a big difference but, just like processing technique, software tools usually will not solve the problem by themselves.
3. Attitude Adjustment: This is the hardest of the three to tackle because you’re not in complete control over your own destiny here and it’s hard to deal with feelings of obligation and guilt. People like Fred and Robert feel obliged to reply to everyone who writes to them. It’s a commendable personality trait but, in Scoble’s vernacular, it doesn’t scale. When you’re corresponding with a handful of people, you can be a faithful and responsive part of each conversation. Scale up to dozens of people (typical of most knowledge workers today) and you can still be very effective. Ratchet the bar up to hundreds of people (typical of many people I know including some popular bloggers) and things start to break down. When you get to more than a few hundred, you have to change the rules of engagement. There simply isn’t enough time in the day to reply in real-time and personally to that many people. So make it clear that you appreciate hearing from everyone but that the volume of mail you receive simply does not provide time for a hand-crafted and immediate response. Use processing techniques and software tools to assist with separating the most important messages from everything else and getting what’s actionable out of these critical messages.

I am being overloaded by information on “information overload”, just today one of my friends posted on the topic – always an event.  Then I came across a few posts in my regular feeds.  So I started following the trail.  Why – because I am easily interested mainly – but also because I am interested in the effect of information overload on collaboration (which I am currently researching)  My logic goes something like this:

• When people are co-located, the barrier to collaborate is very low
• For co-located people the range of sensory input is very high, for example overheard conversations, raised voices, moaning in the corridors, teams not talking to each other, people with smiles on their faces, people working late, looking worried etc
• So as people move out of line of sight the barrier to collaborate increases rapidly with distance and the subconscious inputs decrease rapidly.
• To compensate we now need to seek out information from people, this means generally that we need to:
• pro-actively go looking for information
• try and figure out from emails what people actually mean
• try and determine if – when we cold call people and ask them what’s going on whether – they are tired, busy, worried or actively hiding something
• Life gets so much more difficult.

What can we do to mitigate the effects of distance, and more specifically lack of co-location

• Make sure information flows to people, so that less time is spent trying to hunt for it
• Encourage journal keeping as a way for people to communicate what’s important about their activities, the state of health of these activities, their decision logic and sources of input and their observations of the activities of others
• Discuss and comment on peoples journals, using synchronous technologies when your concern or interest level is raised,  make sure you feedback the value of the journal
• When issues arise that have not been journaled, make sure you feed that back as well
• Gradual encourage a free flow of high quality information and refine the usefulness of it through this iterative positive and negative feedback mechanism (both forms encourage better journalling)
• Make sure we set a good example and keep our own journal
• When people send emails or ring up asking for information that’s in your journal gently point them in that direction.  get into the habit of answering questions in your journal either as well as or instead of via email

What’s so magic about a journal?  (first it’s worth mentioning that Journals are well supported by blogging software so there is no need to invent some new technology)

• It allows a person to take control of their message
• A person can take pride in their journal
• A person can easily navigate their own journal and therefore use it effectively as a personal knowledge repository, this makes it much more likely to be used
• A person can easily send others to information in their journal
• Others can subscribe to the journal and be drip fed with a direct connection into that persons work life (and sometimes home life)

Of course journals need not be strictly individual, for example a project manager could keep journals about the projects they are managing, but they should remember it is the project as seen from their perspective, the lead tester and lead architect might also keep journals about the project from different perspectives. The programme manager will get a much better insight into the project when he looks at all three journals, and a far better one than he would get from reading the monthly status report!

Is there anything else to be said about information overload, oh yes, books and books full!  But I only want to say one thing.  Information overload can be a great place to hide away from what really needs to be done, see next post.

Find out why! this web site gives instructions for most handsets.  On mine the last crash was 4 days ago and it was caused by “phone”

Microsoft has started to talk up Longhorn again, so they must be getting more confident as we move towards the release of the beta.  Here are some of the main articles and interviews, and my extracts and observations.  My overall observation is that these articles show a very feature driven view of Longhorn.  Not at all the experience driven vision that was presented at the 2003 PDC.  Hopefully this is just because Microsoft are only talking about specific features they feel confident to discuss right now.  As the whole Longhorn wave of Operating System, Office tools and third party applications begin to be talked about we will see a real step forward in the user experience.  However I don’t think we will really see the vision until we see the client and server vision coming together and by that I mean.

• Longhorn Client and Longhorn Server
• Office Client and Office Server
• WinFS Client and WinFS server and a WinFS integrated SharePoint Server
• Longhorn Client Security integrated with the federated and peer group security features we see glimerings of with ADFS and Groove
• Office Communicator and Live Communications Server extended with Groove like peer group collaboration
• Groove like capabilities built into Longhorn and Outlook (Groove needs to disappear)

For discussion of some of the above, check out previous posts on Longhorn

First up is IT World, and an article Microsoft more open about Longhorn features

The initial comments seem pretty unimpressive:

Users will not have to worry if they will be successful when plugging a projector into a Longhorn-based laptop for a presentation, Allchin said. Also, Longhorn-based computers will instantly connect to a home network and recognise peripherals, such as printers. “It takes magic to figure that out today,” he said.

Then we get onto something a bit more interesting:

Longhorn will also have a feature designed to protect data on a PC. “We will have something called secure startup where if you lose your laptop it won’t make a difference because somebody can’t load another system on there to analyse your hard disk,”

This laptop security, feature sounds pretty good, particularly if “it won’t make a difference” is actually a real promise and there is no easy work around.  Also continuing the security theme:

Internet Explorer will run in a “protected space” so it can’t impact the rest of the system, while those guards can be dropped when connected to a corporate Intranet, he said.

Then some good news for enterprise customers:

“We have brand new technology for imaging that will dramatically reduce the number of images required,” Allchin said. This should help make Windows more manageable and reduce operational costs for businesses, a major focus for Longhorn, he said.

and finally a little update in dates:

The final version of Longhorn is scheduled to be broadly available in December 2006. At that time, WinFS, the unified storage system that was clipped from Longhorn last August, will be in beta testing, Allchin said. There is no target date for a final version of WinFS, he said.

Then Information Week with an article Building A Case For Longhorn

In this article we get more about the UI improvements, pre WinFS, which sound a lot like the functions we saw in the WinFS demo, but without the “hidden depths” that WinFS promises. 

Even without WinFS, Longhorn will let users stack, rearrange, filter, and create lists of PC files, including multimedia files and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. Improvements in data visualisation will go beyond today’s search capabilities, Allchin says.

I just hope that these features are more than shell deep, ie that they are exposed at the file system level and therefore available to all applications including the shell.  This seems to be the way that Tiger’s search is implemented and the unified experience that the Open Source beagle search tool provides.

Again the uninspiring “Everyday challenges such as finding a new printer or connecting to a projector will be hassle-free for users”, it would be nice to see some of the scenarios enabled by WS-Discovery being described instead.  Also the widely reported auxiliary displays is mentioned again “One cool new capability will be “auxiliary displays” that let a mobile user view, say, her calendar even when a laptop is turned off” I think this will be a useful feature.

Next CRN with an article Allchin Talks Turkey About Longhorn

Some interesting snippets came out here, I especially liked the mention of a sync manager that can “run more seamlessly between work and home and understands the environment” this is a key issue in a business environment increasingly driven by consumerization.

We’ll have a sync manager in Longhorn to simplify that sync process for phones and other machines. It’s [not ActiveSync 4] but a new version of synchronization, a brand new system being done for Longhorn and will have a whole set of wireless support so it can run more seamlessly between work and home and understands the environment

then a bit more info on the search capabilities, which gets me worried that its a visualisation level capability, not something backed deep into the operating system, we will see:

It’s a much richer view capability built into Longhorn. Visualize and organize goes back to Cairo [an old Windows NT project]. The indexing technology that’s in XP and in Windows 2000 is a follow-on of Cairo technology. We have continued working on that technology and it’s used by MSN search but it’s been in the operating system for awhile. [With Longhorn] it is dramatically improved.

Then a little hint about new Orchestration facilities, which I assume will be leveraged by future versions of Office and SharePoint:

WinOE Workflow won’t be in the Longhorn client and the current path is it will be available on the server. Nothing here is tied to WinOE on the client.

Then music to my ears, at the PDC we heard a good message about backward compatibility, illustrated by Visicalc, as an enterprise architect I know that applications are at the heart of decision making around the client platform.  I reported here how important I think applications are to Longhorns success. 

Then we have a bit more about Secure Start-up, its not clear whether it includes transparent encryption or not:

You can tell by using the [Trusted Platform Module] 1.2, what the software is that should be run on the machine and being able to protect all your data. The end-user value we’re trying to achieve is that if you lose your laptop in a taxi, for example, if they load another OS on it, they will not be able to get at your data. That is the end-user value and that is part of Longhorn and one of the steps along the way that is part of the Next Generation Secure Computing Base [NGSCB] that we’ve talked about for some time.  NGSB is the vision. The specific feature we’re talking about is from that vision and is part of Longhorn.

For me its clear that Longhorn must first succeed in the home so its nice to see this comment:

It must be easy to deploy at home, either adding a new machine to an environment at home or replacing a machine and migrating information from one machine to another

We know of course that there is plenty of work going on to enable users to run as normal users and to only access admin priv levels when they need to.  I achieve this today by running Windows 2003 server and having a separate Terminal Server session running as admin.  This web site explains how to do it on XP.  In Longhorn ….

Longhorn will run as standard users, instead of admin [users]. Today in most installs, a large majority run as admin, so everything on the machine has full rights. Longhorn will run as a standard user, with limited user rights that can’t impact the operating system or the user.

For example, if you would try to access something, you’d be prompted to elevate your privileges. Beyond that we have work going on to isolate even the new standard-use level so Internet browsing can run in a more isolated environment and, as necessary, switch from Intranet to Internet in a seamless way. The probability of contamination from working on the Internet and having it contaminate the Intranet is dramatically dropped.

sounds like SU on Unix/Linux!

and no AV

The current plan is to have no A/V. And we have said we do plan on putting in anti-malware protection. This IE isolation is a classic example of what we’re doing here. A/V would come as part of an enterprise offering or as part of A-1.

and PC Mag with an article Microsoft Reveals Longhorn Details

A few extra tit bits in this article, first the mention of a Virtual File System, so maybe we will get virtual folders at file system level after all:

Sitting underneath all this will be a “virtual file system,” helping ease application compatibility issues that arise from low privileges on today’s systems.

This is very interesting,  sounds like a combination of the Windows 2003 Server Volume Shadow Copy and Data Protector functions are migrating to Longhorn:

System restore will now include user data as well, and there will be a new backup system to protect your data and do things such as writing incremental file changes to another disk.

I am a very big advocate of optimising around the end to end customer experience, rather than optimising from a technology or service perspective, it sounds like Microsoft take that view as well:

Microsoft characterizes the different ways people use the system—at work, at home, or on the go—as “experiences.” I was particularly intrigued by some of the changes designed to make Windows a better mobile operating system. Among the new features planned are instant-on, wireless projecting of information, tools to help it better understand different network environments, and support for auxiliary displays (imagine a laptop with an LCD on the outside cover, so you can still see your next appointment even when the laptop is closed.)

Incredibly Allchin said – when referring to search – “This is the original Cairo concept,” he said, referring to an operating system Microsoft promoted years ago.”, well its not the concept I remember, I remember an Object File System, not an indexed file system!

Thanks to a great deal  on eBay I now have a brand new TC1100 with 1.5GB of memory and my middle daughter has my old TC1000 and is very happy with it.  The problem is that I dare not let her use the TC1100 otherwise she will know what she is missing!  Here are a few of the highlights so far:

• The performance is stunning in general by comparison with the TC1000.  To all intents and purposes it is as good as my desktop.  The memory helps of course and it is doing a lot less than my desktop but I am still surprised at how snappy it is.
• The performance increase really helps with the usability,  switching between documents is almost instant, having 20–30 tabs open in Maxthon as well as a load of PDF’s and Word documents is no problem
• Inking feels so much more natural now that there is no lag at all and recognition is improved as well.  The Tip opens in an instant and also feels so much more responsive in use
• VMWare runs great
• The extra 10GB of space will come in handy for all of those Virtual Machines!

Plans

• I am hoping that I will be able to use my Treo 650, replacing my Treo 600, to control PowerPoint via bluetooth when it arrives next week, that should make for a much easier presentation experience
• I am hoping that it’s practical to embed the RDP Active X control into my presentations to make my demos that bit more interesting
• I am waiting to get on the NewsGator beta so that I can finally sync my unreads between my desktop and tablet

I have just installed VMWare 5 on my main desktop machine (2GB) and my TC1100 Tablet (1.5GB) and I have been very impressed,  I have also along the way been very impressed by the latest crop of Microsoft Servers.  Here is a quick run through of the last couple of days.

I have been feeling really rotten for the last 48 hours due mainly to a short lived virus that has wrought havoc with my already screwed up immune system.  As a result I needed some distractions, playing around with VMWare 5 seemed the ideal solution.  Here’s how I spent the worst hours of the last 2 days:

• Installed VMWare 5,  that was very easy – my best VMWare experience to date and so much better than my experience with Virtual Server 2005 the day before.  I liked the idea of Virtual Server because it would allow me to use its Active X control console to embed live Windows Sessions in my PowerPoint presentations.  In the end I hated Virtual Server so much by comparison with the ultra slick VMWare that I gave up on the idea.  Later I remembered I could probably do the same thing with the RDP Active X control (I need to try that later)
• VMWare 5 is so sweet, it seems much faster, supports multiple snapshots and makes cloning so easy as you will see below.  It really is a great productivity boost and saves loads of disk space.  Its well written up in this article.
• Then I decided to build a whole series of demonstrations, but first I needed some machines
• First I installed XP and Windows 2003 Servers from the MSDN ISO images, quick and no problems at all
• Then I service packed and patched them both and installed anti-virus software.  After a few more tweaks I cloned them with a few clicks to create 3 Windows 2003 Servers and 2 XP Clients
• Then I renamed all of the clones to fit my demos
• Servers – BizTalk, SharePoint and Exchange
• Clients – Andy and Rikki
• Then I installed BizTalk, slightly more complicated than I had hoped but not too bad
• AD, Exchange 2003, SQL Server 2003, SP3a, Live Communications Server, LCS SP1 and Office Communicator.  I was particularly impressed with Exchange 2003 and with LCS both products with potentially complex installs made easy by the step by step work flows that take you through all of the options.
• I took snapshots for each step and a couple of times took wrong turns – who reads manuals! – but could easily just revert to the appropriate snapshot and try another route.
• Then I installed SharePoint Portal 2 and the RSS Syndication Generator
• I then created a Windows SharePoint web site that I am using to store everything pertaining to the workshop I am planning that I will also use to demo some collaboration concepts.
• I then subscribed to the changes on that site in NewsGator.

I have a few more bits of plumbing to do before I work on the demos

• I need to make sure I can transfer all of the VMWare files to my Tablet
• I need to record some of the demos in VMWare as AVI files and see if I can manipulate them in Camtasia Studio,  if not I will try recording direct using Camtasia
• I need to add a load of users to AD
• I need to activate a few of those users to LCS and Exchange and add some events to their diaries etc
• I need to sync some data between Office and SharePoint
• I need to sync some data between Outlook/Exchange and WSS
• I need to install the RDP Active X control and see if I can embed it in PowerPoint
• I need to take some WSS data offline in Groove
• Then I can illustrate some important concepts with real examples
• Here’s hoping I don’t improve for a few days so I can keep playing ,  only kidding but I always like to find a silver lining!

As usual Jon Udell has a very insightful article about the need to media-shift, in his case from video to audio.  I have the same problem.  When I am at a computer I only really have time to work, watching videos is too distracting so they tend to get neglected.  This is particularly the case when I have a DVD full to watch from a conference, for example I have still not got through all of the videos from the last PDC.  Anyway I came across a useful utility today, Sermonex, that monitors my “To Watch” folder and automatically strips the audio from a WMV file, providing me with a WMA file, perfect for downloading and listening to on my Treo.  I did this once before using SoundRecorder but it was a bit of a pain, this way it just happens automatically in the background.

I have mentioned before that I live in St Annes on the Sea, a small town that enjoys a micro-climate.  Well it was forecast snow today, but for us it has been a lovely sunny day, which is lucky because it’s market day and what a market it was!  Today we had a speciality continental market, very expensive but a visual delight!