infoarch

I've been wanting to point to a series of booklets about the future of work . These booklets have been put together by Novay . One of Novay's projects is about Future Workspaces. They have been and are conducting practical and fundamental research in the are of the new way of working. The booklets contain many insights from there work. The booklets are great to give away to management.

Sitting in the train I had time to read 'What Matters Now' . I loved it. It's a very inspiring read. A great way to tap into the minds of great people. And all that for free! All contributors were asked to write a one-pager about a word. E.g. Power, Harmony, Compassion. Here's some of the parts I enjoyed most: Vision is the lifeblood of any organization. It is what keeps it moving forward. It provides meaning to the day-to-day challenges and setbacks that make up the rumble and tumble of real life. -- Michael Hyatt (This relates nicely to my post about Vision vs Scale .) The One Percenters are often hidden in the crevices of niches, yet they are the roots of word of mouth. This year, your job is to find them and attract them. -- Jackie Huba & Ben McConnell Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, DIY and UGC - all these digital phenomena are starting to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolu...

BusinessWeek recently published an interesting issues dedicated to "Business@work" . All kinds of work-related topics are discussed. Like: work-life balance , dealing with toxic bosses , how to go from good-to-great in the workplace, tips from experienced office workers , measuring productivity, staying creative in the workplace , working with Generation X and Y employees, etc. I'd advise you to go and read all the articles. But to get you to do just that I'll give you some highlights from the articles: - Jim Collins says : don't only make a todo list, but also a stop-doing-list. And define "white spaces" in your agenda to think. Keep asking questions. - Managers (and employees) should openly write down "how I work" to help others collaborate with you. For instance, your colleagues should know how you react under pressure and why you do or don't give much feedback. - Really nice article on "combating bureaucracy" . I like ste...

As you may know I try to apply the "Getting Things Done" methodology to my work and private life. I have one issue, though, that I keep running in to. "Getting Things Done" says: Write down your task immediately and keep all your tasks together in one list . When at work and at home I do this and it has really helped me become more focussed and productive. However, when I'm not at work, for instance walking in the forest somewhere, these ideas and tasks pop up. I usually don't have pen and paper with me, or my PDA, when I'm walking. Because I can't write them down and get them out of my head, these ideas/tasks will bug me during my walk, because I don't want to forget them. How do you remember those ideas/tasks? I've heard of people that carry pen and paper around with them everywhere for this reason. Some call themselves on their mobile and send themselves a voicemail. But as I said: when I'm walking in the forest I don't want to ta...

Idea Sandbox is an interesting site/blog on creativity and fresh thinking. They also have a newsletter I subscribed to. Not to long ago I received one titled: "Five tips to beat Procrastination". One of them struck me: Keep Yourself Fresh: 48/12 Rule - For each hour, work for 48 minutes followed by a 12 minute break. This really works. The 12-minutes gives you a nice break. The 48-minute push helps you crank through your work. Even if you're on a roll, still take a refresher break. (Especially if your work requires using a computer screen... the 12-minutes is a nice break for your eyes... and in the end reduces overall fatigue). This is basically the 80-20 rule! My experience is that most people find breaks signs of laziness, working all day long without breaks is cool and shows your tough. But how many people actually apply this rule? For instance, if you have a two-hour meeting, you might stop for a short coffee break, but nobody I k...

Luis Suarez of IBM has been treating us with some very interesting post on using less (corporate) email and more social tools. I've pointed to several of those posts before and commented on several of his post. Basically he wants to stop using corporate email (except for confidential matters) and move all communication to social tools. This is a neat experiment. However I was one of the questioners that wondered how the time he spends/spent on email is compared to social tools. I understand his experiment is not about that, but I'm not asking it to be skeptic. I think it's a relevant question. Of course shifting communication from email to social tools is cool, better and more productive/efficient (in the long run). But it does have to be in balance (or doesn't it?). For instance, I can send back an email in a couple of seconds to someone with whom I share a certain context. I can leave out all the details when I reply to him/her. But when I want to answer him/her via...

Insightful and nice overview of the history of personal productivity in theory and practice in Strategy+Business . It was written by Tom EhrenFeld. It addresses questions like: What is at the core of the visions of productivity prophets? What makes a good productivity 'system' anyway? And what productivity advice is timeless? (For Dutch speaking/reading people: this article was also translated and published in Holland Management Review , nummer 117 - 2007. There's no online version, by the way...)

Back from vacation (that's why blogging has been slow, although I've been using automatic posting - works wonderfully!) and still the first to comment on this interesting post about a.o. Luis' venture to stop using email ... After another week of about 30 mails Luis remarks that lots of these emails are related to scheduling. He writes: Yes, indeed, I am talking about e-mails that are related to scheduling, setting up and participating in conference events, customer meetings / workshops, specially when it is to show my own experiences on this new reality itself. I am thinking that if I would be able to find a way to reduce those I would be getting my number of incoming e-mails down to 15 to 20 a week. If not less! Yes! As massive as that!!! This triggered me. This implies (logically) that his list of email per week should also include information about the time he has to spend on an email. If you get 30 mails you can delete after just accepting the meeting request for insta...

Will life slow down in the future or will it continue to speed up? Interesting post on the ever-increasing speed of life by Alex Iskold on ReadWriteWeb . It titled: "Faster - Why Constant Stress is Part of Our Future" .

Some time ago I pointed to an interesting ReadWriteWeb article about trends in reading . Now there's an even more intriguing piece on reading behavior. We're reading less and skimming more ! Again, I'm really curious what its implications are for reading/skimming in the enterprise.

Just wanted to point you to this interesting study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers on "Managing tomorrow's people. The Future of work to 2020" . This report is set up along three lines, based on 3 future scenario's. The 3 scenario' are: "Small is beautiful", "Companies care" and "Corporate is king". I find the scenario's very realistic. I found "Small is beautiful" most interesting, because it relates to the Wikinomics principles . I'm curious what your take is on this report. Which scenario will become reality? Please let met know!

Stunning article on ReadWriteWeb about reading behaviour of young and old people . The numbers shocked me. I read a lot (books, paper articles, etc and of course webpages), but seem to be one of the people that will go extinct soon... I was wondering what this implies for companies. Are people reading less and less reports, memo's, etc. inside organizations too? Looking around in the company I work for, I'd say 'yes'.

Really interesting post by Luis Suarez . It's basically a social out-of-office wiki page he's promoting, based on an idea by SocialText's Ross Dawson. I really like the idea and am going to try it next time I go on vacation.

If you follow my blog you'll know that I'm intrigued by the ongoing debate on "the (myth of the) paperless office". You can find two of my posts here and here . Just recently, an article about the paperless home was published in the New York Times titled "Pushing Paper Out the Door" . Most of the article also applies to the office too. The article is a good read. It's not filled with high expectations, but looks for practical ways to reduce the consumption of paper. And some people are interviewed that are working on paperless homes. Scanning in all your paper stuff (also pictures etc.) is one of the (known) ways. What I think is the real barrier is the first step: deciding to go digital and scanning in all the paper you already have (or throwing it away). Furthermore you need a simple tool to help you easily store the files, add filenames and tags. Looking at my own life I do clearly see I use less paper. And I use paper in a different way than a coup...

Again an interesting post by Alex Iskold of ReadWriteWeb ! It's on the the new "Work from Home" Generation. I agree with most of this post. It nicely sums up the pros and cons. The comments are interesting to read too. It is my experience that working at home every now and then, really increases productivity. I seem to look at my email less (I simply open it less...). Furthermore I take a stack of stuff to do with me. Usually stuff to read and write. Almost always I get through the whole stack. I would (for some reason...) never be able to do this at work. So, I agree with one of the comments: working home say one day a week would be ideal.

I've looked at EverNote before. It's a nice tool for the fully digital knowledge worker. But most knowledge workers have a mixed life. They work on paper and on digital "paper". When I ran into this link , my first association was: did they solve this problem of a mixed work? No, they didn't, they just 'help' you move to one world, the digital one.

Just started using Xobni ! Some time ago I pointed to it , but now I'm experiencing. And I very happy up until now. It looks nice, works quickly, is insightful and gives me good overview. I agree with Frank Goertzen (comment on the ReadWriteWeb post on Xobni that "it adds value to something I'm already using." It gives context to all the stuff that's in my email: emails, files, contacts, meetings, tasks, etc. So, what's Xobni? There are some good reviews here by ReadWriteWeb , Web Worker Daily and TechCrunch (there's a summarizing video there too). Some problems I am experiencing are: Outlook seems to slow down somewhat and it seems to dig up old tasks that I finished a long time ago and present them as To Do's. And my SyncMyCal has disappeared... I was wondering if Xobni also searches my archived items. That would be nice and it would also explain why it shows my old To Do's.

So you don't want to read David Allen's book Getting things done . Well here's a video presentation by the maestro himself which pretty much sums up the book. But I'd advise you to read the book anyway, to really get the details of this new way of working.

Joost pointed me to this interesting post on wiki sessions on the Workplace Blog . What are these sessions for? The goal of the meeting was to educate peers about wikis and then talk specifically about the Avenue A | Razorfish wiki. This is interesting and it triggered me. Wouldn't it be nice to set up " productivity sessions" in companies? (Or do you already have them? Please share your!) In these sessions employees can share their ways of working, their way to be productive. For instance, how do you organize your email, your paper, your blog posts, etc.? At the company I work for we have done this by setting up a workshop on coping with information overload. But this was a one-time-thing.

Really interesting and nice video on 'the future of work' according to Manpower . Thanks for sharing, Brain Magierski !