If you work from a home office – i.e. single employee, family business, independent consultant, small Internet business, farmer, new entrepreneur, etc. - you don’t have a big corporate IT department to support you. You *are* the IT department !

With today’s business, “data” has a value that belies it’s invisibility and the tiny physical space it occupies. All of those records could easily hid in a space no bigger than kitchen toaster.

That data takes storage and needs protecting. Even if the data does not have monetary implication, just think of the pain losing 10 years of family photos, vacation pics, and special events. Add in the e-files of your tax records, bank statements, downloaded credit card statements. So, if you are like me, it may be well past the time to improve your storage and backup capabilities. Continue reading ‘More than a "Home Office"’ »

The timing could not have been more perfect …

Conventional approaches to flexibility, such as flextime, don’t help time-zone warriors very much … Instead, they need ways to regain control over their time. … being explicit about personal commitments when they intervene, says Tess Mateo, Wyckoff, N.J., a director in the CEO’s office at PricewaterhouseCoopers. After an early-morning conference call last week with eight co-workers in six time zones, she told co-workers she’d be unavailable for two hours of family time.

In offices of old, “you’d never tell anyone, ‘I have to feed the kids now so please don’t return my call,’” she says. “Now, you can say those things.”

Source: Wall Street Journal

Continue reading ‘Time-Zoned: Working Around The Round-the-Clock Workday’ »

I envision a conferencing service that is as easy as a cellphone. Imagine a service with the equivalent of voice dialing …

“Get Rocky, Carl, and Libby”

The service locates the participants, but discovers Libby is busy. It scans forward and backward in time to find Libby is available 30 minutes ago, but only for a few minutes, and is also available an hour from now. It chooses a hour from now and contacts her then.

A hologram of each participant is brought together simultaneously (much like looking at a miniature model of a room projected on the desk or table in front of you).

The group conference takes place with all of the resources of the mini holographic conference room – whiteboard, writing paper, interactive video displays, etc.

The projection is automatically recorded and all of the holographic materials are optionally transferred to real objects at the end of the meeting.

With this system, there is no more hunting for a convenient time to meet and is much more productive since everyone is “in the same place”.

A good friend, Libby, wrote in her blog …

This always-on attitude that pervades the workplace (not just mine, but many) requires that we, as the workers (both teachers and those in other fields) to decide what our lives will be like and when we will work, then set our boundaries, and then stick to those boundaries.

Source: Notesgirl

I too struggle at times with keeping work from being an “always on” experience for me. With my job, I have a laptop, and wireless connectivity, and EVDO, and a blackberry, and on and on. There is no reason I can not be working, emailing, text messaging, and taking calls at any time of any day.

*BUT* Continue reading ‘Keeping "work" from taking over "life"’ »

I have really settled into my home office more than I have in a long time. Years ago, long before telecommuting was even mentioned in the employee benefits of most companies, I had the opportunity to work from home about 80% for a whole summer. Some might argue that working from home in the summer is just an excuse for playing hooky but I really find it easy to work from home – perhaps too easy (I find I hit the computer earlier in the morning and late at night).

Anyway, I’ve been telecommuting 100% of the time for about 5 months now (my first business travel in that time is tomorrow to DC for a customer meeting). Until recently, when I setup my new home office, I had a very functional but otherwise unappealing work solution. I had a good desk and chair, two printers (one multi-function and one laser printer) second monitor, extensive wireless solution (with an ever growing security solution) multi-burner and other peripherals. All very well but not very much to cater to the human side of the equation.

I’ve now got my iYiYi to play my iPod and I listen to music about half the day (the other half is either conference calls or other distractions.

So, what does this have to do with the “All-American Rejects”? Well, around Christmas, a friend gave me a CD of this band. I ripped to my computer and sometime later it got stuffed onto the iPod. From time to time, one of the songs would surface in the shuffle. I went out their other CD (only found one so if there are more, please let me know). So more of their music popped up thru the course of the iPod shuffle. I’ve enjoyed the “fresh” sound relative to a lot of what shuffles by.

check them out if you care !

Businesses call it “Collaboration Software” whereas the rest of the world calls it by whatever program they are using – “chatrooms” “forums”, “bulletin boards”, etc. This is definitely true of persistent chat solutions. The idea has been around longer than text messaging. The concept has roots in AOL chat rooms, message boards, BBS’s, even list-servers.

The challenge with looking at persistent chat from the “nose bleed” seats of the Astro Dome is that persistent chat can be implemented in so many different ways and used for so many different things. Continue reading ‘Chat Rooms- are they a big deal ?’ »