Endless Knots

Are you email immune?

Web Worker Daily has another good one today by Anne Zelenka on the dilemma of email. Short responses, long? Delayed, immediate? Email is still in elementary school compared with, say, how to behave on the phone. Pieces like Rising Email Immunity Leads to Conflict over Email Etiquette are good assists to growing up (Keen readers remember Email is for old people here.)

Email immunity is unevenly distributed — some people have become almost entirely immune while others still treat it as a privileged and prioritized channel. Plus, entire generations are less susceptible to email communications: many twentysomethings and teenagers prefer instant messaging and texting.

Facebook, instant messaging, Twitter, and other alternative tools trump email and make some people more immune to email than others. Early adopters of social tools are likely to be relatively more immune to email.

This uneven distribution of email immunity leads to conflict over how to handle email. People with little immunity to email react with indignation to suggestions that you might worry less about responding to email or leave your inbox full or prioritize brevity over niceties. At the same time, those with more immunity question lengthy email discussions, complex email processing schemes, and overly elaborate email etiquette guidelines.

Virtual Teams and our other books online

With the September 11 anniversary approaching, I'm thinking about those terrible days and how distraught we were over how to respond. Everyone wanted to do something, but what? In addition to the horrific loss of life and eternal sadness that the attacks brought, thousands of enterprises instantly were put out of work. No one could go into the office because the offices were gone. One thing we knew for certain was that we here at NetAge had reams of useful information for people who suddenly needed to work at a distance. But how to quickly distribute what we knew without making things more difficult for those trying to cope?

Jeff Stamps, my co-author and the Big Thinker here at NetAge, had a great idea: Post our books to the web, available free for download to anyone. Which is what we did six years ago. Click this link.

Happy birthday to Web Worker Daily

I don't know the folks who pump out the useful stuff for Web Worker Daily, but I sure like them. Started a year ago today, this informative blog is dedicated to Pajama Nation, those toilers on the homefront for the workfront.

Take a look. In the month or so that I've been reading, I've found much to think about and have linked two posts here, one on "the social graph problem" and the other on the advantage of using multiple monitors.

From today's one-year-anniversary post:

On Labor Day 2006, Om Malik and the GigaOM team started this blog/community as a resource for (and a salute to) those of us who were living a sockless lifestyle:

"What are the best tools and what is the right gear to stay in touch with your team? How do you motivate your distributed teams when you are all dispersed all over the planet? The answers for these questions are hard to come by, and it was precisely for these reasons, we are introducing a new group weblog/community, Web Worker Daily."

"The new social etiquette"

The lake is silk this morning, a fishing boat picking up a bit of speed and heading toward Moultonboro, otherwise not a riffle on the Smile of the Great Spirit. Which makes this post even more ridiculous, sitting at the picnic table, waiting for the wood chips to soak before firing up the smoker that my hubby and kids fabricated yesterday out of a garbage can, steel rods, and a hotplate.

Though many people in the US are on vacation (holiday to our Euro friends) this week in anticipation of the official end of summer next Monday (Labor Day), I feel compelled to mention an ad that fell out of WIRED last night. At least, here in heaven, I wasn't reading it. Keen readers may recall my previous post questioning how I came to be a recipient of WIRED.

Helio, a new service of Earthlink and SK Telecomm, is offering us "The Mobile User's Guide to The New Social Etiquette." Here you can get your mobile device along with a heaping serving of how to behave online. It is bold and dismissive: "Voice Call--If you don't know what it is, then please just give this book away." Yes, it's a whole booklet of admonitions. And it harkens back to yet another post here, "Email is for old people," by letting us know that Helio Ocean (tm) "is bringing email back." Did it go somewhere?

I predict: The Messieurs Stewart and Colbert will have a feast with this advertising bonanza.

And...having read the whole thing AND gone to their site, I remain clueless as to what Helio is.

OH! All you guys reading this! Beware! Never send an emoticon to another guy. "Unless [you] like the other guy. A lot." AND "No emoticons unless you've met the other person face to face [sic] or at least sent a picture." Really? I'm sooo 20th-century.

Setting your IT budget? Consider this...

This one's about two things: the arcane topic of how IT budgets are set AND how this might affect virtual teams, collaboration, and such not.

The email from a colleague at a large technology company prompted a bit of conversation late last week here on ye olde blogge: In its efforts to cut costs, this company may be rounding up all its telecommuters and insisting that they work only from the office - even though 2/3 of them work with people in remote locations (like Asia, for example, while these folks are in, say, Kentucky or Massachusetts).

In possibly an unrelated connection, It turns out that this company sets its IT budget as a percentage of revenue. When revenue falls, IT budget shrinks. It would appear that someone thinks this will cost less.

Is this good business? I've been asking what others think, especially since this is the time of year when organizations start planning their IT budgets, which typically are set by Fall (for organizations operating on a calendar year, that is).

I just got off the phone with Bob Perrin, who heads Magellan Associates, a global management consulting firm. "This has nothing to do with telecommuting and costs will only increase by bringing people back in-house. Lights, electricity, and office space versus hoteling?" No contest, says Bob. A former CIO himself, Bob says that setting IT budgets as a percentage of revenue "is not a very popular approach." Many organizations instead choose a zero-cost increase regardless of revenue then add budget based on what needs to be done.

So for those of you reading who don't run organizations or worry about things like this, this kind of stuff is very important. It means that you either receive a laptop or wait months - as has happened with one of our clients. There, existing employees have had to wait out a budget freeze. Meanwhile new employees automatically receive laptops. Which doesn't sound all that important unless you've got people on teams that need to have conference calls at 5 AM because that's the only time their colleagues halfway around the world are at work. You need a laptop for this. Just one small example (but not small to the laptop-hungry employees).

Organizations: regard IT as strategic not perfunctory. Who does your CIO or CTO report to? Another topic but the answer to that question speaks to the same concerns about the role IT plays in making work easier and more productive.

Telecommuning - yup, it's spelled right

Eleanor Wynn at Intel takes the "t" out of travel, replaces it with an "n," and presto-changeo, we have a whole new slant on working apart: telecommuning.

Google Sky - what's next? Google Body?

Google Earth has a new friend: the universe, right here on your screen.

Google Sky allows you to tour the celestial canopy. I think. I've tried downloading four times and still it quits "unexpectedly" (Send Report?). I've been as thrilled as the next person about the stuff coming from Google Labs, though Google Street, the (potential?) Peeping Tom, has me quite worried (likewise, Google Print, copyright laws and all). But I love the sky idea. I love the sky. Having pointed around the whole globe and now the whole universe, what's next? Google Me, Inside Version--Google Body?

Update: I am far from the first to think of Google Body, I've just discovered. One way that people get to blogs is through searches on topics (duh) - and it turns out that someone searched on Google Body, which got them here, which I then reverse engineered and have found these posts that reach all the way back to...March 2007.

Photo, Fly Me to the Moon, Kaikoura, New Zealand, 11 PM, March 5, 2007; for an excerpt from "A Long Prayer for New Zealand," read on.

The social graph problem

Here's one most people reading aren't worried about - yet: The social graph problem. What happens when you join social networking sites, whether for work or for "social?" For each new service - Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, and on and on (one estimate is that there are 5000 social applications/sites floating around as of now), you have to build a new network of "friends." What if you had just one and it belonged to you?

Web Worker Daily, my new best friend, reported on this a few days ago. Raises lots of questions. Different networks for different purposes? Of course. Do we need a site that manages your networks on all your other sites (as they say, this quickly becomes ratttthhhher meta)? Will any of this last anyway, in which case, why bother?

Patti Anklam ferreted out the Welsh word for this: cynefin, the place of my many belongings.

Many different networks, together a person doth make.

IT spending as percentage of revenue?

Does it make sense to key IT spending directly to revenue? An email from a colleague spotlights perhaps unanticipated consequences of this policy: No more telecommuting. Despite the fact that a large majority of the company's employees (2:1) work most directly with people in distant locations. Now this global IT company is requiring everyone to come into work. Got it? You drive into an office to work with people oceans away. Costs more to support IT from people's homes than from central locations? I don't get this.

"Tiny to-do lists" at Web Worker

Good thinking again at Web Worker by Leo Babuata, this time on the dreaded to-do list: make them tiny. Here. Anyone remember the "Few Big Rules" from the '90s? These two ideas should get together.