Author:Zack Miller of Techdirt
Pushing The Envelope Of Losing Yourself
“Are you coming to dinner?” my wife asks after a long day for both of us. Do I power down and hope to finish writing my report after she’s asleep and risk losing myself to sleep? Or, do I ask for another 30 minutes to complete my work, making her and the rest of the family finish up without me? As a digital nomad, this tradeoff — the blurring of the boundary between where work ends and the rest of life begins — is one that needs to be continously addressed to ensure productivity remains high.
Facetime in traditional work settings
I define “facetime” as the unproductive time spent in the office trying to present oneself as being productive. Whether working on Wall Street or in a software startup, much of traditional business is spent demonstrating one’s commitment to his job and his firm. Many times, this commitment is measured in hours spent at the office, regardless of actual production.
Productivity — real productivity — is no longer being held up to paradigm of the iron-man employee, working close to 60+ hours a week in the face of a personal life in shambles. Hours spent at the office is no longer indicative of the real contribution an employee provides to the enterprise. Just check out how much time is spent at work on non-work, non-productive activities.
Redefining productivity
I propose we define productivity in the post-facetime, digital nomad world as such:
Productivity = amount of completed work + impetus to complete future work
Modern businesses recognize that knowledge workers work best when stimulated by their work balanced with productive lives outside of work (family, community, whatever).
Digital nomads have the best of both worlds. No longer tethered to our desks, we face the ultimate challenge of defining our work and life spaces completely under our control. While we’ve moved beyond the time-honored facetime required to progress in traditional business settings, though, we’re faced with the prospect of completely losing ourselves to our work. If our home is our office, our struggle is working too much, not too little, as the lines between work and life are blurred.
How to avoid burnout on the work front
When facing a work day that has no beginning or end, a common digital nomad maladay is burnout. Here are a few tips gleaned from web workers to stay fresh and productive.
- create a work schedule: without one, workers tend to work all day. By scheduling work time and personal time into a hectic day, digital nomads maintain healthy boundaries.
- taking vacation time: digital nomads tend to thrive on worker hard and worker long hours. There has to be some way to completely (or close to it) unplug. Downtime is necessary for future productivity.
- convene team/group meetings: getting together in person with other team members helps to bring untethered workers back from work nevernever land. It helps centers workers and put work into a social context.
- Google workers can appropriate some of their work time to work on projects that interest them personally. Nomads should learn from the great GOOG.
How to avoid sacrificing your personal life on the altar of digital nomadism
While much ink is spilled over keeping productive on the work front, if we believe that a balanced life brings more productivity for the mobile worker, keeping a healthy personal life is just as important.
- all the previous points above help create delineation between work and life
- finding hobbies unrelated to work: many digital nomads take to hobbies that are quai-related to their day jobs, like blogging or podcasting. While these pursuits are certainly admirable and fun, they are too contextually related to one’s day job to perform separation and recharge.
- exercise: you can’t work when you’re profusely sweating and breathing heavily.
- have kids (lots of ‘em): kids keep you young. kids keep you (extremely) busy. Kids also help keep you centered and focused on what’s really important.
Bringing it all together
Balance is key. Digital nomads are prone to sacrifice future productivity for current work. Balancing work and life is essential in finding a groove for workers on the go. Being able to define our working lives around our personal lives is a tremendous opportunity and challenge, but we really can have our cake and eat it too. We just need to make sure we can pull ourselves away from work to really be able to enjoy it.
Getting Through The Data Smog
We’ve got plenty of collaborative technologies to empower remote teams. Some of these technologies function as beefed-up intranets while others offer more targeted functionality. While I’m not a luddite, I do think that in the case of keeping digital nomads connected, we have an abundance of technology. The most pressing issue is preparing our teams to effectively communicate. We’ve moved beyond empowering communications; we’re overwhelmed with email, twits, facebooks. We need protocols to help us sort out our pressing tasks and prioritize our responses to clients and peers. We also need to consolidate and keep focused.
I’m not a purist — while in a best case scenario, technology should merely service the needs of its users but in the case of digital nomads, we frequently need to work around the technologies and optimize our processes via the software because we lack the resources and time to develop these tools from the ground up.
Choking on communication volume
Trying to manage all my various communication channels has become an impossible task. My team’s messages get lost in the flood of everything else I’m receiving. Here are a couple of field-proven techniques we use to help sort out the clutter.
- Use a separate email address to communicate with your team than you use on social networks/twitter/etc. This ensures that important work messages don’t get swallowed up in the sheer volume of total pings we receive.
- Be precise with subject lines in email. If things are urgent, make sure that that’s know to the recipient of the email right away. Being concise and targeted with email subject lines is kind to your team and allows for easier searching through emails for retrieval purposes.
- If things are really important, pick up the phone. It may sound obvious but emails get lost, ignored or just swallowed up. Nuances get misread via email. The tone of a short email blasted off a BlackBerry may sound overly curt. Pressing or personal issues can be cleared up quicker and easier over the phone. Teams frequently fall back on an overuse of email and issues fester or aren’t sufficiently addressed.
Hosted Apps
I’ve used Salesforce.com frequently on small sales/marketing teams and it’s extremely powerful and cost effective. For a small team of reps, though, I’ve stopped using it. It’s overkill — it may sound ridiculous but for a variety of vertical applications, we’ve backed out of using such hosted software and have cut down on the headache of merely managing the software.
- It may sound silly but shared Google Apps like Spreadsheet and Docs work really well in certain cases. For a sales team, instead of collaborating over Salesforce and getting sucked in, we input data into our shared, hosted spreadsheet and collaborate on that document. You can easily see revised versions of the doc to see first derivative-type info.
- While we’ve opted out of most other hosted apps (save Google Docs), I like much of what 37Signals is doing. From Basecamp to Highrise, the software is so simple to use that it’s been a winner for keeping track of projects or contacts for the team or just chatting. Google Chat has been a winner for us to communicate over chat. Make sure you have the “Save chat history” function turned on. It allows you to store chat transcripts in the Gmail GUI which makes retrieving an old conversation a snap. We stopped using Skype which has a very nice conference function on chat but the software proved to be to big and clunky to use with everything else we’re working on.
Face Time is underated (sometimes)
It’s great to be untethered most of the time. I’ve worked with people for years whom I’ve never met. In fact, I’d describe these people as friends. Close ones, too. There is no substitute, though, for some good face time. If teams are local, get together over lunch once a month. If teams are scattered, try to get together once a year. It builds morale and lowers barriers and puts a face behing the chat window.
Summary
While the software industry continues to churn out very useable and affordable software to help empower teamwork for digital nomads, virtual teams still struggle with implementing work processes to enable them to truly use such software. In turn, the software isn’t fully implemented and frequently becomes “just another” thing to manage. Future teams must figure out how best to communicate working either via or around existing technology packages. We’ll figure it out but ultimately, nothing truly changes. Pick up the phone once in a while.
Displacing Corporate Overhead Onto The Digital Nomad
While it’s great to talk about productivity and satisfaction from the employee’s point of view, much of the ROI for the business comes from lowering overall overhead and displacing some of that onto the employee.
I think it’s important to look at the ROI from 2 points of view: the worker’s and his employer’s.
Employer’s point of view
I recently had a gig with an internet firm which began as a completely distributed workforce. There wasn’t even a home office. We managed our time, our teams, and our tasks completely remotely. From an employer’s point of view, this kept costs bargain-basement low. Since everyone worked from home, the firm was spending almost nothing on office space. I ran biz dev so I traveled (but no more than I would have working from a traditional office space). There was not even a secretary on staff. No corporate bloat. The product of this experiment was that the firm stayed lean and mean and was able to reach profitability very quickly.
How was an interent startup with a growing staff able to do this within a year? I think it’s because …Read More
Tackling Three Key Issues In Balancing Work And Life
As it becomes more acceptable in the work environment for employees to space and time shifting, workers are finding a tremendous amount of flexibility in defining where, when and how they work. There is a dark side to this flexibility and that comes in the form of the blending of boundaries between one’s work and one’s life. While technology enables us to receive emails any hour of the day, wherever we are — workers are faced with the challenge of being always on. While the mobile worker has contributed to historically high record levels of productivity, this productivity has its limits.
Assuming we agree that with the blending of work and life together, certain new stresses are arising in the workplace and at home that influence both job and life satisfaction and can be detrimental to both. Let’s address certain ways that workers and employers are addressing these issues. I suggest we address:
- channels of communication
- building/raising a family
- job security
Channels of communication
The conflict
Wifi, 3G and the Blackberry have all enabled us to be always-on and always accessible. Expectations for quick response and quick resolution has made its impact felt both within organizations as well as with partner firms and customer service. It’s created an interesting conundrum: as we become quicker communicators, we’re expected to perform at least as well in all future communications.
I recently worked in an organization that really was a new type of organization. We employed almost 50 people, all of whom worked at home. Many were work-at-home mothers while others just liked the flexbility of running their own show. No clocks were punched and we could determine our own hours as long as the work expected of us was completed with quality and on time. While clock-punching is no longer the norm, an interesting evolution is taking place in “face time”, or the need to put in a lot of time working just to show everyone else that you’re committed to working hard. While we couldn’t stop over at a colleague’s cube to check on one another, we were monitoring each other via email correspondence or IM activity. It wasn’t uncommon that we were sending messages to one another at 3 am (OK, it was a startup).
The result
People were very strung out and their work and personal lives began to suffer. I realive now, in retrospect, that these problems could have been mitigated by laying out the ground rules at the management level. Instead, we were performing this sick type of game theory. Well, Bill responded last night to my question at 2:30; so, the fact that he’s not responding tonight means he is either ignoring me or hasn’t done what was expected of him.
The solution
Expectations of employees could have been spelled out better. How frequently do we expect you to check your email? If something is urgent, how quickly should you turn to the phone? And given that our schedules were all different (I drove my kids to school while another VP picked his kids up), do I need to be reachable during that family time? These were (and continue to be) sources of stress for management and for employees. It’s a shame — a simple communication policy could help address all these issues. This policy should address expectations at every level, how communications should be used, and define why it’s important to provide breathing room in a wall-less office.
Other strategies for managing personal time and the need to check multiple sources of contact have been addressed by people like Tim Ferris in his post “How to do the impossible“. GTD theory and practice help fill-in the much needed issue of managing communication but for the mobile worker, these issues must be addressed top-down by management, otherwise unneeded stress and passive-aggressive behavior follows suit.
Building/Raising a Family
The conflict
While it used to affect only women, it’s now an issue felt across genders as men are taking on more and more responsibility in the home. As a father of 5 children, this is an issue I feel acutely as I try to build my business and simultaneously continue to strive to be a better father to my children and husband to my wife. The problem is that choosing a career in general and certain career paths in particular requires time, energy and emotional commitments that take away from the greater life issues. Balancing is not static but rather on ongoing juggling of both family demands and work requirements.
The result
I didn’t see my father very much when I was a child. His career path, medicine, entailed enough of a time commitment that he had very little left to share with his family. Professions (I can’t speak about medicine) have become less monolithic and more flexible in how practitioners choose to practice their qualifications. This flexibility has meant that women and men can ultimately attempt to have it all — a career and a home life. The problems come in different varieties but once up and running, it’s a daily battle between staff meetings and parent-teacher meetings, between face time and family time.
The solution
While no complete solution can exist as time spent away from your family is a zero-sum game in the early days of family building. It just means less of you to go around. But things are changing — Web 2.0 and more specifically, Sales 2.0 are enabling professionals to carve out their own quasi-professions. Companies should consider hiring more and more not-full time employees with clear expectations of the amount and quality of work that they’re looking for from their staff. Whether it means working on a project basis or just a few hours every day, companies become more limber as they can pay-as-they-go in terms of time from their people. It also requires that today’s worker become more modular in terms of jobs. The days of working for IBM for life are gone and it’s important to understand the new rules. Companies should have an understanding of what each one of their employees is motivated by and work to make it happen.
Job security
The conflict
My father and father-in-law did the same thing for 30 years. My makeup is different and from what I know about my peers, so is theirs. I’m not looking for that much fidelity from firms that pay me and I’m more in tune to looking out for myself. Whether it’s writing, consulting or marketing my content, I don’t have a whole lot of security in terms of my gig. Yet, I’m comfortable with this form of risk as it gives me more flexibility to live the type of life that encompasses engaging work and family time. Workers and those who employ them wll need to balance security and independence as workers themselves deal with these tough issues.
The result
Issues surrounding pay and health insurance are just the tip of the iceberg. Firms need to have dependable staff and workers need dependable pay. What’s happened is the beginning of a large movement away from firms to becoming independent contractors. These millions of mobile minions have begun to define “career” differently. The firms who currently contract my work understand this paradigm and have built-in flexibility to work with me on an outsourced basis. I’m not a liability on their balance sheet and provide dependable work when they bring it to me. It’s built on a relationship and seems to work well for both parties.
I’m lucky though. I live in a country (Israel) that has socialized its medical services so I don’t need to attach myself to a given employer just for the benefits. This frees me up to work with as many firms as I can handle. That said, the mobile workforce has to be able to live with uncertainty: visibility in most project pipelines is pretty poor and it requires a lot of work to be able to find new work. While companies employing this mobile model should be able to manage having slimmer staff, there are other firms that need to rely upon “captive” staff for ensuring work get done on schedule and IP stay internal to the firm. Therein lies the rub. How companies can work to untether some staff and yet still have adequate resources and how mobile employees can continue to support their families as at previous levels while also balancing their work/life in their favor.
The solution
Like the solution outlined above in the building/raising family section, the solution for job security requires a new way of addressing staff and work in general. Firms must become more comfortable sourcing staff that is comfortable working outside the confines of the office. In order to mitigate demand planning issues, these firms should also contract time/projects further out than just immediate need to help both the firm feel comfortable that help is there along the way. This longer-term planning ensures that independent workers can plan their revenues and time to continue to provide for their families in this new type of arrangement. For example, in my business, I’m still too small to employ an inhouse web designer. I have a web designer that I’ve worked with for a while and am comfortable with and giveher 5-7 hours of work every month. I get my needs taken care of and she can bank on these fees and plan other clientele around me.
Summary
There will always be workaholics. Even those who venture outside the typical corporate infrastructure aspire to greatness in their businesses and in their home lives. Better planning for this trend enables both contractor and contractee to understand the rules of the game and plan accordingly. Communication policies and longer-term contractual agreements are just two ways for industry to address these issues.
