Adventures in home working

As regular readers know I work from home and have a pretty structured workday,  partly because of the demands of my job and partly as a coping strategy for a rare form of systemic arthritis that I suffer from.  Having recently read a post titled Don’t take orders from your calendar on the Thinking Faster blog and also a whole raft of posts on attention deficit disorder in tech workers I thought it was about time to share how I structure my day to:

• make sure I get plenty of exercise
• make sure I find time to relax and meditate
• make sure I keep up to date and contactable, without falling victim to attention deficit issues
• make sure I achieve something significant each day/week, and don’t just fritter the day away in meetings and email and RSS
• make sure I don’t over commit myself or get too stressed
• make sure I don’t work too long

To get a good understanding of my day you need to get an overview of my week

Friday – I do a weekly review, what have I achieved, what new work has been added, how have priorities changed.  I update my work tracking application OnTime to reflect all this.

Saturday and Sunday (when I get an odd minute) – I open up a group (called “to blog”) of tabs in my browser (Maxthon), each tab is a web page or document that I want to blog about,  I then work through as many as I can, sometimes I will loose interest in a topic and close the tab, on Sunday night I will save all the open tabs back as a group  I will have another go next week.

Sunday – Having reflected on my priorities over the weekend, I scan my project list and select 3 things I really want to achieve next week.  I write these at the top of my white board, which is on the Office door, so I see it 20+ times a day.

Each evening – I scan through FeedDemon and open tabs in Maxthon for every feed that I want to read in more detail, I then save these as a group on my Tablet.  I also write up on my Whiteboard (below my weeks priorities) the appointments I have the next day and the tasks I want to achieve that day.

Before I go to bed – I fill in my pain diary, this is a simple Excel spreadsheet which takes 2 minutes to fill in but records which joints or muscles have just been aching, which have hurt or have hurt so much that it has stopped me working,  I also record how tired I have been, my ability to concentrate,  how feverish I have been and how bad my head aches have been.  I also record how hard I have worked, how many hours, how stressed and also how good I have been, diet, exercise, meditation, relaxation, meditation.  Doing this gives me a graph which helps me to visualise how I am improving and where I need to work harder.  It really works,  over the last 4 months I have significantly reduced my symptoms through focusing on the stuff that helps and reducing the stuff that makes me worse.

First thing (8:30 – 10:00) – I check my Email, grab my Tablet and my Treo and go for a walk,  like all Arthritis sufferers I get morning stiffness and more often than not a lot of pain in the mornings.  I have trained myself over the years to walk through the pain, stop limping etc, after half an hour I am feeling much better.  Half an hour is my half way point and I will stop at a local fitness trail by a lake and do some upper body exercises and then walk along the beach into town.  During this walk I will either be on the phone or listening to podcasts.  I generally listen to about 1.5 hours of podcasts a day and these are mainly technical conferences.

Breakfast (10:00 – 11:00) – I breakfast everyday at one of three beach side cafes, as I arrive I switch off the podcast and synch my email and go have a chat and order breakfast.  When I come back my Tablet has started up and my Treo has synced up.  I check email for new appointments, reschedules, emails I need to respond to or calls to make then I start reading.  I read through the group of browser tabs that I saved from my desktop the night before,  these contain web pages and documents.  After I have read them I either delete them, save then for reference (using NetSnippets) or save them in another Maxthon group (for example “To Blog”).  This is quiet time, I have no distractions and it lasts for about an hour.  I often don’t read everything in which case the unread stuff gets carried over to the next day.

Walk home (11:00 – 11:15) – It’s a short walk home,  I make any less urgent calls or continue to listen to a podcast.

Personal work time (11:30 – 13:00) – After unpacking, and doing a bit of house work, for example putting the washing in the drier) I am ready to spend 1.5 hours doing some serious work on my own.  As I generally work with people in the USA or Australia I tend not to be interrupted until 13:00.  Typically this work will involve the development of presentations, writing documents or doing analysis.  Towards the end of this session RSI Guard (software that sits in the status bar) will kick in and tell me I need to take a break and do some stretching so I do that as I get ready for my first conference call of the day.

Conference calls (13:00 – 16:00) – During this window of 3 hours I tend to be in conference calls for 2 of them every day.  These tend to be pretty complex with 4–5 participants and an accompanying web conference where we will work collaboratively, review, check on status or discuss several projects.

Lunch and Meditation (30 Mins) – Sometime between 13:00 and 15:00 I will try and find time to meditate for 20 minutes and to have a snack, usually fruit.

Family time (16:00 – 16:45) – Time for tea with the family and finishing off some household chores like putting the dry washing away

Take the kids somewhere (16:45 – 18:00) – depending on the day I normally take the kids swimming, shopping or for an evening walk to the park.  We always walk, if it’s swimming I will sit in the pool side lounge and watch a video of a conference session like Microsoft’s PDC or LotusSphere or do some reviewing on my Tablet. 

House work (18:00 – 18:30) – I tend to put the clothes away and listen to a Podcast while I am sorting, folding etc.

Catch up on email and scan RSS feeds (18:30 – 19:30) – I will check emails that have arrived since 16:00 and will then scan through all my RSS feeds and collect articles that I want to read tomorrow as a group in Maxthon.

Read (19:30 – 20:00) – I try to spend a bit of time relaxing before I finish work for the day and normally I read, sometimes a business or technology book, and sometimes a novel that I am working through ready for discussion at the local reading group run by the library at the end of the road.

TV Family time (20:00 – 22:00) – 5 nights a week my wife and I watch TV with our two older daughters, we enjoy the family time and because we have Tivo we can pause the programs and so have lots of discussion which greatly enhances the experience.  Two nights a week the girls are out at clubs.

Reading in the bath (22:00 – 22:30) – I complete my pain diary, do a final sync of all of my computers and then I like to soak in a very hot bath and read,  its good for my arthritis and helps me sleep,  I get further help because I take muscle relaxants and pain killers.

I had 10 days off over easter, and we walked every day, and had good weather most days.  We didn’t travel very far afield but there are loads of great walks within 20 miles of my house.  By the end of the holiday I was feeling great, a few aching muscles from over use but generally better than I have felt for 6 months.  I spent my time walking, gardening, reading, cycling, cooking, cleaning and playing. 

I have been back at work now for 2 days and the only change (as I work from home) is that I have been sitting down for an extra 6–7 hours a day, end result my hands, chest, ankles, knees, wrists and elbows are all pretty painful and I have had a headache for 2 days.  The relationship between mobility and my arthritis could not be more striking, add in a bit of stress (none of that so far though, as its been an easy 2 days) and it’s even worse.  In some ways it’s almost better not to have holidays,  that way I would start to forget how great it feels not to be ill every day.

As I often say I am really focussed on delivering a great end user experience to my customers,  Omar describes some of the challenges to achieving this (his context is Microsoft vs iPod):

1. You do not own the end to end experience (you make the software but not the hardware in the case where the hardware is > 50% of the experience).
2. Your customer is not the end user, but another company is your customer.

In my business (out-sourcing) we have similar challenges:

• Organisational fragmentation means that no single team owns the complete experience
• Corporate IT departments that sit between ourselves and the real end-users

Omar goes on to describe some of the key attributes necessary to craft a really great experience:

1. The employees that work on those products care a great deal about what they are building. It’s not just a job.
2. Other employees in the company also dogfood said product and care a great deal about the product and give plenty of feedback to the product team.
3. The product team is responsive and reacts to the feedback the receive.
4. The product team listens to what their customers say, and create a two way conversation with them.

I think we stand a good chance of resolving these issues if my company takes the necessary steps to change its focus, and the signs are looking good!

This week it’s the turn of the desktop database.  Dabble DB looks like an amazingly flexible tool to create custom web databases (the image shows a database rendered as a calendar).

It’s similar to tools in the enterprise space from Oracle and also SharePoint lists which get even more powerful in Office SharePoint 2007.  It maybe though that Microsoft retains an advantage by creating a great web solution, that integrates seamlessly with desktop applications (Access and Excel) that provide layered value.

I work in desktop out-sourcing, and am feeling increasingly uneasy as I see the rise of web 2.0 companies.  The capabilities are increasingly compelling and new concepts like the live clipboard are starting to show how the integration benefits provided by the traditional desktop can be extended to the web.  I still believe that the traditional portable and desktop have a role in business (for some users),  but I strongly believe that server based approaches to application delivery will play an increasingly important role in the integrated user experience we need to create. 

On the whole I am excited though, because my focus is on the user experience,  or how we deliver capabilities that make a real difference to the way people work and live, and as the capabilities get richer, more flexible and more integrated that just enhances our ability to make a difference!

Marc describes some of the uncomfortable realities on his great blog this week:

You can rail all you want about standards and how Microsoft’s current Office document is open and how, evil empire that they are, they’ll find a way to poison the well with their new XML-based formats. And from a purist perspective you’re probably technically right. But you’re thinking like a geek and ignoring reality.

The reality, like it or not, is that standards are defined by the market. I’m not talking about IETF standards here, I’m talking about business standards. Businesses use Microsoft Office. They hire people who have Microsoft Office skills, so that’s what schools teach and use as their standard. The people who work in these Office-standard businesses and learn in these Office-standard schools need to do work at home. So guess what they use there? Yup… they use Microsoft Office. Or they use Works (which reads or imports Office files).

I agree with his points,  but I also think that people play up the benefits of open standards whilst ignoring the benefits of ubiquity.  Users of Microsoft Office gain many additional advantages, beyond the capabilities of their products:

• Everything imports and exports in Office formats, and will also do the same shortly after the new XML formats ship
• Thousands of add-ins and extensions are available to fill every functionality gap in Microsoft products
• Thousands of partners offer expertise and systems integration skills

Microsoft Office is in many ways similar to the iPod which is a great product but now succeeds not just because of its functionality but because of the huge number of add-on products and services that have created an eco-system that’s much more valuable than the product at its core.

I have often noticed that the most impressive people I work with are the ones who ask the best questions,  Hal has some hints on how to do this on Reforming Project Management.  His key insight is to use the following two questions, in addition to the traditional who, what, where, when, why and how:

Here are two more revealing questions.

1. Why do you say that?
2. What possibilities are opened (or closed) for me (us)?

The first question is an invitation for the speaker to say more about his/her statements/opinions. The answer to the question reveals how the person sees the world. The question is encouragement for the speaker to continue speaking.

He also adds some useful advise though, because great questions can be pretty scary!

Be careful…adopt a stance of curiosity when asking the question. Otherwise, the speaker may interpret your questioning as an inquisition.

In my experience I found the – What possibilities are opened (or closed) for me (us)? – question to be very clever,  one of my customers once asked me to answer it for the fixed price project we were delivering too them,  by making a great answer to the question mandatory they essentially forced me to go beyond full disclosure,  requiring me to get the whole team to think of every pro and con that we could, and discuss and debate it with them,  it was a great tool to bring customer and supplier closer together.

I am really big on “user experience” and this is a useful article on the subject, here is one of my favourite bits:

one core principle stands out large from all of these various experiences.  The inversion of control, from the organisation to the individual, is going to become increasingly and fundamentally disruptive to IT shops that don’t obey this commandment. And the world of Web 2.0 only further highlights it.  And that is putting the user and their needs, front and center.  That means going out of your way to know what their problems are, engaging them, and being useful and indispensable.  If you focus on that, you can’t go wrong.

Now, some of you might consider this obvious advice, but we witness the breakdown of putting the user first all the time.  One of my favorite citations is that the vast majority of defects in software come not from actual bugs, but from failure to engineer the requirements correctly.  In other words, to figure out what the user really needs.  Now, and this is the tricky part, it is often true that the user has no idea what they need, and can’t very well ask for it.  It’s up to us as IT experts and software developers to be able to help them figure it out.

I have just read this article that describes the way that Bill Gates works,  it’s very similar to my normal work style, I bet I spent a lot less on my office though!  I have added my comments to the article in blue:

On my desk I have three screens, synchronised to form a single desktop me too. I can drag items from one screen to the next yes, its great. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity very true.
 
In the digital age, Microsoft chair Bill Gates uses a lot of electricity, but not as much paper I am essentially paperless.

The screen on the left has my list of e-mails mine too. On the centre screen is usually the specific e-mail I’m reading and responding to in my case it’s normally the presentation or document I am creating. And my browser is on the right-hand screen mine too. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I’m working on something, and to bring up a link that’s related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.

At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than phone calls, documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even meetings (voice-mails and faxes are actually integrated into our e-mail in-boxes) hmm, email is important to me,  but now days I send and receive way more IM messages than I do emails and RSS is my main information feed.

I get about 100 e-mails a day I get about 50. We apply filtering to keep it to that level—e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I’ve ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know thankfully I don’t have this problem. And I always see a write-up from my assistant of any other e-mail, from companies that aren’t on my permission list or individuals I don’t know. That way I know what people are praising us for, what they are complaining about, and what they are asking.

We’re at the point now where the challenge isn’t how to communicate effectively with e-mail, it’s ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most. I use tools like “in-box rules” and search folders to mark and group messages based on their content and importance I use similar tools for RSS feeds, but for email I just use rules to colour code my email, so I can see at a glance ones that come from important people or customers and I use GTD to keep my mailbox pretty much empty.

I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I’ve flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs. I have real trouble with to-do lists,  they just make me feel overwhelmed,  I like to only see my top 3 priorities to achieve each day and nothing else.

Outlook also has a little notification box that comes up in the lower right whenever a new e-mail comes in. We call it the toast. I’m very disciplined about ignoring that unless I see that it’s a high-priority topic.  I switch off all notifications and hide my email unless I am processing it.  Instead on my left screen I normally have reference material that I need to help me with the work I am doing at the time.

Staying focused is one issue; that’s the problem of information overload. The other problem is information underload. Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.  I could easily be flooded,  I have a lot of projects on the go,  a big backlog, a lot of technology tracking to do mainly via RSS.  My strategy is:

• I write up my top three priorities on my white board and only look at my to-do list when I am doing a review or need access to reference information.
• I use different devices for different activities, each one is optimised for a different task
• I process my emails in the morning before I go out for a walk in the morning, at lunch and before I stop working at night
• I process my RSS feeds at the end of the day, but read the ones I am interested in on my Tablet

I deal with this by using SharePoint, a tool that creates websites for collaboration on specific projects. These sites contain plans, schedules, discussion boards, and other information, and they can be created by just about anyone in the company with a couple of clicks. My company uses Lotus Notes databases and quickplaces,  they are equivalent to SharePoint.

Right now, I’m getting ready for Think Week. In May, I’ll go off for a week and read 100 or more papers from Microsoft employees that examine issues related to the company and the future of technology. I’ve been doing this for over 12 years. It used to be an all-paper process in which I was the only one doing the reading and commenting. Today the whole process is digital and open to the entire company. This sounds really cool,  but I don’t take weeks off,  however I do collect up research in Maxthon groups and then spend a few hours working through it when I get chance.

The idea seems to be to use a single client to manage all of a teams interactions around a specific activity.  It seems like a great idea in principle,  although I have a few concerns about how it will work in practice:

• I am worried that the process of publishing to the team the few steps in a process that need to be shared will be a bit of an overhead,  I favour a publishing process thats as seamless as possible (like adding a tag or ticking a check box)
• That trying to do all of this within the confines of a single application will be difficult with the screen real-estate available to most people, however maybe eclipse supports multiple monitors (then I will be happy) but laptop users will really struggle
• The tool will be a jack of all trades and master of none
• I will not be able to interface with the server infrastructure using standard protocols, like RSS, and will be forced into using the IBM client,  this will be a real pain because no matter how good the tool is its very unlikely I will be using it for all of my projects and certainly not for all of my research and storage
• That the team view of the world will be optimised at the expense of personal productivity

What I liked:

• That the developers do seem to be building the solution to support real business scenarios and not just features
• Online and off-line support
• A rich client, thats flexible and customisable

Here is a screen shot, and I recommend you take a read of the full article if you are a current Lotus Notes user.