Adventures in home working

I’m currently brainstorming ideas for my new home office,  I spend about 6 hours a day in it right now, so its the most important (time wise at least) space in my life.  Debbie and I currently share the room and I essentially have one quarter of the wall space, Debbie has two walls and the whole family share a wall of storage. 

Now that I have insulated, lit and boarded out the loft we have a lot more storage space and Debbie will soon be getting her own garden room, which will be part office, part craft space and part chill out space. 

Bottom line is that the room will become a real home office for me with lots of potential to create some more varied working environments, spread out a little, tidy up a lot etc. 

I’m currently looking for inspiration, good sources here:

1. Home office warrior setups
2. Scott Hanselman’s home office

but right now these are a few of the things on my mind:

1. a very comfy chair that I can relax in and read and work with my laptop on my lap
2. a small two seater sofa
3. an exercise bike
4. a coffee table where I can lay out books and magazines I am reading
5. a meditation cushion
6. some plants
7. an ioniser
8. new art
9. a larger central screen – I currently have three 19″ screens – but I work with a lot of large complex spreadsheets, presentation slides and documents and I would definitely benefit from more space probably 1600*1280 would do it
10. a 4th small 1024*768 screen for screen sharing on web conferences, many people still have 1024*768 laptops and this would provide them with the best experience.  My desktop has a spare video connection and I have a spare screen so it just space that stopping me
11. reduce the amount of wireless radiation in the room,  I currently have a wireless access point, 2 wireless laptops, a mobile phone and a DECT phone in the room and that’s a lot of radiation
12. more inspirational visibility of books
13. clearing the scanner and printer out of sight,  I hardly ever use them, but they are important for the rest of the family
14. a Polycom Skype communicator, once Polycom release Vista drivers

Strange though it might seem I think handling of audio is one of the weakest features of every SmartPhone I have ever had.  These are some of the things I want to do:

1. Listen to music or Podcasts, with automatic bookmarking so I don’t loose my place.  While listening I want to be able to interrupt my flow and without touching my phone (but I don’t mind pressing a button on my headset) I want to be able to:
1. Answer calls and pause my music
2. Make calls using voice recognition and pause my music
3. Listen to GPS instructions and pause my music
4. Take a voice note and pause my music
2. While on a call I want to be able to:
1. Be heard on a windy day or when there’s other background noise
2. Mute and un-mute that call without touching the phone, but again I don’t mind pressing a button on my headset
3. Record a segment of the call
4. Conference someone else into the call
3. While writing an email I want to be able to:
1. Record a voice note and email that instead of writing on the tiny keyboard

This article also provides some interesting future scenarios for audio, concentrating on the hardware and sharing of audio.  This article links to it and has a good comment thread.

Dave Pollard has a typically excellent post contrasting Knowledge Management 1.0 (which I remember being pushed at me, but thankfully resisted) and KM 2.0 that’s been inspired by the Internet and web 2.

I have two thoughts worth noting:

1. Things that work at Internet scale don’t always translate to the enterprise
2. Dave’s post doesn’t seem to put much emphasis on the information lifecycle, for example
1. blogs are a great way of narrating your work to improve ad-hoc collaboration between your known and unknown community of interest. 
2. However at some point information needs to be refined by collaborative effort and then maintained by other people (the original creators move on or loose interest) and wiki’s are better for that.

Looks like Microsoft is finally realising that custom workspaces is one of the keys to increasing employee productivity.  Rather than assuming that individual offices is the only – and best – way to work they are now moving to a building design that can evolve with the needs of the team. 

I like this idea, whilst I have never had the luxury of a budget that stretched to a personal office (except at home) I have always tried to:

1. give team members input into their office design
2. created environments that could be easily rearranged to suit the needs of the team at a particular point in time.  We found we rearranged our offices at least every 3 months
3. provided lots of different types of space, from quiet space, to ad-hoc meeting rooms, library areas, collaborative work areas and formal conference rooms

I’ve designed 4 Offices over my 20 years and it’s probably had more impact than anything else I ever did as a manager.

In the Microsoft Office design I particularly like the Atrium and the Coffee bar, but these are expensive and grandiose and you can do a lot even in the most basic of office buildings.

Tom Davenport is spot on, with this post:

Here’s a next big thing: companies will need to redesign their workplaces to better fit the needs of knowledge workers. The idea that we should spend our workdays in boring cubicles — either in big downtown buildings or suburban office parks — is increasingly out of kilter with the way people actually work and how they want to spend their lives. It doesn’t take into account our needs and abilities involving mobility, social networking, stimulation, and fun. I’ll bet that the best knowledge workers will be seeking out companies with workplaces that offer more to them.

Anyone who reads my blog knows how passionate I am on this topic and over the years me and my teams have done lots of experiments in workspace design that have proved just how much untapped business and personal improvement is available for companies willing to innovate and allow their teams to design their own working environments.  Tom points to a good case study that seems to address at least the first tier benefits:

Of course, companies frequently undertake initiatives involving new work environments, but none is as visionary, well-planned, and well-executed as Capital One’s “Future of Work” (FOW) program. This program was implemented on a pilot (but substantial) basis in the company’s Richmond and McLean, VA, campuses. The FOW program combines a variety of different office environments with a strong emphasis on mobility and mobile technologies. There are quiet sites, coffee bars, team rooms, and accommodations for working at home. The program has already yielded substantial increases in employee satisfaction and self-rated productivity, and Capital One has lowered its costs at the same time

Scott describes his home office in great detail in this post.  I’m a little jealous because he has his own space (I have to share mine with my Wife and she’s not very tidy!) but we have a similar setup, although Scott has even more monitors than I do!.  If I had the office to myself I would get rid of Debbie’s desk and replace it with a reclining chair or a sofa for chilling out, reading and informal meetings.

I really appreciate it when people describe how they work and I think workspace design is often the most neglected area.

For a long time now I’ve watched Jeffrey Snover and admired his passion, Graham noticed as well and linked to this short video that explains some of what motivates Jeffrey.  As Graham points out the all important ingredient is that Jeffrey really believes that PowerShell is going to improve the lives of IT administrators everywhere and I think he’s right.

This sort of passion drives me as well – at least it does when I’m convinced that the technology and process innovations I’m working on with CSC are really going to makes peoples lives more productive and fun.  That’s not always the case of course sometimes the enterprise agenda and the end users agenda are not perfectly aligned, but whenever possible I’m trying to find ways to make what we do a “win win” for CSC, our customers and our users.

This blog reflects my focus on the end user more than my other work in CSC but I’m never more enthusiastic about work than when I think there’s a chance to help people.  Right now though I’m worrying about a few things:

1. Is ever more technology in our lives really making life better
2. Is always on communication disrupting our work life balance
3. Is addiction to email, social networks, computer games, eBay etc going to be as damaging as other forms of addiction
4. Is mobile working really more productive
5. Are constant interruptions making us dumb
6. Do we really need to keep on top of all this information that’s flowing our way so efficiently
7. What’s the long term effect of virtual work and play on our mental health and the quality of our relationships
8. Do end users need protecting from themselves
9. etc

In all of the examples above,  I think the answer turns out to be “it depends” and its part of my job to help reduce the level of uncertainty in the answer.

I had a good laugh at this article in Wired where Seth describes how the search for increased productivity can easily become a goal in itself, in fact dwarfing actually doing real work.  This snip tells it all:

When my fiance came home from work each evening, we’d ask each other how our respective days had gone. She’d describe the small frustrations and victories that punctuate office life. I’d say something along the lines of “Today I spent three and a half hours organizing my Google Bookmarks” or “You’d be amazed at what you can turn up if you play around with Google US Government Search.” Then we’d both laugh. It took a couple of weeks before I finally noticed the concern in her eyes. Then she asked: “What else did you do?”

That’s when I realized I wasn’t actually accomplishing anything. My campaign to increase productivity had become yet another distraction — and a significant one

It’s a big issue, sites like LifeHacker (and so many others) provide a constant stream of new tips and tools to improve your productivity, but they become an end in themselves.  Part of my job is to work through the hype and make recommendations to enterprises on how to improve personal productivity so I’m in an even worse situation,  I’m paid to try out all of this stuff. 

Still I have a real job as well so I have to work hard at finding balance, but tweaking is so much fun!

Within CSC we have recently been seeing a strong trend towards consumerization of IT with many tech savvy employees now pushing for control over their work IT, especially their desktop PCs, collaboration and personal productivity tools.  A few years ago these desktops were locked down business tools, now users are happily tweaking away and managing them themselves. 

Certainly they are happier – everyone likes control (at least when things are working) – but are they more effective?  Our current focus is on finding the sweet spot:

1. Giving people enough control to allow them to innovate and tweak to suit their personality and skill level
2. Making it easy to fix things when they go wrong, a bit of – protect people from themselves
3. Making their environments transparently secure
4. Making it easy to do the right thing, and find out what the “right thing is”

Hopefully avoiding Seth’s situation:

Thanks, Google. You’ve turned me into the most efficient time-waster ever

Since I started suffering from Stills Disease about 6 years ago and more specifically since I spent a couple of years on Steroids to combat it, my concentration has degraded really badly.  I can measure the degradation quantitatively and it’s pretty significant, although it does vary from day to day.  

I have tried lots of things to improve it from healthy living, reducing medications, taking a wide variety of supplements and meditation with some moderate success. 

If you are suffering and want a useful overview and some first steps then I recently came across this excellent article from Kent University, don’t put up with it challenge it!

While I was at my in-laws this weekend I didn’t have broadband so I installed OnSpeed to improve performance of my GPRS connection.  I have been pretty impressed, here are the main advantages:

1. For me OnSpeed seems to compress data by an average of 3-4 times, of course OnSpeed claims more!
2. This means on my capped Orange GPRS/3G data connection I can now stay online all the time that I am out of the house and browse quite a bit and not really worry about hitting my cap
3. It also means that browsing is significantly faster
4. It seems to have a much better estimate of GPRS data usage than my 3G Watcher program
5. It’s transparent in use

What’s the catch:

1. It costs £24.99/year which I think is a good deal when you consider how much GPRS per MB data costs are
2. Images are compressed, the quality is slightly reduced, but its not been an issue for me so far
3. You can block adverts if you want more compression, which I personally think is a good thing, although the Maxthon ad blocker is better
4. It seems to slow browsing down slightly when I’m on my fast ADSL connection,  you can disable it, but its not significant enough for me to bother disabling it