E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

9 Ways To Increase Your Productivity While Working From Home

I have been working as a remote knowledge (Web) worker for the last 9 years in two different countries and four different business units in one single organisation and I guess that, at this point in time, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Specially, thanks, amongst several other reasons, to the flexibility and freedom of being in control of your own workflow.

I can imagine though there may well be people out there who question the validity of remote workers, mainly now that the trend seems to be leaning more towards that distributed, virtual global workforce I have been blogging about over here a couple of times already who are making heavy use of social software tools to keep in touch, collaborate and share their knowledge. Indeed, for most people working remotely, i.e. from home, while at a customer site, while on the road, etc. etc. it can be quite a challenge, even more if you have to justify it to your co-workers located at the traditional office. However, it *does* work! Mashable’s Nellie Akalp‘s piece on “9 Ways To Increase Your Productivity While Working From Home” is just another proof of how it can work out in setting up the right expectations for both remote knowledge workers and those co-located in the same traditional office to inspire that collaborative environment where everyone can benefit from it.

That’s why I thought I would spend a few minutes today talking about this particular topic and perhaps add some additional ways of how it’s worked for me as well over the course of those 9 years. The interesting thing is that Nellie’s smashing article on this subject surely is spot on. As a remote knowledge worker, I can relate to it myself, and I am sure if you are one as well, you would probably do, too! So in order to build further up on her article I thought I would add my ¢2 into the conversation describing how those very same ways are working out for me, and those around me, who are also distributed employees. Hopefully, we can add some further insights that may be helpful to others… So here we go, let’s do it!:

1. Respect Your Own Time: This is probably one of the toughest challenges you are going to bump into as you initially move away from the traditional office into your own home office. I struggled with it myself back then, and for multiple various reasons, till I eventually had that ah-ha moment that if I wanted to make it work for me I would need to add discipline and flexibility into the mix. Transitioning from being measured by your sheer presence to being measured by the results you produce can be quite challenging, but if you allow for flexibility to kick in, along with a good dose of discipline it will work out time and time again. Being a bit stubborn and resilient would also be good traits to make it work, more than anything else, because if you don’t respect your own time, how can you expect others to do the same? Show them, educate them, help raise the right level of expectations and negotiate that mutual respectful agreement that should work both ways in equal terms. 
2. Impose Time Limits on Specific Tasks: Oh, yes, ever since I have introduced The Pomodoro Technique to help me schedule time chunks on specific tasks, specially, rather complex ones, also even the time I spend on social networking tools, it’s made a huge difference for me. I have got a stronger sense of achievement at the end of the day by checking out the logs from those pomodoros to see what I have done for the day, and I can certainly recommend it to folks who may be wondering how their days are gone by without them hardly noticing. I use to have that very same feeling till I introduced this technique on my day to day workload. And I’m loving it! It’s like a bit of fresh air coming along in small time lapses that would allow you to transition from one task to another rather easily, without losing much of the control of your own productivity. Quite the opposite, actually! Priceless!

3. Set Strict Deadlines: This is perhaps one of the hardest things to comply with, yet, one of the most rewarding, because, just as it happens with co-located knowledge workers in the traditional office, procrastination surely is not your best friend, as some people seem to claim time and time again. The best way to fight it off is to set those deadlines, even if you don’t really have to set them up. Still knowing there is a timeframe lurking around in the horizon waiting for you to accomplish something, somehow accelerates your sense of urgency and that seems to be really handy. At least, it works for me. That’s why I rely quite heavily on one of my favourite services within IBM Connections: Connections Activities. 

4. Log Off for “Power Productivity” Hours: Indeed, most of you folks know I am a rather heavy user of social networking tools, whether internal and / or external, but you may have noticed how, every now and then, I suddenly go silent for a period of time; I lurk heavily, I learn from what others are sharing across and eventually it’s the time when my “Power Productivity” kicks in. Once again, The Pomodoro Technique is a superb way of helping you schedule those hours, so next time you see I have gone quiet, I am not really gone away, or gone into hiding; rather the opposite… When I come back, ask me what I was busy with during that power productivity time lapse and you will see what I have been up to, which, in a way, may eventually end up on this blog as well anyway hehe
5. Delineate Your Workplace: This is a very important point. If you are working from your home office, as in working from your kitchen, or your bedroom, or your living room, or the front porch, the terrace or whatever else, you are certainly extending your virtual office to the point where there is no hide-out. You need to avoid that. You need to find a spot where you can escape work, specially after work hours. Having a home office will help you do that; not necessarily that you need to close the door time and time again, but certainly understand that even work has got a limit in your own home space, it’s a physical room, once you leave that door, that’s when your quality time will begin. Don’t neglect it; it’s the most precious time of your day. Every day. 
6. Slowing Down? Change Your Environment: Now, I am not saying that working from those places can be rewarding every so often as a way to freshen up your working environment, specially, if you are putting long hours, but the thing is you should try not to make a habit out of it eventually. There is still a need to separate,  to some extent, your work life, from your personal life. Not because of you, per se, but because of them. Those who make you treasure the little things that matter. That quality time that’s worth while going for after a hard working day!

   On the other hand, and as a side note I can tell you folks that, to me, whenever I need to change my working environment the device I have leaned on to relying the most, by far, has been my iPad, which allows me for that flexibility of taking work wherever I am and still have that sense of detachment from the computing environment. And even more notorious when I am travelling…

7. Conduct a Time Audit: This is a rather interesting one, specially, to me, since I wasn’t aware of the many benefits of doing such time audit trail, but then again, subconsciously, I have been doing it all along thanks to the logs provided by the nifty application Pomodoro that I have been using for a good few months now. So every day, by the end of the day, I take a look at those time lapses specified in the Pomodoro logs to see not only what I have achieved during the course of the day, but at the same time the actual time that it takes me to achieve that; so in the social networking front I have come to the conclusion that unless meetings and conference calls collide I usually spend about 3 pomodoros of 25 minutes each throughout my work day to keep up with what’s happening out there on the internal and external Social Web. That seems to be the right measure for me as to how much time I spend using social software tools every day. Not too bad! Perhaps on future posts I will detail as well what other tasks / activities I get to embark on and share which ones are the biggest time sinks, although I can already give folks a hint on which one is coming up big time over and over again: presentations! (Grrr)
8. Create Tasks Lists: I don’t know where our obsession, as human beings, comes from creating lists. They have always been there since the dawn of time and I guess we will still continue to create them for almost everything. Of course, I, too, use them quite a bit, both for public consumption, through Connections Activities, once again, and for private use, where I rely on a couple of iPad Apps Things being one of my old time favourites. They are the first thing I check in the morning and the last thing I check in the evening as they help me get a grasp of what I need to get done, and what I have done in the past. I keep up with them religiously as a way to help empower my own productivity, and that one of others, if I need to collaborate on a particular task with other peers, networks or communities.

   But perhaps the main reason why I heart Tasks Lists is because they help me get a grasp of my workload throughout the year, which I find rather convenient referring to whenever my yearly performance evaluation comes up by year end. Somehow, they have turned themselves into a tracking record of sorts that helps me manage how I interact in multiple projects, teams and initiatives. And I can honestly say that if you haven’t created your tasks lists just yet, you surely are missing out some big improvements in your efficiency. No doubt!

9. Make your breaks count: Finally, this is probably one of the most important traits I can think of from working remotely. Make your breaks count, indeed! Over the course of the years one gets to learn, through the hard way, unfortunately, how important it is to have regular breaks while at work, more than anything else, because if you don’t take them yourself, no-one else will, in fact, no-one will even notice you need a break after those long hours of hard work. So the first person who should take care of taking those breaks should be yourself. Like I said, remember, if you don’t do it, no-one else will do it for you. 

   That’s why long time ago I resolved to take several breaks during the course of the day (Even when I am travelling) and to achieve that I have been making use of this relatively small, but rather powerful and nifty application called MacBreakZ 4 (For Macs), which allows me to stay healthy and watchful for my wrists by taking regular short breaks during the day. Then I also take extended breaks where I try to do some exercise, to help me keep fit. You know, sitting kills (A must-go-through and read infographic, if you haven’t done so already, by the way!), as so does standing, so I figured that striking the balance between both of them is going to be the key to make it work. 

   And, finally, another type of break I have learned to take rather consciously as well over the course of time is to schedule a one full hour for my lunch (Scheduled as in blocked in my diary for everyone!); again, based on the same principle as above, if I don’t take that break for lunch, I have learned, through the hard way, once more, no-one else would, and I won’t be able to rely on that regular and healthy habit of eating at the same time every day. So, whenever folks try to schedule a meeting or a conference call with yours truly, that time is blocked, marked as busy, in my diary. Already. And again, for everyone! Throughout the whole year! And I cannot relate well enough what a difference it’s made for me to stick to that schedule. Long gone are the days where I didn’t have lunch, or just a 10 minute lunch break, or just munching along through that conference call, while on mute. Now, I just walk away from the home office, shut the door, enjoy my one hour disconnect time from everything, get my energy levels back and ready to hit the rest of the day! Highly recommended, if you haven’t started doing that!

And that’s it, folks! That’s my ¢2 worth of comments on that wonderful piece put together by Nellie Akalp on ”9 Ways To Increase Your Productivity While Working From Home“. However, and before I let you all go, I thought I would share one more way to increase your productivity, the #10, which would work as well for both remote workers and their co-located peers in the traditional office. And it’s probably one that you would be least expecting it, since I doubt most folks would associate it with that trait to help you improve your efficiency and effectiveness at work. Of course, I’m talking about sleep, or getting *enough* good sleep!

Yes, something so relatively simple as that! Sleeping enough hours day in day out will surely help you increase your alertness, focus, attention, motivation, speed of execution, etc. etc. And the magic here is to figure out how many hours would be good for you to help you function properly, but once you hit that, stick to it. For good! In my own case, and after trial and error over the course of the years it looks like 7 hours is good enough for me, although I have seen and read plenty of research suggesting to go for the 8 or 8.5 hour mark of daily sleep. That would probably include power naps as well, which seem to gain plenty of popularity as of late. But the important thing is to strive for that good night sleep that can help you function properly the day after. Now, I do realise about that saying that “Sleep is for the weak“; well, it’s actually quite the opposite. It’s the weak the ones who don’t get enough sleep in the first place!

Jessica Stillman, over at GigaOm’s WebWorkerDaily wrote, not long ago, “Why the Web Worker Lifestyle Is Good for Your Health” and I can highly recommend its read. Very insightful and powerful piece at the same time, specially the additional resources included. After going through it, and after reflecting on the 9 years I have been a remote knowledge (Web) worker, I tend to agree with its overall sentiment that, perhaps, indeed, our web workers lifestyles might be good for our health as employees after all; it feels like that to me. At least, I am happy with how its flexibility and freedom, amongst several other things, have been working out for me so far.

And you know what they say about happy employees and employee engagement, right?

Global, Local, Personal

Over the course of the last couple of years I have taken the chance to blog, every so often, about one of my favourite video series that has surely changed the perception of the real impact of the Social Web, not only within the corporate world, but also within our own society as a whole. Of course, I am talking about the Did You Know? series of video clips that keeps re-surfacing every now and then. One other interesting outcome of those clips is the good amount of spin-offs that abound all over the place on the Web, like today’s inspiring video that I thought I would share over here to kick off another week at work. It’s all about going Global, Local, Personal.

It lasts for a little bit over 4 minutes and it was originally presented at the Elisa ICT Symposium 2011 conference event in Helsinki, Finland. And apart from painting together a rather interesting landscape of the impact of the Internet, and the Social Web, in our lives, both at work, and in our personal relationships with others, whether co-located or not, the rather interesting part of the video clip is how it evaluates the impact of current trends like Cloud Computing and Mobility to set the stage of how we will be using the Internet in the next few years… More instrumented, intelligent, interconnected than ever. More integrated, even, into our daily lives.

What really resonated with me from the video itself though was the main theme permeating through these three keywords: Personal, Local, Global. Personal from the perspective of how critical context is as “the new battleground for business” (Couldn’t have agreed more with it!) and how we can probably no longer ignore it, nor neglect it, in a business environment as perhaps one of the most critical success factors for employee empowerment.

Local from the perspective of how that context is king and how through the use of social networking tools we have got that opportunity to localise our knowledge having access to globally available information. And, finally, global by helping introduce a concept I have grown very fond of over the course of years, specially, internally, at IBM: global integrated enterprise. Global companies helping define the next generation of the corporate environment for the 21st century combining nicely both that global reach with that local flavour of flattening organisations through the extensive use of social computing tools and, eventually, arranging work through networks and communities instead.

Not a bad start of the week, don’t you think?

Social Business Forum 2011 – On Collaboration by Luis Suarez – Part Deux

As I have mentioned in a blog post a couple of days ago, on June 8th I will be participating in the upcoming Social Business Forum 2011 event in Milan, Italy. And as a way to introduce my breakout session on the topic of “Organisations or Communties?” I mentioned a recent interview I did with Roberto Cobianchi “On Collaboration: Interview with Luis Suarez (Part One)“, where we talked at length around the topic of virtual collaboration, online communities, and the role social networking tools are playing within the enterprise. The interview was divided in two different parts and yesterday, Roberto published the second part under “On collaboration: interview with Luis Suarez (second part)“.

Once again, we spent some time talking about some interesting facts from another infographic (This time around SocialCast‘s “Dare to Share?“) around the subjects of Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing and how can both, through cooperation, help solve business problems more efficiently. Specially, in today’s, now-more-than-ever distributed corporate environment where not only is the vast majority of the knowledge workforce working remotely, but at the same time those knowledge workers keep working on multiple projects and teams across the board. Long gone is the time when we *all* used to be co-located and working on the same floor, on the same building, on the same single project / team, without having to go elsewhere to get the job done!

To such extent, and to share with you folks over here a little bit of a teaser on the kinds of conversations we had during that second part of the interview, I thought I would go ahead and add those questions over here, with an additional short annotation, perhaps, and point you to the article itself to read the rest. And see what you think on this rather important topic around fostering and boosting collaboration within the workplace. Once again, I would also want to take the opportunity to thank Roberto for taking the time to do the interview with me and for sharing it across over at his blog. Many thanks! So, here we go:

• “In the long history of humankind (…) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed“: Indeed, now more than ever, we have been witnessing, over the last couple of years, how more and more businesses are starting to turn their heads towards their internal (AND external) communities, whereas before they weren’t just simply doing it, as perhaps the most powerful organisms to help boost collaboration and knowledge sharing across the board, helping flatten the organisation encouraging work to take place amongst networks versus teams and organisations, making them all much more agile and nimble. Yes, indeed, about time that happens, don’t you think?
• “From an enterprise perspective, the social software and the change in the behavior of employees is not only a question of efficiency or cost reduction, it’s a matter of survival”: And that matter of survival is driven mainly by customers and business partners, even competitors!, whereas before it was all somehow driven by vendors themselves in their ivory towers thinking they always knew better than their customers, when all along, social software tools have confirmed it’s rather the opposite. No matter how much a vendor is knowledgeable about their own products, your customers will always know more than you, not only because of the extensive use they make of your offerings, and the figuring out of new ways to use your products you didn’t even think about!,, but because they are also connecting and talking to other customers, amongst themselves, and competitors! to converse about your products and that’s something that in order for businesses to succeed they can no longer ignore, nor neglect. They need to dive right in, before your customers move on to the competition… just because you were not there!
• “In the same infographic: “20% to 50% of collaboration activity resulted in wasted effort”. There are three main factors:
  

1. poorly planned meetings
2. unproductive travel time
3. bad communication

   I think you agree with that, but which one do you suggest to consider first? Which one do you think is the first to fight with?”
   
   This question surely was an interesting one, specially, since I have been trying to tame down, quite a bit, one of those items for a few years now while living “A World Without Email“; thus, considering that one out already, my answer for this question was probably what’s going to be my next quest, poorly planned meetings, not only because of the quality of some of those meetings, but also because of the sheer number of them we all seem to have throughout the course of the day (How can you have 7, 8 or 9 meetings a day and still get work done?!?! That’s just insane!), when, in reality, we may not even need them in the first place, if we would get to utilise our own collaboration, knowledge sharing and social software tools much more effectively reducing our dependency and addiction, not to count the time we spent in meetings! But that would be another topic for an upcoming blog post on living “A World Without Meetings“… (Notice that I am not going to state I’d want to kill off meetings altogether, but certainly find smarter ways of getting the job done without having to call for a meeting along the way…)
   

• “How many tools do you use in your daily work in order to reduce mail overload?” I tried to be brief on this one, since I know it could get far too long before we all know it, but basically I mentioned the main social tools I am currently using, both internally and externally, in order to reduce, rather substantially, my dependency on corporate email and, like most of you folks know already, I detailed plenty more of that on a recent mindmap & presentation I put together on that very same topic of “A World Without Email“, for those folks who may be interested in finding out much more in-depth.
• “Each tool is an opportunity to keep in touch with customers, colleagues and partners and so on”: Indeed! and 4 years later I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s that fragmentation and diversification of my mailbox that has allowed me to forget / worry about all of those issues with inbound email. It just doesn’t happen. Even if I am gone the entire week on a customer and company event like I have been, having just returned from Barcelona, Spain, where I got 17 emails for that single week, while I have been interacting all over the place on social tools. Priceless!

  Oh, and here is another good reminder for a much overdue update on the progress report over the last few months that I need to do as well over the next couple of days …

• “When do you foresee to arrive to zero emails?“: Probably, the one million dollar question that everyone is trying to answer to a certain extent, for sure; specially, seeing how there are some business that are starting to question the validity of corporate email and are already well embarked on a mission to ditch it altogether. As part of my answer, I mentioned how we would probably not be capable of ditching it altogether, since there are two single use cases for which email still is probably the most effective of communication tools (i.e. Calendaring & Scheduling and 1:1 private / confidential conversations), but for the rest we can probably kiss it good-bye, if we are all ready to embark on diversifying and fragmenting our Inboxes to look out for much more effective and efficient collaboration, knowledge sharing tools within the social computing realm. 

  I guess that time will tell, although for me, seeing a reduction on my incoming email already by over 95% is probably good enough for me to state I’m almost there, don’t you think?

And that would be it! Those were the questions that Roberto asked me as the second part of the interview and I do hope you may have found some of the answers interesting and relevant. I would be looking forward to the Social Business Forum event  where, after checking out the agenda, I know it’s going to be a rather interesting and tough challenge to decide which sessions to attend, because, once again, the line-up of speakers is outstanding with plenty of smart folks like Bill Johnston, Sameer Patel (Who has already blogged about the event over here), Cordelia Krooss, Esteban Kolsky, George Siemens, Bertrand Duperrin, Norman Lewis, Ming Kwan, Craig Hepburn, Rosario Sica, Laurence Lock Lee and a few others!

Lots of really good friends to meet up and see again, and a bunch more new ones to be made in a packed couple of days of great conversations and thought-provoking knowledge sharing around Social Business! Yes, sir, you can tell I just can’t wait for it to get started!!

And you?