Adventures in home working

Sam asked me a couple of weeks ago to blog about my new Office. I’ve been resisting because I wanted to spend at least a month working in it before I felt ready to really comment on how it’s changed my life.  Seems a bit of a bold statement “changed my life” but I don’t think I’m overstating it.

I’ve always been very focussed on workspace design, I can remember over 20 years ago convincing my boss to radically change our office around and – inspired by the book peopleware – I’ve been working to improve the working environment of my teams every few years since then.  I’ve previously written about the great opportunity I’ve had in the past to design a couple of offices from a pretty blank sheet of paper and I think we did a pretty good job and I learned a lot. 

Last year though was the first time I’ve ever designed a workspace for myself and it’s been great fun.  I started with these objectives in mind.

1. I wanted a space that I felt was my own, the rest of the family, friends and colleagues would be very welcome to visit but it would be on my terms and I wouldn’t be storing any of their stuff.
2. I wanted a space that allowed me to seamlessly and easily transition from work to play to exercise.  I suffer from a rare form of arthritis and low intensity, varied but long days are a must for me.  The ability to work for an hour, chill for 20 minutes, work for another 30 then exercise for 20 suits me perfectly.
3. I wanted to feel as relaxed as possible throughout the day, so the space had to feel less like and office and more like a holiday home.
4. I suffer a little from Seasonal Affective Disorder, so I wanted as much light as possible
5. I wanted to be able to able to work in a range of different positions, seated, standing, exercise bike, sofa, to keep my joints and muscles working and moving and it’s just more fun
6. Collaboration and team working are important to me so I wanted to be able to have effective virtual and physical meetings

This is how it turned out:

1. I decided to build a conservatory, it was a pretty cheap option, addressed the SAD issues, has been plenty warm enough through a cold January with mostly no heat required during the day and radiators at night.  I’ve invested in window blinds that have been essential and have worked well.  I’m waiting to see how many days this year I’m driven out of the room due to lack of roof blinds in the summer.  Roof blinds are expensive and the top investment priority right now is to turn our old shared office into a great lifestyle space for Debbie, and that’s where I will retreat to on hot summer days as well.
2. I’ve got a huge glass wall (between conservatory and lounge) that has roller blinds behind it to turn it into a massive whiteboard, it also works great for tacking up A3 slides that a group of people can scribble on together.  I have a Bluetooth eBeam (electronic whiteboard) that suckers onto the glass for virtual meetings.
3. I’ve got a 4 seat sofa that I retreat to whenever I’m on the phone, I just love sitting back and looking up at the clouds on those long conference calls, with my Tablet PC on my lap when I need it.  I’ve a wireless DECT headset that lets me move freely around the whole house (thanks to a repeater). 
4. From the sofa I can watch conference DVDs and downloads, PowerPoint presentations etc on my 27” Dell high res display which is attached to a media centre PC so I get to watch TV as well.  I’ve previously struggled to watch more than 20 minutes of video on a computer, but the big screen “TV like” experience from the sofa makes hours at a time practical.  The big screen is great for watching while doing the ironing as well.
5. I’ve got an exercise bike and it’s perfectly positioned for watching the big screen too.
6. I’ve got all my favourite reference books and books i’d like to read – right there in full view to remind me not to buy any more for a while and hopefully to inspire me to chill out and read for at least 30 minutes a day.
7. Previously I’ve been a dedicated user of 3 displays and It’s still a great setup, but this time around I decided to go for 2 screens, one 27” 1900*1200 and the other 1280*1024.  I’ve loved the extra screen real estate from the large screen and as I’ve already mentioned it’s enabled the “work from the sofa” scenario, further helped by a wireless media centre keyboard and remote.
8. I don’t have a desk chair right now, I’m loving using a – cheap – exercise ball.  It’s great fun and I can feel it strengthening my back already.

From a green perspective it’s mixed:

1. It’s turned the lounge from the coldest room in the house into the warmest, and the conservatory keeps warm with a couple of small radiators with the thermostatic valves cranked down
2. All the lights are ultra low power LEDs or fluorescents
3. When I suspend my desktop PC, all the displays and peripherals auto power off
4. The blinds and glass are both coated to keep heat inside in winter and out in summer

The end result:

1. I’m able to work for longer
2. I feel much more relaxed
3. I feel more effective
4. I’m having a lot more meetings at home, and we’ve had a great Carvery restaurant open just on the sea front that’s perfect for business lunches
5. It’s much nicer to be able to work and interact (through the glass) with the kids without being disturbed and for them to be able to see when I’m disturbable and pop in for a chat or a hug
6. Debbie and I are having more lunches together
7. I enjoy doing the ironing
8. I’m watching more TV – perhaps the only negative
9. I’m getting more exercise
10. When I’m not working we have a great family room
11. The Sofa is actually a sofa bed, so we have a guest room and the girls love having sleepovers there and watching the stars
12. It’s definitely been a worthwhile investment

For most of my working life I have really enjoyed my work and put in a lot of hours,  but my recent illness has resulted in me working probably an average of 6 hours a day over the last 3 years and it’s resulted in a significant shift in my thinking.  The first thing I noticed was that many people I worked with didn’t realize that I was working reduced hours, the second thing was that whilst the total output of work did reduce quite a bit, the volume of really high value work probably increased. 

Although I produced fewer slides and pages of reports that no one read, I did a lot more coaching, development, networking, facilitating and idea generation and with a higher adoption rate. 

This observation got me thinking about when I was most productive in my 20 years at work and it struck me that there was one period that really stood out – and it was when I was working a true flextime system.  Under this scheme my employer allowed me flexible start and finish times and allowed me to trade any hours I worked beyond 37 hours a week back to holidays.  I had a lot of holidays during those 3 years, and I don’t think I ever booked an hours over-time, but it was without doubt the most fun and most successful time in my life. 

I recently re-read a book that inspired a lot of this thinking called Slack by the famous Tom Demarco of PeopleWare fame.  The subtitle of the book says it all “Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency” and it’s message is much needed in today’s business environment, I liked it enough second time around to buy a copy for my current boss. 

I was also encouraged to see that there are some signs that the issues of over work without associated over-achievement are being increasingly recognized by leading businesses.   This snippet from a longer article cites the work of Dr Ellen Ernst Kossek of Michigan State University’s School of Labor and Industrial Relations – gives you an idea:

Kossek says the study showed that reduced-load work arrangements can reap several key benefits for employers, including greater productivity, less turnover and cost savings.

“Some of these benefits are counter-intuitive but nevertheless they are real,” Kossek insisted.

Employees working fewer hours were less stressed and felt they performed their job better

But the most compelling reason for advocating reduced workloads for professional employees is that they are a good way to retain top performers, something that every organisation wants to do.

Employees working fewer hours were less stressed, able to manage family commitments and felt they performed their job better. They also exhibited a greater loyalty to the organisation.

And there can be other hidden benefits, Kossek agues. For example, she said, an attorney on reduced workload used the time to think about his job. He came up with an idea that resulted in huge savings for the firm, something that might not have happened if he had been working full-time.

Hopefully you won’t learn this lesson through illness forcing you to slow down like I did,  but instead I encourage you to pick up a copy of Slack and have a good read one weekend and perhaps come back to work the following week determined to change life for your self and your teams.   

If the idea of slowing down really appeals then I can also recommend In Praise of Slow, although I must admit I did skim read it towards the end so I’m not totally cured.

I posted a quick update on my experiences with home working yesterday, but  thought I would provide some additional details, particularly in terms of my technology setup and some of the technology shortcomings.

First off, when I work from home I really don’t want to be tied to my desk all of the time,  this is particularly important to me for health reasons, but its useful for everyone. 

Here are some of the techniques I use at home:

• I leave my desktop running all of the time,  that way a press of a key and the monitors power on and I can check email, IM messages, RSS feeds etc at a glance and then get out of the study and on to something else
• I use a great utility call Wizmo that I assign to a shortcut key on my Microsoft keyboard,  a single press of the key and my monitors all go into power save mode.  Wizmo does all sorts of stuff but the command to power down monitors is “wizmo.exe monoff”
• I synchronise my Tablet with my desktop,  so if I want to work somewhere else in the house I just grab it from its dock and go
• I auto-forward my Treo 650 to my analogue business line when I dock the phone,  that way I only need to carry one phone around
• I have a DECT phone and a speaker phone,  when I am not in the study I take my DECT phone with me,  it uses the same headset as my Treo and I have a strap that lets me hang it around my neck while I am walking around the house in conference calls
• My wireless network and my DECT phone work anywhere in the house and garden,  I use a pre-n wireless access point with matched PC cards that have a range extender mode to get the coverage
• When I am doing housework etc,  I tend to listen to podcasts on my Treo,  if I am backing bread etc then I watch web-casts or conference DVDs on my Tablet,  I have a spare docking station in the kitchen

When I am at my desk I want to be ultra efficient (In theory I only do 4 hours a day of desk work):

• I have three monitors and try to create workflows that make most use of the screen area I have available
• I always like to know whether my contacts are online,  so I use Trillian which gives me a unified interface to Yahoo, Sametime, MSN and AOL.  One of the best features of Trillian is that it can be docked in an “always on top” configuration, in my case on my left monitor
• I do a lot of web conferencing,  I use my left monitor for web conferences.  While I am in the web conference I can also see all of my IM contacts
• Because most of my contacts have screens that run at 1024*768 res and I use 1280*1024 I have set up my web conferencing monitor so that the application area is roughly 1024*768 as well,  the rest of my screen area on that monitor is taken up by a “3 task high” task bar at the bottom and a set of custom toolbars and docked Trillian window on the far right.
• I have all of my contacts in groups, so that when I start a conference call or web conference I open up the groups with the appropriate contacts
• While I am in a web conference, sharing my screen, or watching someone else’s screen,  I have two additional 19” screens that I can use to view reference material, hold IM conversations, make notes, check email etc
• I try to work paperless, which makes it much easier to work wherever I am,  I almost never have any paper on my desk except post it notes or index cards to scribble notes on and I have a whiteboard on my door, which I stick stuff onto with magnets as well as using it for reminders.
• I have a notice that I can hang on the door so that the kids know to be quiet when they come home from school or come bounding into the study full of enthusiasm when I’m on a conference call
• I have speakers that I use to listen to stuff while filing, scanning or otherwise moving around the study
• I have a headset that I use when I want peace and quiet or want to use Skype
• I use Skype and Pamela to record conference calls that are not interactive,  I then play them back while out walking or in the car
• I use Polycom PVX for video conferences,  it provides great quality video,  I also sometimes use Skype.  Video is important to help with the bonding experience with new contacts
• My Polycom Soundpoint speaker phone has two lines (home and work) and lets me seamlessly switch from headset, to speaker to handset.

I like to get out and about:

• I have a Laptop and a Tablet but I tend to only use my Tablet when I am out of the house
• I have a GPRS modem and I can use my phone as a modem to keep connected,  but most of the time I am happy to just get email on my Treo
• I have two batteries for my Tablet to keep me going for about 4 hours if needed
• I don’t use a case for my Tablet,  I just slip it into a division that’s built into my rucksack,  I used to use a case but in the end decided it was well enough protected without and I use it much more now because it’s so much quicker to get in and out, not a single scratch in 6 months!
• I have several wired headsets for the Treo so I can listen into podcasts or dial into conference calls in all weathers and still hear what’s going on,  if its windy I need to stay on mute though!
• I carry everything I have ever written or read (nearly) with me, although I just had to upgrade to a 100GB disk
• I have a waterproof mp3 player that allows me to listen to podcasts or conference calls while I swim

Collaboration Software:

• Lotus Notes and Quickplace for company email and databases
• Outlook for personal email
• FeedDemon for RSS subscriptions
• Maxthon for all browsing with extensive use of tabs and groups of tabs
• Groove for inter-company collaboration
• Net-snippets and OneNote for note taking and research
• Trillian for IM

Stuff I would like:

• a more seamless phone experience, allowing me to switch between mobile, analogue and Skype as required
• a remote that lets me easily toggle the phones mute on and off.  I use headset control at the moment that uses the Treo’s headset button to control the Pocket Tunes media player.
• high speed always on Internet when I am away from wireless coverage,  at the moment it’s too slow and expensive
• a way of cancelling out wind noise so I could do conference calls while out walking
• better mobile coverage in my house
• space for comfy chairs and a table in the study so I had a better place for chilling out and for meetings
• improved collaboration software that made it easier to see what’s going on within the teams I work in,  probably using a combination of absolutely everything being RSS enabled and some sort of persistent multi-party IM discussion
• IM while mobile
• my Tablet to act like an ink enabled touch screen extension to my desktop whilst it is in proximity to it and a stand-alone device when it’s out of the room.  That way it would be easier to use it for note taking and sketching when on web conferences
• when conferencing I would love software that handles different screen resolutions better and that can share applications on any monitor, not just the primary display
• an easier way to establish ad-hoc web conferences, Sametime is not configured correctly (in my view) in my company
• a tablet display that works in full sun,  I often sit in the sand dunes or in the garden and do conference calls,  but seeing my screen can be a real struggle
• symmetric broadband, even 2mb would be ok,  but ideally symmetric 10mb
• better video conferencing.  I would like full screen resolution and 4 people to a screen resolution,  with 3 screens video conferencing is definitely viable and useful
• every application I need to access to be Internet facing, I hate VPN,  I do sometimes need to use VPN and when I do I run up a virtual machine and VPN from that so that it doesn’t interrupt my other activities
• a whisper quiet printer, for when the kids decide to print in the middle of a conference call
• a system that monitors where friends are right now,  to make it easier to decide to meet up for an hour in a local Cafe

I consider myself to be very lucky to work from home.  Because my medical condition makes it difficult for me to travel at least a couple of times a week and I feel too ill to work for at least a few hours most days only a decade ago I would have probably had to give up work. 

However having reached the point in my career where I am now happy to use my skills and experience to support others around the world on their projects home working suits me very well for the following reasons:

• I have a 12 hour window within which to fit in 4 hours of desk work and a couple of hours of research,  this is possible on most days even if I am really tired or in a lot of pain
• I work with teams in the UK, Northern Europe, US and Australia so the extended working day is very valuable
• Not only do I spread out my work over a 12 hour period but in between work sessions I do a lot of gentle exercise which would be difficult to do in an office environment
• I often need to rest, read, nap, meditate etc again this would be difficult in an office environment
• The global nature of my work means there really is no office full of people that I work with anyway
• Although my wife also works from home because two of my daughters need to go to hospital regularly there are often times (every week) when I need to pick kids up from school or take them to after school activities
• Work life balance is much improved
• I have a trampoline at home!

Although home working is very convenient, there are definitely some down-sides:

• I miss the casual social interactions, for example the chats that don’t take place when you only ever talk to people on conference calls
• Most people I want to chat with seem to be busy on conference calls all day,  somehow when you work from home just chilling out for 10 minutes with a couple of team mates is more difficult than it used to be
• I observe much less the way that other people work, and therefore it’s more difficult to pick up new skills and broaden my experience
• There is some social isolation,  even though I get out a lot and meet people a lot,  it’s a smaller circle of people
• My work life and my home life are fully integrated,  it’s more difficult to switch off, but I am nice and relaxed so there is less need to switch off

I mitigate some of this using tools and processes:

• Blogs and blog comments provide access to a diversity of opinion and discussions
• Podcasts provide a way to connect to a broader set of views in a more social way than just reading, and I can listen to them while walking, swimming, ironing, gardening etc
• Presence and IM provide a relatively un-disruptive way to keep in contact with people
• Lunch time meetings provide a good social connection with the few people who live locally
• I am not addicted to always on email
• I keep my Tablet largely free of all work related activities except reading, and a small amount of reviewing

I have an extended version of this post here

I am currently changing my approach to spending money, in the most obvious, (in hindsight) way.

First I did an audit of how I spend my time, then I looked at how much I could improve my level of enjoyment or productivity by investing money in support of each activity.  I also looked for new activities that I could add to my life if I spent some money.

I ended up with a fairly simple list in order of Return On Investment.   Without going into all of the details here are a few of the outcomes:

- I have sold a whole load of old gadgets on eBay, because I only used them for a couple of hours a month

- I reaffirmed my decision not to spend any money on cars for a long time,  my current car get used for about an hour a week, although my wife uses her’s more, so we won’t be investing in a second car when hers gives up in a few years time.

- I invested in some great walking gear and swimming gear because that’s an activity I do every day and I want to maximise my enjoyment and minimise the opportunity for excuses

- I cancelled a load of magazine subscriptions, because I can read the same stuff on my Tablet

- I felt happy at all the personal money I invested in my work computing environment, because I use it for 4-6 hours a day and this provides by far the greatest ROI.

- I am considering upgrading my TC1000 to a TC1100 off eBay because I use it for about 1.5 hours a day which aside from TV is probably my second most important activity, that can be improved.  (now that I have GPRS)

- Next years bonus is going on upgrading the TV, because we spend about 2 hours a day watching TV

- Debbie and I go out a lot more on our own, because time alone is very precious when you have 4 kids!

- We give more to charity because the return on charity investment is hundreds of times greater than the ROI we get investing in ourselves!