productivity

Feb 28 2009   8:14PM GMT

Would a results-only work environment make you more productive?

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
innovation, productivity, work place, ROWE, results-only work environment, business, CIO, human resources, employment, management

Last Friday we featured results-only work environment (ROWE) as our word of the day and I felt stirring within me feelings I’d almost forgotten. Feelings of hope, glimmers of possibility. Maybe even sanity…  I was thinking back to the first of January, when I was inspired by a fresh new year and a fresh new approach to work and — dare I say it? — work/life balance. For some reason, the first week of January everything seemed to be going to heck in a handbasket. Crises to deal with, fires to put out and damage to control for one thing or another. And somehow, the fresh energy of the new year had gotten stale. But then I was writing about the ROWE and there it was again…

Here’s how Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson describe the ROWE to Tim Ferris:

In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Currently, there are two authentic ROWEs—Fortune 100 retailer Best Buy Co, Inc. and J. A. Counter & Associates, a small brokerage firm in New Richmond, WI. At both organizations, the old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.

Selling employees on the ROWE concept is not difficult. The issue is…

How to convince your boss

On their website, Ressler and Thompson have a pretty compelling list of reasons that your boss should be interested in giving the ROWE thing a try:

• PRODUCTIVITY – Get more work from existing workforce now
• RETENTION – Keep the talent you want; say goodbye to the talent that isn’t producing results
• ATTRACTION – Be a magnet for the best talent from all generations
• ELIMINATION OF WASTEFUL PRACTICES – Elimination of unnecessary tasks and processes; communication becomes more efficient and effective
• A WORKFORCE THAT’S FLUID, FLEXIBLE AND ACCOUNTABLE – Ability to perform in a more agile, 24/7 manner with clear, measurable goals for every employee
• OPTIMIZATION OF SPACE – No need for 1:1 workspace requirements or hoteling programs
• LIFE BALANCE FOR ALL – Environment that is inclusive and fair without the headache of managing a flexible work program
• IMPROVED EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT/MORALE/LOYALTY – Happy employees boost the bottom line, are more dedicated and produce better results
• GO GREEN – Reduce your impact on the environment by creating a culture where everyone uses common sense about where they get work done – whether from home, a coffee shop or library. Wherever. Whenever.

Ok now, Tim Ferris is the guy that wrote The 4-Hour Work Week so he may take an especially rosy view. I have no illusions that I could do my current job in four hours a day — let alone four hours a week. Still, Ferris raises some good points and has some good advice. For example, he suggests that if you’re trying to talk your boss into a ROWE, you sell her on a trial period instead of a complete revolution. Theory is that’s all it’ll take to convince her of the benefits.

That said, well, here it is lateish on a Saturday afternoon. And I’m tying up loose ends for work, posting to my work blog. Thinking back, again, to New Year’s Day, when I was doing the exact same thing. But, to be honest, I’m kind of in the mood for it. Come Tuesday afternoon, I might not be. And which time am I likely to get more done? I can tell you, unequivocally, that I’m at least twice as productive when the stars align properly and I actually want to work. Especially if I don’t flog myself to sit like a lump in front of the keyboard when the energy just isn’t there but, instead, take a little time to recharge.

And now my memory wanders a few years further back. I was on the phone with Paul Gillin just before I signed my first contract with TechTarget. We were talking about what the terms of my contract, what I would be expected to accomplish. “And beyond that,” he said, “We don’t care what you do. You do the work and you manage your own time.” Eminently sensible, I thought.

Gillin went on to say that they had no issues with people working from home. Then he chuckled — and, Reader, it was an evil chuckle — and explained that giving people control of their own time was absolutely the way to get the most work out of them.

Jun 10 2008   12:16PM GMT

What is enterprise 2.0? Cloud computing proponents mix with social software vendors in Boston.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, Microsoft, Networking, business, interoperability, news, Web 2.0, enterprise, software, Technology, Web services, video, new media, Internet, innovation, useful, social bookmarking, social publishing, interesting, invention, event, entrepeneurship, startup, collaboration, participation, Development, wiki, conversation, streaming, productivity, spreadsheet, trend, social networking, buzz, communications, Web applications, interface, buzzword, software development, cloud computing, the cloud, word meanings, conference, demonstration, enterprise 2.0

The question of creating an agreed upon definition for enterprise 2.0 continues to come up here on the Boston waterfront, as hundreds of software executives, CIOs, software vendors, media and curious technologists mix and explore the latest in enterprise collaboration technologies at Enterprise 2.0. Zack Church and I collaborated last month to formulate this:

Enterprise 2.0 is the strategic integration of Web 2.0 technologies into an enterprise’s intranet, extranet and business processes. Enterprise 2.0 implementations generally use a combination of social software and collaborative technologies like blogs, RSS, social bookmarking, social networking and wikis. Most enterprise 2.0 technologies, whether homegrown, free or purchased, emphasize employee, partner and consumer collaboration. Such technologies may be in-house or Web-based. Companies using YouTube for vlogging or a private Facebook group as a modified intranet, for instance, are implementing a form of enterprise 2.0.

The conference organizers have formulated the following definition, loosely based upon Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAffee’s definition for enterprise 2.0:

Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.

So what’s the story? Buzzword akin to Web 2.0 or something “real?”

In a session exploring the state of Enterprise 2.0, however, Dion Hinchliffe offered up one of the best, most succinct definitions to date that moves beyond the specifics to a more overarching purpose:

Enterprise/Web 2.0 is made up of “networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects.” — Tim O’Reilly.

In this case, a network effect is “When a good or service has more value the more that other people have it too.” (Wikipedia)

Here at the conference, over 60 different vendors are demonstrated different kinds of communication and productivity software that creates such network effects by helping workers to collaborate more easily, efficiently and socially. We’ll be posting videos, articles, interviews and other content over the next two days, as long as the wifi allows. Livestreaming has been balky, due to heavy network use, but you can check in on WhatIs.com’s live conference coverage of Enterprise 2.0 at uStream.com to see if we’re online. Check back here for more coverage on cloud computing, Dan Bricklin on SocialText’s new social spreadsheet or demonstrations of new social software like Newsgator’s Social Sites 2.0, a plugin that turns MSFT Sharepoint Server into a Facebook-like environment.

If you’re at the conference floor and would like to demonstrate your software or talk about enterprise 2.0 and social software, feel free to email me at ahoward@techtarget.com or send me a tweet at @digiphile on Twitter.

Jun 10 2008   11:26AM GMT

What is a social spreadsheet? Dan Bricklin and SocialText combine wikis with workspaces at Enterprise 2.0.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, interoperability, applications, enterprise, Internet, innovation, commentary, cool, education, learning, academics, social publishing, interesting, invention, event, creativity, collaboration, freeware, Development, community, information, productivity, spreadsheet, history, communications, interface, software development, conference, enterprise 2.0

Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText, a maker of enterprise wiki software, announced the launch of a new social spreadsheet at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. In his presentation to a packed hall of technology executives, developers, media and social media mavens, Mayfield first addressed the state of Enterprise 2.0 before asking a simple question:

How can you work with structured data in an unstructured way?

He noted that the killer app of the PC generation that came of age in the 1980s was the spreadsheet, pioneered by Dan Bricklin in the form of VisiCalc. That app was what led many early adopters to buy an Apple and tap into the productivity gains brokered by the IT revolution.

Spreadsheets are now used for communication, lists, tables and two-dimensional layout. Mayfield asserted that they’re the most common database on the planet.

Workers collaborated originally by using sneakernet and floppy disks to share spreadsheets.

Now, we play “email volleyball with attachments” — a descriptive and all too accurate summation of how files ping pong around a network, introducing version control issues, 90% error rates. As Ross sees it, reverse engineering a spreadsheet on a web page misses the potential.

For the past two years, Socialtext has been working with Dan Bricklin to combine the usability and collaborative power of a wiki with the organization and flexibility of a spreadsheet. Meet the social spreadsheet, a “multi-user wiki-based spreadsheet program that simplifies version control, reduces errors and increases productivity.”

The software is able to cross organizational, structural, geographical and temporal boundaries. In the short video below, (available on Viddler for sharing or on YouTube), Dan Bricklin explains what a social spreadsheet is, how it works, how he was involved in the project and what users can expect from the software.

The social spreadsheet is open sourced and will be used in XOs for the One Laptop Per Child project worldwide, providing access to a quintessential IT tool for farmers, village merchants, businessmen, teachers and thousands of other individuals in the developing world.

Thanks again to Dan Bricklin for taking the time to talk to WhatIs.com.

May 6 2008   8:38AM GMT

Video: CommuniGate’s Pronto! demo shows what a real-time communications dashboard can do

Posted by: Alexander Howard
messaging, applications, software, video, YouTube, multimedia, aggregator, portal, personalization, tool, productivity, communications, interface, display, demonstration

This video, uploaded by CommuniGate, demonstrates Pronto!, their take on a unified communications dashboard.

The application pulls multiple forms of rich media and communication streams into a single dashboard. 

The desktops of many office workers these days often contains all of these communications forms already; they’re just not combined into a single, slick interface or administrated by centralized controls.  Given the risk that any organization, much less enterprise, takes in  allowing employees to install multiple third party applications for IM, VoIP, email, RSS, videoconferencing and web-based widgets for anything and everything else, it’s perhaps not surprising that vendors are stepping in to offer some control to sysadmins.

Nov 7 2007   10:32AM GMT

Driven to distraction by drive-by interruptions

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
email, enterprise, lifehack, productivity, communications

Does the following sound familiar? You’re at your desk, opening email, preparing for a good solid work day. As you’re responding to one message, however, that little alert pops up on the bottom of the screen and before you know it you’ve got a bunch of open emails clamoring for your attention. And then comes the IM, which, being real time (as opposed to the several seconds elapsing between messages in an email exchange) trumps email. At the height of this madness, I’ve occasionally been exchanging email and IMing with someone simultaneously when interrupted by the phone. Guess who?

Whatever your job, if you do it at a computer you’re probably coming to terms with spending a fair amount of your day doing things that didn’t come up in your job description. (Hands up, anyone who saw “Writing and responding to email” at the top of the required tasks list?)

Ok, no surprise that email is eating our lives (not sure I even want to see the numbers on that) but did you know that you probably spend more time being interrupted from tasks than you do working on them?

This article looks at drive by interruptions and the toll they exact on productivity.

Here are a few stats:

• Interruptions crunch through 28% of the average knowledge worker’s day.
• Interruptions typically lower a worker’s IQ 10 points. (The researchers note that’s over twice as big a drop as experienced by someone who smoked marijuana. Man.)
• In a study of Microsoft employees, it took workers an average of 15 minutes to settle into a task again after an interruption.

If, like me, you telecommute you may not have the “drop-by drive-by” coworker sitting on the edge of your desk. On the other hand, family and neighbors (many, many of whom just never seem to get the “work” part of “work from home”) will typically take time out of their busy days to fill that niche.

When a friend of mine was working on his doctoral dissertation, he actually locked his door and tied himself into the chair at his computer with the belt from his bathrobe so that he couldn’t absent-mindedly wander away.

Ingenious, but it would never work today. We’re virtually strapped in at our computers but the potential for interruption just seems to get worse. Without so much as standing up, we’ve got email, IMs, RSS notifications… not to mention the siren call of the Net or even the archaic charms of the telephone.

So how to cope, get some work done and maybe even save your sanity? Well, here’s a hint: “Unplug” is number three on Lifehack’s top 50 ways to increase your productivity list. On rare occasions, I’ve closed out of Outlook and exited IM. It’s amazing how much you can get done without interr… oh, hold that thought — I’ve got to take this call…

~ Ivy Wigmore

May 28 2007   1:43PM GMT

Email bankruptcy: Fighting words

Posted by: Margaret Rouse
email, productivity

 Mike Musgrove set off a blogswarm last week with an article called ”E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone’.”  

 The buzz is about email bankruptcy.  What is email bankruptcy? Mike Musgrove defines it as “swearing off e-mail entirely or, more commonly, deleting all old messages and starting fresh.” 

MIT Professor Sherry Turkle has been credited with inventing the term.  She talked about declaring email bankruptcy in this 2002 interview with NY Times columnist Costance Rosenblum. She also called it a “fantasy.”

But then along came venture capitalist Fred Wilson — who went ahead and actually did it.  Yay Fred!

Fred Wilson is the managing partner of two venture capital firms, Flatiron Partners and Union Square Ventures. (Hint: You’ve heard of Feedburner? How about del.icio.us?)

Pretty clever that a VC would title his blog post “Declaring bankruptcy.”  

“I am so far behind on email that I am declaring bankruptcy.
If you’ve sent me an email (and you aren’t my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again.
I am starting over.”

Pretty clever of Mike Musgrove to get the grandfather of the Internet, David Farber, to go on record saying that poor Fred should get out of the technology field.

“For a venture capitalist to say something like this — he should get out of the technology field.”

BLOGFIGHT!

For the record, I’m in favor of the concept behind email bankruptcy.  Also for the record, I don’t think their quarrel has anything to do with email.

The real argument is about words and organizational style. 

There are some folks who live to color code. They have Outlook rules and folders within folders. They like structure and order and will do everything they can to control the contents of their inbox.

Then there are folks who like the junk drawer approach. They never sort their mail.  They like to see what’s coming in and they want it all in one place. To these folks, inboxes — like all junk drawers — need to be cleaned out periodically.

Both organizational styles are valid.  It’s sort of like left-brain / right-brain thinking.  Remember the ant and grasshopper? One isn’t better than the other, they’re just different.  Same with communication technology. Telephone, snail mail, IM, email…they all have their uses.  So it’s not the technology we’re really talking about, it’s what’s socially acceptable for how a person choses to manage the technology.

Some people think email = priority.  In their minds, every incoming message has an exclamation point. They will eagerly drop whatever they’re working on to offer a quick reply. Other people prioritize thier time differently. They see email as a daily chore.  Ok. I get that part. Different strokes for different folks.

So what’s all the fuss?

The word “bankruptcy.” 

Dr. Turkle used the word bankruptcy to describe “starting over.” Unfortunately the word also means “utter ruin and failure.”  It implies the person is incompetent and a loser. Pretty harsh condemnation for just having a different organizational style.

So let’s change the words.  Do-over is so much friendlier.

---

Our readers are good at inventing new words. What should we call it when you delete all your old email messages and start fresh? 

May 9 2007   4:21PM GMT

Netvibes is a good start

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
applications, Internet, search, blog, useful, cool, free, social bookmarking, personalization, desktop, tool, productivity

Netvibes.com is a terrific, highly customizable start page . It comes with some defaults but you can change just about anything on the page to get whatever you want to see first when you log in.

Dion Hinchcliffe named netvibes the best start page in his Best Web 2.0 Software of 2006:

Increasing in popularity in particular are what some people call Ajax desktops, or personalized start pages. Well exemplified by Microsoft’s Live.com, but also by the likes of the popular Protopage and Netvibes, the interest in these online desktops is being driven by a confluence of factors.

One major factor is that we are struggling with attention scarcity; finding enough time to digest the proliferating sources of information we need to track on a daily basis. I don’t need to tell you that the sheer variety can be daunting and now usually includes e-mail, calendars, contacts, to do lists, news, weather, school closings, blogs and work documents like spreadsheets, presentations, and more…

This is making the simplicity and elegance of online desktops ever more attractive.

Apr 12 2007   1:23PM GMT

Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0: Free download to remove Office-specific HTML from documents

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Microsoft, useful, tool, HTML, Office, productivity, tag

If you work with Microsoft Office, you may be aware of the Office-specific HTML tags that the various applications in the suite add to your code when you save as HTML. This handy tool, available as a download from Microsoft.com, enables the user to easily remove those pesky tags. Nifty.