Why You Shouldn’t Check Your Email First Thing In The Morning | Gizmodo Australia
Interesting article. One of the things we often get sucked into is the notion that emails need to be read, dealt with and filed as soon as they arrive We feel rude if we have unread emails in our inboxes. I know I do anyway.
What it means in reality is an interruption to whatever we were doing in the first place. I have tried to only read emails once per hour but it's a tough discipline in the modern world, not to mention a world where people expect things to just happen instantly.
How do you manage your email?
Friday, January 21, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Telecommuting
Telecommuting, teleworking, remote working, distributed workforce; Call it what you will, the bottom line is that you have a group of workers who are not all located centrally in your office. It sounds like an old term and in fact telecommuting and teleworking were first coined decades ago. Actually doing this in a modern environment is becoming easier and easier, and indeed is being encouraged by governments and green advocates.
With the terrible floods in Brisbane and surrounds this week, our remote working policy has been fully tested. The office has been closed for the last 4 days so we’ve all been working from home (or in some cases, other people’s homes!). As pretty much all of our infrastructure is in the cloud, we have been able to continue working with barely any deviation from business as usual really. We have been talking about increasing our remote working time and when we review the week, it will be interesting to see how it changes our views and what is possible and reasonable.
But what does it mean to you and your company?
The biggest single factor restricting the growth of telecommuting is trust. Do you trust your staff to actually do what you are paying them for, when they are not sat in the next cubicle? Or do you expect them to be playing Farmville or Call of Duty? In the past, this would have been difficult but technology should be making this less of an issue. And I’m not talking about spy cameras!
So what do you need?
For me personally, I feel that being out of a noisy office increases my productivity. I can just get on with things and end up completing far more jobs out of the office than when in it. Downsides are a bit of a lack of visibility of what’s going on in the company and the office, and knowing that there are certain things that do just have to be done while in the thick of it.
Telecommuting is a no-brainer for me, at least on a part-time basis. How does it work for you?
With the terrible floods in Brisbane and surrounds this week, our remote working policy has been fully tested. The office has been closed for the last 4 days so we’ve all been working from home (or in some cases, other people’s homes!). As pretty much all of our infrastructure is in the cloud, we have been able to continue working with barely any deviation from business as usual really. We have been talking about increasing our remote working time and when we review the week, it will be interesting to see how it changes our views and what is possible and reasonable.
But what does it mean to you and your company?
The biggest single factor restricting the growth of telecommuting is trust. Do you trust your staff to actually do what you are paying them for, when they are not sat in the next cubicle? Or do you expect them to be playing Farmville or Call of Duty? In the past, this would have been difficult but technology should be making this less of an issue. And I’m not talking about spy cameras!
So what do you need?
- Firstly I would say good staff but it’s not quite as simple as that. You need to foster a culture where your team are motivated to work for the company and understand its goals. How you do that is a topic for another day - though feel free to leave comments with your ideas and opinions. Communication is key. speak to the team, make sure they have the tools and information they need and understand the tasks they have been given. Even the most motivated and dedicated worker can tie themselves in knots when working alone by trying to figure things out where they would normally just ask their co-workers. So you need to make sure they have what they need or are able to ask for it.
- Secondly, you need a steady stream of work - interesting work as much as you can - to keep their attention. Communication comes into play here too. You really have to make sure that the team understands the tasks allocated and what outcomes are expected.
- Thirdly - and depending on the line of work you are in - some system of logging and tracking time. This is straightforward for us, as a percentage of our engineers time is charged to customers on an hourly basis, so the team has been drilled and drilled on how important it is to track time. And we have a software platform designed exactly for that. They understand that this is not to play Big Brother but that it is a necessity for the company to get paid.
- Lastly you will need systems. Your team needs to be able to communicate with you, with their co-workers and with your customers. These days this may be via mobile phone but you may also have a Voice over IP (VoIP) phone system that allows them to log in and handle phone calls in the same way as if they are in the office. They will need access to email, CRM, documents, etc. You may have web based applications for this or maybe a Terminal Server so your staff can access a full desktop experience that looks and feels just like their office desktop.
For me personally, I feel that being out of a noisy office increases my productivity. I can just get on with things and end up completing far more jobs out of the office than when in it. Downsides are a bit of a lack of visibility of what’s going on in the company and the office, and knowing that there are certain things that do just have to be done while in the thick of it.
Telecommuting is a no-brainer for me, at least on a part-time basis. How does it work for you?
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Dipping your toe in the cloud
So you’ve decided you want to go cloud. Or maybe you are a bit apprehensive and want to dip a toe in the water before you go the whole hog? This is fairly common. And understandable for that matter.
I’ve had a GMail account for years so I have been using ‘the cloud’ but have never really done anything with Google Docs. Until recently anyway. I had been using the beta of Office 2010 for a while but in the end didn’t feel the need to go out and buy it. So when the beta period ended and I could no longer use it, I got rid of it. That left a bit of a hole, which was mostly filled with Google Docs. I could simply upload my important documents with the built in batch uploader and away we go.
Having used Google Docs for several months now, I can say that it works well. As a way to dip your toe into cloud for free, you can’t really argue with the value. But here’s the rub. I have documents all over the place and just when I thought I had uploaded them all, I found another obscurely named folder with some files I needed to view to see if I should keep them or not. I didn’t want to upload and convert each one manually so I went looking for another solution.
You would think it would be simple and that a quick Google search would have you floundering in a sea of applications that would let you view these orphaned Word and Excel documents easily. But no, that really isn’t the case. I had almost given up on it when I came across GDocsOpen. They offer a free trial so I thought it had to be worth a go. A 744kb download and trial registration later, I’m ready to go.
Installation is just a next, next, next, finish kind of affair - pretty straightforward. Once registered, you are faced with the options page which asks what kind of documents you want to associate with the program, and of course your Google credentials. Then you are ready to go.
Finding an Excel file to test it with, I double-clicked and waited for the magic to happen. You get a spinning wheel which sits for a few seconds but then your Microsoft Office file opens up in Google Docs, inside GDocsOpen. By this point it has already uploaded and converted the file for you. If you are an impatient person like me, the process can seem a little slow but compare it to uploading manually and there is definitely an efficiency there.
If GDocsOpen finds that you have the file in your Docs repository already it will prompt you for which copy you want to open, or if you want to discard the local copy and just open the Docs copy. If you choose to just open the remote copy, when you come to save and close, you have the option to sync your changes to both copies, which is a nice touch for toe-dippers. It also means you can essentially use it to backup your Google Docs locally.
So the application doesn’t do a great deal but it does remove a few clicks and a bit of manual effort. Overall it is a pretty nice little app that fills a hole that nobody else seems to be trying to fill. There is a free 7-day trial available ($9.99 to purchase the full version), so if you are wanting to dip your toe in the cloud, it has got to be worth a go. Click here to view the website.
I’ve had a GMail account for years so I have been using ‘the cloud’ but have never really done anything with Google Docs. Until recently anyway. I had been using the beta of Office 2010 for a while but in the end didn’t feel the need to go out and buy it. So when the beta period ended and I could no longer use it, I got rid of it. That left a bit of a hole, which was mostly filled with Google Docs. I could simply upload my important documents with the built in batch uploader and away we go.
Having used Google Docs for several months now, I can say that it works well. As a way to dip your toe into cloud for free, you can’t really argue with the value. But here’s the rub. I have documents all over the place and just when I thought I had uploaded them all, I found another obscurely named folder with some files I needed to view to see if I should keep them or not. I didn’t want to upload and convert each one manually so I went looking for another solution.
You would think it would be simple and that a quick Google search would have you floundering in a sea of applications that would let you view these orphaned Word and Excel documents easily. But no, that really isn’t the case. I had almost given up on it when I came across GDocsOpen. They offer a free trial so I thought it had to be worth a go. A 744kb download and trial registration later, I’m ready to go.
Installation is just a next, next, next, finish kind of affair - pretty straightforward. Once registered, you are faced with the options page which asks what kind of documents you want to associate with the program, and of course your Google credentials. Then you are ready to go.
Finding an Excel file to test it with, I double-clicked and waited for the magic to happen. You get a spinning wheel which sits for a few seconds but then your Microsoft Office file opens up in Google Docs, inside GDocsOpen. By this point it has already uploaded and converted the file for you. If you are an impatient person like me, the process can seem a little slow but compare it to uploading manually and there is definitely an efficiency there.
If GDocsOpen finds that you have the file in your Docs repository already it will prompt you for which copy you want to open, or if you want to discard the local copy and just open the Docs copy. If you choose to just open the remote copy, when you come to save and close, you have the option to sync your changes to both copies, which is a nice touch for toe-dippers. It also means you can essentially use it to backup your Google Docs locally.
So the application doesn’t do a great deal but it does remove a few clicks and a bit of manual effort. Overall it is a pretty nice little app that fills a hole that nobody else seems to be trying to fill. There is a free 7-day trial available ($9.99 to purchase the full version), so if you are wanting to dip your toe in the cloud, it has got to be worth a go. Click here to view the website.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
How much information should you give away?
As an IT service provider, we are there to support, maintain and where possible improve our customer’s IT systems. During the course of these works, a whole lot of information is collected from log files and error messages, research and testing and more. Well-run IT service providers - and certainly those who stick to IT Service Management frameworks such as ITIL - will have some form of knowledge management system implemented. In basic terms, this will be a knowledge base of documented issues, problems and their resolutions. It is likely that this repository of information will consist of specific articles documenting resolutions, as well as job notes from resolved issues. The whole point is that information is shared within the company, and future issues can be assessed against known issues for quicker resolution.
So far, so good. To run an efficient IT operation, it is vital to have and to share this information amongst your technical staff. It just makes the whole business of servicing your customers that bit easier. But speaking of the customer, how much of this information do you share with them? There are several things to consider here and it is worth looking at it from both the customer and provider standpoints.
The customer wants to see that you have done plenty for them to justify the fat bill that just landed in their inbox. They want to see that you fixed problems quickly and by being proactive, you saved them lots of dollars by avoiding potential lost downtime. Having said that, in my experience they are not interested in the technical details. They probably have no idea what HKLM_User is and don’t care what tweaking a Reg_DWORD value does.
From the service provider point of view, you want to keep your customers happy and as much as possible, give them what they want. But you don’t want to give away the farm to your ad-hoc customers. Give them enough information that tells them you are working for them and looking out for their business interests without necessarily giving away your intellectual property (IP). Having said all that, if you have customers on fixed-fee contracts, it could be in your interests to give customers access to that IP, so that in future they can fix problems themselves without having to call you. This is win-win really.
So what to do? Firstly make sure that all your work is documented and a mostly non-technical summary of work goes out with the bills each month. Implement some kind of knowledge management system (KMS) or knowledge base (KB) and give access to this to your fixed-fee customers. Encourage them to search this system before calling you. At the same time, you should probably not give access to this info to your ad-hoc customers. You can have the best of both worlds but the absolute key is getting your engineers to write-up useful notes in the first place. But that discussion is for another day …...
So far, so good. To run an efficient IT operation, it is vital to have and to share this information amongst your technical staff. It just makes the whole business of servicing your customers that bit easier. But speaking of the customer, how much of this information do you share with them? There are several things to consider here and it is worth looking at it from both the customer and provider standpoints.
The customer wants to see that you have done plenty for them to justify the fat bill that just landed in their inbox. They want to see that you fixed problems quickly and by being proactive, you saved them lots of dollars by avoiding potential lost downtime. Having said that, in my experience they are not interested in the technical details. They probably have no idea what HKLM_User is and don’t care what tweaking a Reg_DWORD value does.
From the service provider point of view, you want to keep your customers happy and as much as possible, give them what they want. But you don’t want to give away the farm to your ad-hoc customers. Give them enough information that tells them you are working for them and looking out for their business interests without necessarily giving away your intellectual property (IP). Having said all that, if you have customers on fixed-fee contracts, it could be in your interests to give customers access to that IP, so that in future they can fix problems themselves without having to call you. This is win-win really.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
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