Workstreaming: One Secret of Web Work Success
January 12th, 2008 (3:51pm) Anne Zelenka 12 Comments
If you work remotely from your colleagues — whether you’re a telecommuter or a freelancer or entrepreneur joining with other entrepreneurs loosely across geography — it’s helpful to let associates know what you’re up to on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis. In the presence of ubiquitous connectivity and absence of facetime, use workstreaming.
I defined workstreaming last March as “the publishing of work-related activities and events to your remote colleagues, usually via RSS but sometimes in other formats and ways.” This jumps off the idea of lifestreaming: sharing a moment-by-moment or event-by-event account of your life, whether through video or blogs or tools like Jaiku and FriendFeed.
How can you do workstreaming? Message boards can work well for corporate teams: post a message when a project milestone is reached, a document is available for review, a sale has been closed, a bug fixed. On her new blog Anywired, Skellie offers tips for using micro-blogs like Tumblr, Twitter, and Soup.io to do it. A macro-blog like WordPress or Blogger works well as a coarse-grained, person-focused workstream. Stowe Boyd is working on a secretive project called Workstreamr that he calls his greatest obsession. I can’t wait to see it.
Do you want to learn more about workstreaming and other new ways that web workers succeed when ubiquitous connectivity is a given but face-to-face contact is not? Then check out Web Worker Daily’s book Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working, where I discuss workstreaming and other secrets of success in the connected age.
12 Comments Post your own comment
oblonski says: January 13th, 2008 6:24am
Twitter is awesome for precisely this reason. It is quite freaky to get minute to minute updates on what thought leaders in the new media/blogging space are doing.
For Web Workers who are learning as they go along and start ups and freelancers looking for tips this is invaluable.
Khürt says: January 13th, 2008 8:10am
I have never used Jaiku but I am addicted to Twitter. I also use Tumblr where all my blog posts and Twitter updates are logged.
johnny says: January 13th, 2008 10:33am
twitter is changing the way we socialise - away from multi-this-and-that to a simplified point of view..
Canada SEO says: January 13th, 2008 12:36pm
LOL @Twitter,
I’ll stick with programs like dotproject & exchange calendars / CRMs for this sort of application / tracking.
Adam Darowski says: January 13th, 2008 5:16pm
I’d love to use Twitter for this, but the rest of my team is not yet drinkin’ the kool aid. We go a less “immediate” route, and everyone sends out daily emails of what they’ll be doing that day and what got accomplished yesterday. It’s actually a HUGE help since we’re all remote.
Amanda at i5invest says: January 13th, 2008 8:47pm
Great post Anne. I work with a team based in several remote, international locations. Some are using Twitter and we’re using Basecamp and Skype extensively.
A shared chat group in Skype works really well if you’re interested in staying connected and less interested in publishing and saving a log of your work.
Heading over to Amazon to order Connect!:)
Sandy says: January 14th, 2008 11:52am
We are using Skype too.
DaveKebb says: January 14th, 2008 3:16pm
Yup this is my work and home setup since October. Works well - transparency and a good level of privacy
My recipe is
* Soup.io for the lifestreamblog;
* Twitter or Zooomr for the updates
* Zooomr or Gallery2 for the images
* gallery2 or Youtube for the vids
* Rememberthemilk via Yahoo pipes for completed tasks
*Skype and messengers through Pidgin
MS free since 2003
Barbara Saunders says: January 14th, 2008 4:30pm
The problem with the workstreaming concept is that it obliterates one of the benefits of working remotely. I believe some of us are drawn to remote work precisely because we are burst workers (a concept also articulated in this blog.) Those of us who hyperfocus for short periods of time and take more downtime throughout the day will a) seem as if we’re “goofing off” when we step out of the stream and b) be forced to interrupt our productive flow to make gestures of “engagement.”
Linking Wordpress, Twitter and Facebook « Two cultures, one mind. says: January 18th, 2008 3:31am
[...] and I still need to be convinced that Twitter provides a useful experience for most people, but Web Worker Daily, which you know I hold in high esteem, sees the benefit of Twitter, and reports on it [...]
When is enough, enough? | The goWholesale Blog says: January 24th, 2008 1:49pm
[...] Workstreaming combines these tools to give people INSTANT instant access to what you are doing. Web Worker Daily describes it [...]
The Workstreamr Blog » Blog Archive » How Can You Do Workstreaming? says: March 16th, 2008 6:14pm
[...] Quoted from Anne Zelenka, Web Worker Daily [...]