Adventures in home working

Years ago I setup a collaborative working environment for my team, the idea was for the environment to be really social, we had lots of breakout rooms, large tables where people could sit together, comfy seats, whiteboards everywhere a library area and of course quiet space for when you needed to concentrate. 

Lots of people would ask if they could come and hot desk in the office and in the end we said no because it was getting too crowded.  When I saw this article – and the photo above – about co-working facilities for people who wanted to get out of the house, but not into the office – it reminded me of those times gone by.

I really like the idea, of a space where you can pop in and meet like minded professionals in a great working environment with food and drink.  For me that’s not the office, I work on global projects with virtual teams so I have little in common with the people in the nearest office, and theres no desk space anyway.  

The hat factory is a great example:

The Hat Factory is community office space for geeks and media hackers. We’re a group of open sourcers, video bloggers, Drupal developers, and more who are tired of working from coffee shops and home every day

It’s a really cool idea, and I bet a lot of real social networking goes on here, not just sharing contacts, sending messages and reading blogs!  There’s even a video.

Previous posts I have made about work spaces can be found here and about home working here

I am a bit nervous about VMware on Vista right now and concerned about the upgrade costs to move from 5.5 to 6.  So for now I am leaving VMware on my servers.  For my clients I have installed Virtual PC 2007 and have been pleasently surprised by the following:

1. I like the UI, its clean and simple.  The menus are unobtrusive and provide all the key functions
2. I like the fact that when I resize the window, the video driver changes resolution automatically
3. I really like the fact that it now supports – VMware like – virtual folders, these are important to me because they allow me to establish a VPN session from the Virtual PC and still access my local hard drives (without a split tunnel)
4. I like the fact that I can drag and drop files from my host PC into the Virtual PC
5. performance seems pretty good, I haven’t done any benchmarking but its certainly fast enough for casual use and testing

None of these things differentiates Virtual PC from VMware, but they are enough to make Virtual PC good enough, so I can’t see me upgrading to VMware 6 with any urgency – at least right now – and I definitely think that for most people who need a it Virtual PC will meet all of their needs.

The download is here

The Tech overview is here (XPS)

After reading about my rebuild nightmare you are probably thinking that I would be migrating fast to web 2.0 sites.  Wrong!  I really like some of the web 2.0 sites and work extensively in the browser – but I like to use the best tool for the job and right now I think that’s:

1. 2003 server
2. Driving 3 screens
3. Running most applications local but with background synchronization of data onto servers where it makes sense

I just love the customizability, the great integrated experience and the fact that from one desktop I can run local apps, smart apps, web apps, terminal served apps, virtual machines etc. 

I also love the fact that I can leave my desktop running and grab my Tablet and have everything synched but have a completely different environment optimized for a very different type of activity and different form factor.

So for me web 2.0 is a complement to the desktop, not a replacement.  My desktop has been rock solid for 2 years and largely because of my own messing around has probably cost me 3 hours of downtime to fix.  Not a bad trade off for the productivity benefits and fun I have had over those 2 years.

I switch to a new machine and Vista in a few weeks, I am pretty worried that I won’t get the rock stability I am used to but here’s hoping!

On Monday I started to notice that IE and Maxthon were not working correctly following the installation of IE7 on Windows 2003 server (my desktop).  IE would just stop opening new web pages completely, Firefox was fine but Maxthon is too integrated into my working practices so I decided IE7 must go and did a de-install.  Unfortunately the resulting machine running IE6 was badly broken, IE6 would not browse to any web pages, just download them.

I poked around for 30 minutes but failed to fix it, not to worry I thought a quick repair would fix it, but to no avail and this tipped me over the edge and I decided to do a rebuild. 

This machine – my current desktop – is about to become my server when my new desktop arrives in January so a rebuild was due anyway as this build has lasted me a couple of rock solid years.

Just at the end of the build (after lots of installing and lots of patching) I di a final restart and horror of horrors I get some error about services.exe won’t start because some dll is missing.  Using the repair console I copy over the dll, no joy, then I do a full repair – no better so I had to do the whole rebuild again!!!  I am not sure but I think it was VMware or the latest ATI drivers that did it.

Anyway the second time was much better and I took more care with the install sequence, my machine was running great.  I had been working on my laptop during these rebuilds so not much time had been wasted. 

At the end I thought I will do a quick image backup using Ghost 2003,  I decided to avoid the Virtual Partition utility that’s included as I thought there may be compatibility issues but made the mistake of invoking the image from the windows UI which without asking installs the virtual partition and reboots to that. 

Anyway the virtual partition doesn’t seem to be compatible with 2003 server!  It boots first and it’s impossible to get out of it.  After deleting this partition, changing boot.ini and marking my 2003 server partition active (thanks to BartPE) I was up and running again.

WHY NOT USE A BOOT FLOPPY!!! to run Ghost you may well ask, my floppy drive has been broken for 3 years and I have never had to fix it.  A new USB floppy drive is on the way from eBay!

The moral of this story, pay some attention to system backups.  I have great data backups in place and have coped seamlessly with a disk and 2 motherboard failures without a hitch but I always said to myself it’s as easy to rebuild -  NOT AFTER 2 YEARS OF FINE TUNING ITS NOT!!!

So I now do a weekly ASR backup as well as daily data backups (my software library is part of my data backup).

For me telecommuting means I am able to work, so it’s wonderful and liberating.  I do miss the office though and the sort of team dynamics that develops only when you work with people day in day out for years.  For anyone contemplating teleworking I have only a little advise:

1. Live somewhere you love, so that you don’t get tempted to stay in the house all day
2. Meet up with colleagues whenever you can, I like to go out for lunch
3. Create a great working environment, one that you really enjoy working in – remember your employer is no longer in control and that this is a room where you will spend most of your waking hours, so treat it with that level of importance
4. Put the money you save in fuel in the bank and spend it – without guilt – on improving your home working experience
5. Make sure you go into it with a positive attitude, it’s not perfect, but the more energy you put into making it so the better it will be
6. Don’t give up on it,  technology is moving at breakneck speed and the social down side of working on your own will rapidly decrease as high definition video, combines with high speed networking and multiple large screen displays

There are lots of books on the subject, but I recommend reading the comments on this post from lifehacker and this one from Joel on Software.

and no, the house isn’t mine!

One of the more interesting business trends is increasing mobility and how it will change many lives, it’s certainly changed mine allowing me to work from home, out walking, from cafes and restaurants and hotels.  So I was pleased to find this very interesting open survey on this critical dimension of knowledge work on this blog,  you can complete the survey here:

Survey :: http://tinyurl.com/sjsar
Password :: GMWS2006

Complete results are instantly available to you when you complete the survey instrument. It takes a scant 10 minutes. I found some very interesting trends in the survey results. Could you please share your responses?

Note: the survey summary is anonymous and does not include answers to open-ended questions.

I just saved the results as a PDF file and I will be having a good read through on Monday.

I don’t like having the room light on while working at my PC, so this idea on Lifehacker gave me the kick I needed to come up with a cheap way to backlight my monitors and it works really well.

Behind my displays I have a 30W 1 Meter fluorescent light fitting which kicks out the equivalent of 3*60W bulbs,  I added a small inline toggle switch for easy access. 

The effect is excellent, I get a nice background of reflected light that means I can clearly see everything on my desk, but I also get this great glow behind the monitors which is really easy on the eye.  Overall I am very pleased with the effect, and as a twist I assembled it all during a conference call briefing this afternoon – one of the best conference calls yet!

The Inescapable data blog has two recent posts (here and here) that describe some of the gathering momentum around home working that are worth reading.  I am a great fan of home working personally,  although I have some short term reservations about how home working is often implemented by companies.  I think new processes, tool and cultural norms will rapidly mature to make home working a more satisfying experience in the medium term.  I think the nail in the coffin of the office will be when companies start to give employees an allowance that they can choose to spend on a company car, company PC, company phone, company desk and company office space all of which are optimised for the company or they can choose to spend it on creating an optimised personal environment that addresses their work and home life in a more integrated fashion.  I know which one I will be choosing. 

In fact I run an allowance system of sorts myself at the moment,  I gave up long ago expecting my company to invest as much in the tools of my trade as I would have invested if I was given the choice.  So when I started working from home I took the money that I was saving in fuel, personal broadband and other incidental travel and office related expenses and stuck it in a dedicated bank account.  I now draw on that account – without guilt – whenever I need/want to invest in my personal effectiveness and I am much happier as a result,  I no longer spend every day wishing my laptop had more memory, or wishing I had a second display, or a better headset,  I just buy them!

I couldn’t resist entering this contest on Lifehacker!

Snap a few pics of your favorite workspace – home office, desk, studio – and send ‘em in to us. Over the next week or so we’ll feature our favorites. Readers will vote on the ultimate coolest workspace – and the winner gets a $100 gift certificate to Amazon!

This is the main image I sent in,  with a few more detailed ones as well:

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.