Should New Jersey governor Jon S. Corzine, who was injured in a car crash two weeks ago, become well enough to govern, he may do it from his hospital bed. Now that brings a whole new dimension to the virtual office!
Corzine’s aides said Monday they are looking into video-conferencing technology in the hopes that he could govern remotely. However, Corzine’s condition is still critical — he was only upgraded from the ICU today — following breaking his left thigh bone, 11 ribs, a collarbone, and his breastbone in a high-speed crash on April 12.
Video-conferencing technology is cheap and nearly ubiquitous these days, as Om reminded us when Google bought such software from Swedish firm Marratech last week. All you have to do is buy a couple of laptops with built-in cameras. Or perhaps Corzine’s entourage would like to spend some tax dollars on something a little more upscale, like Teleportec’s life-size 3D face-to-face communication system.
Check out this video by Ryan Carson, a super-organized guy who often blogs earnest explanations of his work methods. For his to-do list, Carson uses a combination of OmniOutliner and Hipster PDA. His method requires quite a bit of dedication on a daily basis, but it’s simple enough for us mortals to imagine giving it a whirl.
Every Monday morning Carson spend a half an hour reviewing his list of tasks and moving items to a “This Week” folder. Then, each day, he culls items from the week for a “Today” folder. At the end of each day, unfinished tasks go back in “This Week.” And while on the go, Carson takes notes on future tasks using pen and paper, and makes a point of inputting them into OmniOutliner upon his return to his desk.
Chris has reviewed Todoz and Stikkit for WWD. Anne is a steadfast devotee of pen and paper. Me? Well… I don’t have a favorite to-do tool at the moment. After watching Carson’s testimonial, I just downloaded OmniOutliner, though. Suffice to say I’d take any suggestions under careful consideration!
Gmail just launched a few new features — nice buttons, mail alerts within conversations, forwarding a whole conversation — and they’re all quite nice. But why stop there?
I personally am logged onto Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Calendar pretty much all my waking minutes. They are without a doubt my most-used applications, and I am quite happy with the price tag. I even recently jumped ship from GigaOM’s email setup in favor of sending things through a Gmail alias, just so I could use Google’s excellent search engine and spam filter.
That said, with a few added tools I’d be an even more loyal user. I’ve been building a list over the last couple days of niggling feature requests.
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Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani posts on her favorite “placeless office” tools: Campfire, MediaWiki, Gmail, Google Calendar, Wists/del.icio.us, Google Docs. They are fairly specific to running a blog, but it’s a good roundup for anyone trying to coordinate a virtual company. For example:
Once a week the four of us gather in a Campfire chat room to discuss our evil plans for internet domination. Campfire beats a group instant messenger chat a bunch of ways: there’s no figuring out who uses AIM and who uses Yahoo! Messenger, no chance of our other IM buddies interrupting our interaction, there’s an archive of transcripts sorted by day and participant stored in one central place, plus Campfire lets us communicate right inside our favorite desktop app, the web browser. Not to mention Campfire makes sharing links and broadcasting files a breeze without having to go “Did you get my AIM file transfer? No? It’s not going through? Ok, try hitting Accept again… What client are you using?”
At GigaOM we don’t have quite such an organized regimen of tools, though every once in a while we try to get organized. Each of us has our own personal favorite calendar or email tool, so for us it’s essential that everything is exportable and compatible…which is often a challenge.
Just heard about a little piece of software called ChatterBlocker that offers an assortment of background noise to help you tune out distracting sounds. While the advertised use is for shutting out annoying office-mates, there’s obvious applications for those of us who work out of even less controlled environments like cafes.
Chatterblocker, which is Windows-only, doesn’t seem to do anything terribly high-tech — for instance, cancel noise like those expensive headphones, or respond automatically to increases in volume around you — it simply plays sounds determined to be non-distracting. After getting panned by Slashdot readers last weekend, the company reduced its price from $40 to $20. That’s still an awful lot for some generic sound files, but hear me out.
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I work mostly from home, so if a company is coming from out of town and wants to meet up, I choose one of a few cafes in the neighborhood. I live in an area of San Francisco where the only businesses are restaurants and laundromats. Laptops aren’t rare at our little cafes, but collared shirts and ties are. Much of the jeans-clad clientele comes to read novels or the paper.
But here’s my dilemma. When a team of CEO, VP Biz Dev, and PR person shows up, the four of us crowded around a small table overflowing with laptops and precarious lattes, the CEO using his demo voice…we definitely stand out. At one meeting few weeks ago, it was particularly bad; the guy giving the presentation seemed to have overdosed on public speaking classes. I tried to apologize with my eyes to my neighboring novel-readers when he reached the climactic PowerPoint slide. Oy vey.
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Yesterday I stopped by a different cafe, Jumpin’ Java on Noe, to mix things up a little. I was met with a bizarre scene: the sixteen wooden tables lining the shop each housed one person and one laptop. Each table (well, desk) was disturbingly uniform, down to the empty chair across from the person peering intently into his or her screen. I snapped a picture with my own laptop’s internal camera, so it’s pretty crappy, but hopefully you get the idea. If you find yourself at a cafe that’s ridiculously full of our web worker brethren, take a photo and send it to info@gigaom.com.
More suggested reading from Om: “Give yourself permission to suck,” by Pamela Slim.
Pamela advocates releasing early versions of just about anything. Sounds all too familiar for me, having spent a good bit of the last couple years signing up for and reviewing the flakey beta versions of web apps. But she extends the “release early and often” ethos to newsletters, podcasts, and any sort of product.
Like most anything, this could be taken too far. Do you find yourself explaining away everyday mishaps as pilot projects? Sorry honey…that souffle was in beta.
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
