Stu Downes

On Saturday BBC Radio 4’s business discussion programme, The Bottom Line, covered the topic of Mobile Working.  Listen again here, or subscribe to their podcast.  Worth listening to, the main discussion is in the first 10 minutes.

It was an excellent discussion with important points raised around meeting people in person, eye contact, the power of serendipitous conversations in the office, being able to visually assess products (and how that can’t be done remotely).

The discussion moved quickly and then talked about home working, given travel issues this week with snow in some areas of the UK it was relevant.  The panel were quite divided in their view on home working, but all agreed that it suits specific individuals better than others and that actually a hybrid working pattern is their favoured approach.

I tend to favour the views that support location independent working, and absolutely agree that everything is a hybrid, I cannot think of any way that people could work 100% at home, or for me I find it strange to think of a world which would be 100% office (but again that comes down to work requirements and work style – and my work can be performed flexibly).

One point they didn’t raise which was a shame was day extenders, or time shifters.  Those who’d like to work in the evening in order to spend more daytime with families.  I think that will be more and more important in the future.

 

For those of us who regularly want to copy and paste information from numerous slide decks into a new deck relying on an open office tool has always been a requirement, and on many locked down corporate builds this isn’t possible (and to be fair what I’m suggesting here may not be possible on heavily locked down machines).  A solution exists!!  Firstly I have to thank George for sending me the link and thank the Please Make a Note Blog:

1. Create a new user on your machine
2. Locate the Powerpoint icon in your start menu (or search for Powerpoint in your start menu)
3. Press "Shift" and right click on the icon
4. select "Run as"
5. Enter the credentials of the newly created user

Voila!
Now you have a new Powerpoint instance that you can place on a second monitor.
Alternatively, for the "programmatically" inclined users, you can invoke the "Run as" command through the command shell

1. Open a new command shell (Start menu/ search for "cmd")
2. Type the following

   runas /user:username "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\POWERPNT.EXE"

3. Press enter

Voila!

Some caveats/additional information:  I’d recommend the run-as window is used to copy from.  The reason I say this is that saving files from the session running as the secondary user proved problematic for me on vista with UAC (even running in admin mode and granting permissions to folders), as by default it wants to save files into the second user’s my documents area.  Also some plugins for powerpoint will complain if they detect their processes are already running (Camtasia plugin was the main one I noted) and I didn’t test any of those plugins while 2 powerpoint sessions were running.

When the second window opens it automatically stacked on top of the existing powerpoint icons making me initially think it hadn’t worked, it had – just needed to move that version across to the second monitor.

 

Congrats to a government department!  (didn’t think I’d say that).  Their new service at http://www.traffic-england.co.uk is great, especially their Motorway traffic flow graphs where you can turn on or off various streams of information, here is the M6 close to me when I wrote this:

The only things that aren’t quite there are the interactive map isn’t working at the moment.  I was also surprised that the agency hadn’t considered mobile users on smartphones.  I feel that even though they have a telephone number (08700 660 115 – cheaper than a lot of the premium rate services offered by others) they should have a mobile accessible site … oh and if anyone reads this from the agency could you make the number text rather than embed in a graphic so folks with soft phones or those who have opened the site on a telephone can call it without typing in the number (thanks!).

 

Like most of the folks reading this I’ll spend a good proportion of my day in remote meetings.  Generally these are:

• one to one
• multi-way audio
• multi-way web meeting (some with integrated audio)
• Video calls (few)

But more importantly I’ll class those meetings as:

• relevant to me for most of the meeting
• relevant for some of the meeting
• only relevant for a small portion of the meeting
• irrelevant

Now hopefully you’ll have sent me an agenda before the meeting so I won’t even attend the last category, so lets ignore those (I tend to duck out politely).  The top of the list is easy, I tend to remain totally engaged throughout those meetings as they are completely relevant to me and what I need to achieve.

The problem comes of meetings where only a portion of the meeting is relevant.  When this is the case I suffer the temptation of distraction, like you I have lots to do and this call is dragging on and I’m not to interested in what X is saying.  The problem is that after we’ve switched off something relevant comes up and a question is directed our way – “could you repeat that please” becomes a well heard phrase.  So in order to maintain attention I have to take some basic measures (which are actually more difficult than they sound):

• Audio calls:  I walk around!  Carry a notepad and pencil and literally stretch my legs (sometimes outdoors) but generally round the house when working from home.  I really find it helps maintain concentration – but more importantly takes me away from distraction!
• Web meetings:  I have to force myself not to get into IM’s, read emails, tinker with my action lists or write that report I need to finish.  Its really hard – I know I’m not the only one who finds it hard.

In summary my survival technique is to avoid all calls with limited relevance and for those where I have limited input either pre-arrange a subset of the call to attend OR really concentrate on avoiding distraction.

What are your tips?