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A Peaceful and Productive Day February 27, 2006

Ingredients:

* Blue skies and sunshine are optional, but it’s not really as good without it.
** Fresh ground coffee is not optional!

Method:

Result:

Increased productivity and reduced stress while working at home. Actually, with the exception of the Chatterbox (which is actually attached to a “comms” laptop at home) I could have been using all of the above almost anywhere – home, Starbucks, wherever. The point is that I’m lucky enough to be able to work at home when my projects and commitments come together appropriately, and prompted by some posts I saw today about “working from the bag”, I thought I’d throw in my two-penn’orth.

  1. Office Phone Calls. I diverted my office phone to voicemail before leaving on Friday, although I could have done it over the web today if I’d forgotten (I like Cisco Unity!). Voicemail is delivered to my email as an MP3, which then forwards to my Blackberry. I can’t play the MP3 on my Blackberry, but I can see that the message is there, and decide when to retrieve it. Anyone who may need me urgently has my cellphone (Blackberry) number anyway, so I’m reachable, but this extra filter helps keep me moving along. If I needed to get into a “proper” work call, my Cisco softphone would’ve worked perfectly well. The same Bluetooth headset for my Blackberry would work with my laptop for the softphone.
  1. The Vosky Chatterbox is a quick-and-easy way to take personal calls, if I’m on a break or otherwise inclined, while leaving my hands free to keep working away at a keyboard. It’s also really easy, as I use Skype, to click the mouse a couple of times and make sure that any personal calls also go to voicemail.
  1. Physical Layout. From where I was working, I was four paces from the kitchen (and that nice, fresh coffee…), and twelve paces from the bathroom. I haven’t tried to calculate it yet, but I know that made a significant time saving today!
  1. Digital is great, but know when to use pen and paper. It was quicker to take my hands off the laptop and make a quick note in the Circa than it would’ve been for me to use multiple applications on the laptop today. That would have been a different story if I’d been working at my desktop, with the two monitors – the moral of the story is choose the right tools for the job.
  1. Contactability… Trillian on my desktop, Skype on my desktop and laptop, and Tello on my Blackberry, as well as email access on my laptop and Blackberry, and I think I’ve been pretty reachable! Given I work with an international team, and I also don’t sit anywhere near the folks I regularly interact with when I’m IN the office, this doesn’t throw any great issues into my workplace/working methods.

Not a lot of face-to-face, or (today) remote contact with the team and colleagues via IM, etc., but it’s the same general principle as the “out of the bag” posts – it’s not always about being “at the office”; sometimes it’s just about “what you get done”, and the overall benefits that can bring, and the comforts you can experience as a result of that.

All in all, a very productive, pleasant and comfortable day.

I’m going to do it all again tomorrow J


This week…

… I was going to buy a new iPod, probably one of the 60Gb ones.  And I thought the only choice I had to make was whether to get it in white, or black.

Seems I’ll have to wait a little longer to decide.

On Tuesday, Apple will be announcing “fun new products“.  As one of those products might be a new video iPod, I’ll wait…

And then on Thursday, Microsoft will be telling us about their Origami product, which the early reports (leaks) and speculation has as a multi-purpose, video, audio, etc. etc. handheld device.

So, hopefully, I’ll know by Thursday which device I’ll be going for.  Of course, if neither of the new products are going to be available any time soon, I’ll go with the iPod anyway - at least I know it’ll do what I want it to do, and it’ll fit into the rest of my computer/audio/video equipment quite nicely.


Spelling with Flickr

Just a little silliness to start the day…

Spell with flickr

GARY ese-dos.jpgLINGER