A Month on the Road

We both spent time away from home over the last couple of months, so in this episode we share some of our experiences, including principles to help you plan your own business trips.

Listen to the episode here:

Download the MP3 file here

Buy the book here (available at a reduced price for a limited time).

Resources:

• The Complete Business Traveller Gadget Checklist

Online Meetings Etiquette Guide

Online meetings are important for many Out of Office workers, but most people don’t know how to behave in them - neither efficiently nor effectively. In this episode, we give you 10 guidelines for online meeting etiquette, so you make the most of your next online meeting.

Listen to the episode here:

Download the MP3 file here

Buy the book here (available at a reduced price for a limited time).

Here are the ten guidelines:

1. Find a quiet environment with good call quality.
2. Be on time.
3. Stay silent while waiting for the call to start.
4. Identify yourself and address people by name.
5. Be polite.
6. Use mute when not speaking.
7. Avoid distractions.
8. Avoid multi-tasking.
9. Stay on track and ensure private matters are solved outside the call.
10. Respect people’s valuable time.

Reference: This list is from Gihan's book Best Practice Conference Calls. The main credit for this list goes to his co-author Brandon Munro, who initially created this list. We also have this list available as a free one-page download from the Web site, so you can distribute it to colleagues and clients as well.

Get Focussed

As Out of Office workers, we sometimes need to shut out the world in order to get stuff done. In this episode, we'll look at how you can choose the right environment, plan your work, and then do the work efficiently and productively.

Listen to the episode here:

Download the MP3 file here.

Buy the book here.

References

• If you need to brainstorm, head to Starbucks
• The Pomodoro Technique
• Regular short breaks are good for your health
• GoodToDo.com

The Out of Office Work Style – What’s New

A lot has changed in the last 6-12 months for Out of Office workers. In this episode, we review some of the changes, enhancements and new services available to make it even easier to use the Internet for greater freedom in your work life.

Listen to the episode here:

Download the MP3 file here

Buy the book here.

References

• Online retail has grown by around 29 percent, roughly ten times the rate that traditional bricks-and-mortar retail is growing.
• Local retailers striking deals with overseas distributors to refuse Australian customers - but this might be illegal
• Australia Post still in the Dark Ages when it comes to delivery and pick-up - newsagents might start offering an alternative
• Collaboration is a $1 billion industry, due to grow to $3.5B by 2016
• Scam losses reported to the ACCC totalled more than $85.6 million, a 35 per cent increase from 2010 (from the ACCC’s 2011 Targeting Scams Report)
• Online scams cost $US485m in US in 2011
• Singapore sees spike in online scams
• For help, check scamwatch.gov.au
• Malware writers targeting Macs
• Mobile wireless access is growing faster than other broadband
• Criminals are getting smarter about exploiting hotel WiFi users

Online Collaboration - Principles and Tools

On-line collaboration has some things in common with face-to-face collaboration, but it also has some important differences. If you and your team are working this way for the first time, you might not be aware of the potential pitfalls. In this episode, we share our six principles of on-line collaboration, and then work through a case study.

Listen to the podcast here:

Download the MP3 file here.

Buy the book here.

Better, Faster, Stronger: Productivity Using the Cloud

We're bombarded with more information than ever before. We’ve always had to manage the flow of information through our “pipeline”, by (a) filtering what comes in, (b) processing it more efficiently and (c) doing more with it. The Cloud can play an important part now, in two key ways: If information is not already in the Cloud we can store it there before processing it; and if we publish information to the Cloud as soon as possible (without hoarding it on our hard disks), we free up the overload and make it usable by others sooner.

In this podcast, we discuss a number of the tools we use for managing our personal productivity using the Cloud - including Gmail, Google Docs, Dropbox, Evernote, Kindle, Ubuntu1, YouTube, and Read It Later.

Listen to the podcast here:



Download the MP3 file here.

Subscribe to the podcast here.

Buy the book here.

Here's an overview of the principles we discuss:

Broadly, we’ll talk about these things:

1. Choose what comes in:
   What? (Fill Depth): Choose whether to get overview, detailed or somewhere in between
   How? (Switch Channel): Choose between reading, watching, listening
   
2. Choose how you process it:
   When? (Shift Time): File in the Cloud for consuming later
   Where? (Keep Space): File in the Cloud for consuming anywhere
   
3. Choose where you publish: Use the Internet as your filing system - e.g. blog, tweet
   

Outsourcing Using Talent Markets

Talent markets are Web sites that connect customers with freelance providers. In this podcast, we look at how you as a business owner can get best use from using these talent markets.

Listen to the podcast here:



Download the MP3 file here.

Subscribe to the podcast here.

Buy the book here.

Web sites we mentioned:

• These are the “traditional” ones, which have been around for ages: Elance.com, Guru.com, vWorker.com, Freelancer.com
• This one is newer, and favours hourly rates rather than fixed price: oDesk.com
• This one is fixed price, but one fixed price!: Fiverr.com
  
• This is good for small, repetitive tasks: Amazon Mechanical Turk
  
• This one is quite different from the others, because it’s based on crowdsourcing rather than outsourcing: 99 designs
  
• See a detailed comparison at Assembla.com

Predictions for 2012

This is our annual predictions episode, where we look at what's coming up in the year ahead, this time with a focus on what it means for Out of Office work.

Listen to the podcast here:



Download the MP3 file here.

Subscribe to the podcast here.

Buy the book here.

These are our eight predictions for 2012 ...

1. Growth of mobile will facilitate increased telecommuting

The advent of powerful mobile computing devices such as smart phones and tablets has lead to an increasingly mobile workforce. Cloud Computing has become an important technology in support this mobility. Although Cloud Computing is often touted as a way of lowering the cost of IT infrastructure, it's also important in supporting a mobile workforce. As more companies make use of these technologies to enable mobile workers, so too they are enabling their employees to work Out Of Office.

2. More Wi-Fi connectivity out and about

As we become increasingly mobile, there'll be a greater demand for cheap or free wireless Internet access wherever you are - including parks (Brisbane City Council is doing it), city centres (the Perth Lord Mayor promoted it as one of her main election promises) and in the air (Emirates is doing it, Qantas is planning it, many American carriers are doing it).

3. Growth in Mobile Devices

E-book readers will drop below $100 in Australia, high-quality Android tablets will be available for under $300, and smart phones will overtake feature phones.

4. Better support for on-line meetings from tablets and phones

Tablets and smartphones provide many of the features of laptop computers, but there's still some way to go before tablets replace laptops. One of the areas yet to mature is the use of on-line meetings tools, such as GoToMeeting. We predict the vendors of these tools will provide much better support for use on tablets, so Out of Office workers can (realistically and reliably) use a tablet instead of a laptop for on-line meetings.

5. Outsourcing will keep increasing (changing the nature of “jobs”)

It’s the age of the free agent: one in three Americans is a free-lancer, not because they’re finding it difficult to get work but because they want to be. Outsourcing is growing, particularly through the “talent markets” (such as elance.com, guru.com and odesk.com), and this trend will continue in 2012.

6. Google+ will reach 200 million users

Google+, currently at 65 million users, is growing steadily, and we predict it will reach 200 million this year. That number alone doesn't particularly matter for Out of Office work, but it does mean Google has finally created a social network that works, so they are likely to keep investing in it. The Google Hangouts feature in particular could be the video-conferencing solution that we've all been waiting for.

7. A large Cloud-based service will fail (temporarily), causing mass disruption

This is inevitable, not because Cloud Computing is inherently unreliable but rather because it’s becoming more prevalent. More Cloud services are being offered and more people and businesses are using them (as we mentioned earlier, the growth in the number of mobile workers is the main driver behind the adoption of Cloud Computing).

8. E-mail is (still) not dead

Despite various dire predictions to the contrary, e-mail is still going strong, with 3.1 billion users in 2011, and no sign of it slowing down. On the other hand, the volume of spam is decreasing, which means e-mail is becoming even more valuable.