Adventures in home working

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’m not a Office communicator user and have often wondered why Microsoft bothered with multiple products in this space.  That was until I read this post,  which described the main reasons that Office communicator is better than WLM.  The level of differentiation really surprised me and it’s had quite an impact on my thinking since about the difference between web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0.  Here’s the highlights, with a couple of extra benefits I have added in bold.

Communicator 2007 with OCS is better than using WLM because:

Its integrated with the AD, Exchange and SharePoint

• Looks up all the numbers for you, mobile, landline, home etc from contacts or the GAL
• Uses your calendar to auto set your presence state
• Takes you to their mysite on right click
• Presence globes throughout MS Office system, including SharePoint, AD, Outlook, Word, other apps etc.

Security

• Anyone can sign up for your Windows Live ID and thus pretend to be you (all it says is ‘email address not verified’
• In WLM you can change your name to someone else. All too easy to change your name and impersonate someone else.
• When you leave an organisation, your communicator buddy list stays with the company. With WLM you take that list with you
• Communicator is possible to log conversation centrally, not possible with WLM
• Because it encrypts the traffic so people can’t intercept your messages as they travel outside the firewall

Higher fidelity presence

• You can see at a glance if they are OOF before you email them or IM them
• With Communicator you have advanced presence such as ‘in call’ and ‘in a meeting’ which are set automatically
• You can tag a contact if you are looking for them
• With Communicator you can also see the presence of those that are NOT on buddy list.  This is a big one - its people you don’t know that well that you need the most presence assistance with.  I’d have to put the whole company on my buddy list to use WLM for this.

Phone integration

• Communicator integrates with your phone
• Can divert calls to the device you choose even mid call
• Communicator lets you answer the phone on your pc if you like because the two are integrated
• You can have your phone do simultaneous ring like your desk and mobile
• Via remote call control, you can see your phone calls come in even when you are not near your phone or mobile and can choose to take them via the pc or send to vmail
• Is integrated with your voicemail letting you talk to your voicemail inbox from the client
• With Communicator you can make outgoing and incoming calls from your PC. WLM only does outgoing - and its nowhere near as good quality (IMHO)
• You can click on a phone number in a document and it will phone it, you can cut and paste numbers and edit them before dialling

Enterprise management

• Communicator client is updated once every 3 or so years. WLM has a shorter refresh cycle so requires more effort to maintain in an enterprise
• You can do multi person video conferencing - don’t think you can do that with WLM
• Can IM a distribution list
• Cleaner UI, more corporate

Extras

• No adverts
• Great API for programming BOTS and other enterprise integration scenarios
• Integration with web conferencing
• Ability to switch seamlessly from peer to peer mode to client server mode once more than two participants are involved
• Works with Microsoft’s roundtable video conferencing hardware

Its a pretty impressive list,  although I think Lotus SameTime is on track to do an even better job of demonstrating just how different enterprise real-time communication is from consumer grade equivalents.

This post is dedicated to Sam - who is trying to make all this integration work in the real world!

(updated to add missing link later on in the post)

Stu has an interesting post on effective collaboration,  I think his arrows pointing in the right direction, but I don’t think its the whole story.  In Stu’s model we need to have a willing person, a willing team, the right culture (less important) and the right tools.    I think these 4 things are key for a short term activity,  in my experience pretty much any team can collaborate well given enough management attention and team enthusiasm, even if they just have a shared file system and a whiteboard.  But the real trick will collaboration is to sustain it over time and to make it work across all of the activities a person’s involved in,  not just the priority project.

For this more sustained and systematic collaboration to take hold I think culture’s more important and I think we need to drill a bit deeper into what motivates people.

In this post I described a way of thinking about the stages a person goes through to be comfortable with collaborating,  I’m no psychologist but it seems to fit my observations so far.  I stretched the idea further with this post trying to apply Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the same discussion.

But my best post on the topic is probably this one where I took a similar approach to Stu, but looked at the challenges that we face in collaborating and tried to come up with a model to describe them all and their relative importance for different types of collaborative endeavor.  I’ve read whole books that attempt to address the topic of this post so its pretty simplistic, but it’s nice when such a big topic can be reduced to a diagram as simple as this one.

Jing is a great example of collaboration done right, quick and easy to use, with just a couple of clicks I am able to create a screencast  and share it on my blog via screencast.com.

Here’s a sample screen cast I created with Jing.

Definately worth checking out the demo, the FAQ and the blog.  Right now its free to use, so start using it now and convince your boss that its worth paying for when its out of beta!

Just when I thought it would be impossible for me to write any more on the benefits of multiple monitors along came another twist - the debate between one big one and several small ones!

Lets be clear for the type of work I do more is better, here’s why:

• If you do a lot of assembly of documents from multiple sources and using lots of different content then multiple monitors are for you.  In my case I will be writing a report and assembling it from Visio, Excel and PowerPoint content, and drawing on content from the web and OneNote.  I need to see several of these apps at the same time so I can cross refer between them and keep context.
• If you are working on one thing, either creative or analysis oriented and its large and complex then one big monitor might be better,  maybe some very complex graphic or a mega spreadsheet.

I am very big on symmetry so for me there’s no alternative to 3 monitors.  Although maybe three with a forth above the central one would also work.  My desktop supports four so maybe that’s an option for the future. 

I actually have 4, right now, but ones my Tablet that I access via Synergy.

Anyway if you still want one large monitor then I strongly recommend this blog post on coding horror which has some links to really useful apps that help partition the screen.  This new post that drills into some quantified benefits and these two (one - two) on web worker daily that have useful comments.

And just for completeness here are my old posts on the topic!

I find that I am increasingly wanting to save and view flash files.  Maxthon has a plug-in for this but its not that great and when my eldest daughter came to me last night and said she wanted to save a great flash animation of hurricane damage I really struggled to get a copy of it for her.

In the end I recorded it as a video using Camtasia Studio and saved that video as flash - talk about overkill, especially as I had to figure out how to make Camtasia v3 work with Vista, which it partially (but frustratingly) does.

The end result worked pretty well, but the resulting flash file ran slower than the original and didn’t have any sound. So tonight I decided there must be a better way - and there certainly is.

The BrowserTools web site has an excellent set of utilities, one of them lets you right click on the html content of a web site that contains flash content and download it, if this doesn’t work - for example nested flash - then you can quickly go hunt through the cash with its cache browser (easier than it sounds because the cache browser is pretty clever and provides previews, filters etc).  Finally when you get your flash content you can display it directly with the flash viewer.  Altogether really excellent.

Web site link

Flash saving plugin link (includes the viewer and cache browser)

Both seem to work in Vista with Maxthon and Firefox.  With IE you get a toolbar as well.

As an aside; the Vista programmes search is great, press the Windows key and type flash and it will return all of the programmes relating to flash - that assumes they have flash in their filenames!  In this case they are named FLV…,  so I dropped a few shortcuts into my startmenu that I renamed to have flash in the name.  That way I stand a chance of finding these utilities again.

I may be stange but I scan all of my feeds online and then read a small subset - generall about 20-30 a day offline.  I do the scanning while watching TV on my laptop and the reading on my Tablet.  I scan the feeds in FeedDemon and then read the associated web pages in Maxthon as a series of 20-30 tabs.

I noticed recently that there was a real buzz about Google Reader, so I gave it a go.  Since I scan online it worked pretty well, I really liked the single keys shortcuts for navigating between posts, however for me it was too slow,  when scanning it just could’nt keep up with me :-(.  So I went back to FeedDemon, the speed was good but I missed the shortcut keys.  FeedDemon does have keyboard shortcuts but they are all multi-key combinations, which I find a real pain.

I started to get annoyed,  in fact I was going to write a post asking for people to describe how they managed to efficiently scan thousands of posts a day in FeedDemon because it seemed to me that no end-to-end working practice had been developed that worked for people who scanned on one PC and read on another. 

Then I discovered Control-K which opens a dialog that leys you define single keys for anything you want to do in FeedDemon,so here is what I did:

N - takes me to next unread post,  I just press NNNNN until I see a post I want to read and then I press

L - which opens up the link in Maxthon.  If Maxthon is minimized and set to “not activate” when a newpage is opened it just sits on the task bar opening up tabs in the background

so here I am NNNNN and then my brain catches up and says you missed one so I press

P - which opens up the previous unread post, this works because I don’t mark posts read as I read them,  I wait until the end and then I press

R - which marks all posts Read.

So this is great however there are two minor issues - which hopefully Nick can fix:

1. I could not see a way to define a key to download a PODCAST
2. When I press L to open a link in an external browser I need to click back on the FeedDemon page to return focus to it before I can start to press NNNNN again.  The same thing happens if I click a link in a page or download a podcast.  This takes my hands off the keyboard - not desirable

So now I have loads of tabs open in Maxthon,  all I do is click Groups > Save Windows as Group > I have a group for my Laptop so I pick that (3 clicks).  Then back on my Tablet (via remote desktop, 1 click) I open that group (2 clicks) and I am done.  I can now read away on my Tablet closing tabs as I go.  If I don’t read them all I just save the few I have left back as a group and open that group up on my laptop before I start my next scanning session.

Actually my workflow is slightly more complex

1. I open up tabs in Maxthon because many feeds don’t contain the full text
2. After I have finished scanning I scan the tabs, because quite a few web pages have articles spread over multiple pages so I need to open up the other pages as well or show in print view
3. Quite a few web pages turn out to be a few lines of comment and then some links,  its often the article or articles then link to I want to read so I click to open up those
4. Sometimes I come across new sites I want to subscribe to, so I generally subscribe to them while online.
5. Sometimes I have opened links to files I want to download,  so I sometimes initiate the downloads there and then,  or if I am offline when I come across the download then I add the site to a Maxthon group called Action and come back to it later.

A post on the SharePoint blog on the potential for SharePoint to replace file servers has stimulated a good debate.  I replied to it here and Joel (the original author) replied to me here (thanks for taking the time and effort Joel!).  Initially I was left feeling less than convinced that Joel had addressed my concerns and considered a counter comment, however now I think a new post is required because of the whole I don’t think we disagree - I think we just have slightly different perspectives.

Rather than continue to throw around th pros and cons of the file server, maybe its better for me to describe the way I prefer to work, which blends the use of file storage (local and server) and SharePoint.  Neither is the total solution. 

Maybe that will help both Joel and I iterate to a better understanding of each others positions.

First off let me say that I have been using SharePoint since version 1 and have used Notes, Quickplace, WebSphere portal and various other collaborative workplaces over the last 10 years and my view of their role is simillar.

I consider SharePoint a great place to publish but not a great place to work,  so here are a few details of how I breakdown working with files and publishing them.

How I work with files:

1. I prefer working with files stored on my local hard drive.  Every application - not just Office - works great with the local file system and its quick, reliable and simple to use.
2. I have pretty much every file I have ever worked on and many reference files on my local file system and I can search the 30,000 files in a flash using X1. In addition I get fast high quality previews of the files I am searching.  In the last 10 years if I had saved files directly into collaborative spaces they would be spread across probably a 100 different workspaces and be impossible to find. 
   — Impossible might seem strong but remember these files would have been scattered across collaborative workspaces from several customers and partners and several of the systems that contained the files have now been decomissioned.
3. I re-use data from old files every day,  I don’toften go back 10 years but I go back 3 years every week.
4. I am really looking forward to Vista’s ability to combine search with tags and other meta-data and again I stress the importance of the ability to work with all my files, across customers and projects.
5. I love the fact that files in my local file system are available almost instantly with no network delays or reliability issues and that I can replicate them easily to my Tablet for mobile working.  I have found replication to be 100% reliable even with plenty of adds, deletes, renames and edits at both ends (obviously not at the same time)

How I backup my files:

1. I backup my files on-site using robocopy to mirror my master file system to another machine each night
2. I backup my files offsite using Iron Mountains connected,  which is fast and very efficient, especially when multiple users have many duplicate files (as it uses a single instance store).  There is a web interface to Connected as well to provide anywhere access (but I have never needed to use it).

How I publish files:

1. When I am ready to share files I need to publish them, if I am working with a small team all sharing a file server, this is really easy - just mirror (or copy) my files up to the file server.
2. Sometimes I use Groove as a way to share files between team members and it works well, but it’s expensive.
3. More often I publish the files to a collaborative workspace and the discontinuity always annoys me,  the fact that I have to browse to a document library and upload the file, or drag and drop it using web-dav, often needing to add document properties.  SharePoint makes this a bit better because it can use property promotion to populate server meta-data from document meta-data. 
4. Sometimes I copy files using web-dav but the poor web-dav integration always annoys me,  I particulary don’t like the fact that web-dav support rarely includes surfacing document properties in the shell or providing right click actions.  Now that most of the functionality in collaborative workspaces is implemented by well defined web services I wish shell extentions could be written that exposed this functionality via Windows Explorer as well as the Browser, much as SharePoint v1 did.

How I publish status:

1. When other people need to track what I am doing I don’t find uploading individual files very useful.  Instead I prefer to post  documents with embedded documents or more often links.  That way I can provide people with access to sets of related files with approporate comments.  Its even better if people can comment back to me.
2. Discussion databases can be used in this way and I often use Notes databases, but I think I have a preference for blogs to provide this function.  Now that SharePoint includes blogs this is a step forward, especially because I can use LiveWriter which allows me to save drafts in the file system and also easily edit previous posts.  Even better LiveWriter keeps track of all of my posts to all of my blogs and because all of its data is in the file system I can replicate it between multiple machines and easily back it up.

How I publish ideas:

1. Blogs are definately my favorite place to publish personal ideas, although I prefer discussion areas for developing ideas.
2. I also like wikis but prefer them for publishing ideas that need collaborative effort over time, for example a process or service definition that I know will evolve.  I am concerned though that wiki content is more difficult to reuse as it gets locked up within a particular wiki.  For someone who is working on many projects having my contribution to each project locked away in a wiki silo is an issue I have not come to terms with.

Team working:

Lots of the comments above touch on team working, but here are some particular notes:

1. When I work with a team on a file server every team member gets a personal working directory.  The owner of it gets READ/WRITE access and all other team members get READ.  This means there is never a risk of conflicts and everyone can easily track everyone elses activity.  This is especially true with search that makesit really easy to aggregate files from across multiple peoples working progress areas.
2. When working with a team across multiple companies, I prefer to use Groove,  the fact that it works offline and syncs in the background well makesit much more likely to be used.  I also like the fact that it provides a multiple tools including a discussion area where people can refine Ideas and post status information.  We sometimes use it to provide a sort of team blog.  Everyone I know who uses Groove wishes it included RSS notifications so that we only had one place to look for change (our RSS readers).
3. When working with a team within the company my preference is to work locally on my desktop and Tablet and publish to a collaborative space at key points, if I am working with a small team I will also write a highlight report with links to documents, blog posts, useful web sites etc.
4. I think RSS will have a huge impact — making it much easier to coordinate activities within and between teams as well as many other scenarios.

In summary I am essentially looking for a more integrated and seamless experience, hesistate to propose solutions because there are people better at figuring these thing out than me but here are some things I have seen and liked. 

1. I really liked the idea of accessing web based document libraries through the windows shell, especially if I have right click menu support for all key actions like check-in/out.
2. I really like the idea of being able to perform actions offline and then have these actions execute transparently when my PC detects that it’s online again.
3. I like the idea of making RSS subscriptions to document libraries and associating them with folders in the filesystem and seeing file enclosures appear as if by magic.
4. I want all change reported to me through RSS and sometimes I want enclosures to be delivered as well. 
5. I want intelligent handling of URLs, ie if I am offline I want them to resolve to local replicas or caches on-line I want the option (Lotus Notes handles this pretty well)
6. I want tags to work across applications and not just at the file system level. 
7. I like the Vista idea that allows applications to register preview, search and property handlers to create a more unified experience
8. I really like the “blog this” concept and would like as many applications as possible to have one click integration into Live Writer or simillar.  That way I have a single place to manage blogs and persist drafts and previous posts
9. I like the idea of Groove but I would like a central Groove server as well so that a star topology was supported for replication as well as a mesh.  Sometimes with small teams individuals working across time zones are not online enough at the sametimes.

Much as I like full text search tools like Windows Desktop Search and X1 they are not really optimized for searching ALL of the files on my PC just by filename, and file meta-data.  So I was pleased to come across Locate, on my PC it builds an index of 365,000 files and 30,457 directories in under an hour and is lightning fast at finding them again - even when searching every file on your PC.  I also like the fact that the results list is like a normal explorer window and supports all the normal right click options etc.

In fact as I have used Locate over the last week or so I realized that most of the time I don’t need full text indexing at all.

Just by chance I came across a vision document for the Chandler open source Personal Information Management (PIM) client application which has a very innovative design and ambitious plans for sharing, extensibility and cross-platform support.  Even if you have no interest in Chandler as a product I recommend you have a read because it includes some really useful concepts that might help you assess the capabilities of alternative products.  Take this extract as an example:

Who says that the lines between emails, events and tasks are clear? Users need to manage their information according to project, not according to application. Chandler offers heterogeneous collections, able to contain any kind of Chandler item as well as resources that might otherwise live in random places in the file system. Naturally, searches can also cover all application areas at once or alternately be limited to specific kinds of items.

More subtly, we believe it’s powerful to allow users to not only put their peanut butter and chocolate in the same cupboard, but also to mix their peanut butter and chocolate together in the same item. We call this stamping, as in “I want to stamp this note as a message” or “I want to stamp this message as a task”. The user adds email-ness or task-ness to the pre-existing item without creating a separate item. Consider some of the possible use cases for this:

• An incoming email leads to an ill-defined task. Rather than have to create a task and try to decide exactly what it is and what to call it, just stamp the email as a task to be sure to come back to it later.
• A co-worker has to be notified about an upcoming event. Rather than create a mail and give it a subject then copy information from the event to the email, just stamp the event as a message and fill in the “To” field.

Stamping replaces the flagging feature that traditional email clients often support. Flagging is tantalizingly close to being useful for many people but lacks the ability to define due dates or detail to explain why something was flagged. Since stamping an email as a task is just one click, it’s as easy as flagging and doesn’t force a series of decisons. All the user has to know is that there is probably something to do, sometime, and stamp as task. Later the user can remove the task stamp, assign a date, or add more details to the description of what has to be done.

The image in the sidebar shows an event that was stamped as an email, adding “to” and “from” fields but keeping the same subject, body, and all the event attributes.

Some of these ideas seem to have found their way into Notes Hanover and it’s activity explorer.