Fried talks about the how absurd it that many people are most productive in trains, cafes, dens, but not in the office. One of the more salient remarks in Fried’s talk is that “people go to work and they’re basically trading in their work day for work moments“. In essence, Fried is suggesting that creative work that requires long uninterrupted stretches of focus is inherently disrupted by the distractions of modern office life.

Curiously, Fried draws parallels between sleep and work as activities that are “phase-based,” requiring prior phases to complete before being truly rested or productive; you may sleep for many hours, but interruptions will lead to more tiredness.

Fried goes on to suggest that the perceived distractions of Facebook and web surfing at work are false, with “M&Ms” (managers & meetings) making up greater, involuntary, more disruptive and expensive distractions.

The talk concludes with three recommendations from Fried:

1. “No-talk Thursdays.” A period of “quiet time” prohibiting coworkers from talking to each other and limiting distraction.
2. Replacing active communication, like conversation, with passive forms such as email, IM and collaboration tools.
3. Cancel your meetings. Things will still get done!

Though I agree with Fried’s thesis that disruption is at the heart of low productivity, I’m not so sure about the general value of the closing recommendations. Email and IM can be just as disruptive as office conversations and meetings, for example, but Fried didn’t offer any insights into best practices in using those communication methods.

Nevertheless, I’m finding the essays in Fried’s book to carry some very useful insights. You can watch Fried’s TEDxMidwest talk at TED.com and learn more about Fried’s book, REWORK, at 37signals. (And if you want to find out more about enabling a remote workforce to to be more productive, you should also come to our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on Dec. 9 — Ed.).

How do you manage distractions in your workplace?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• By The Numbers: Running a Coworking Space

The group identified the ten key changes that they see shaping the world of work during the next decade:

1. “De-routinization” of work. “Non-routine” activities that cannot be automated, such as innovation, leadership and sales, will dominate employment: By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be “non-routine,” up from 25 percent in 2010.
2. Work swarms. Rather than traditional teams of people familiar with each other, ad-hoc groups or “work swarms,” with no previous experience of working with each other, will become a commonplace team structure. Gartner’s “work swarms” concept sounds similar to the Noded philosophy, which describes how groups of individuals, often but not necessarily geographically distant, come together to form temporary or recurring project teams.
3. Weak links. Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. Exploiting our own networks will help us to develop the ties that are required for participating in wider “work swarm” opportunities.
4. Working with the collective. Being able to influence the complex ecosystem of suppliers, partners, clients and customers will increasingly become a core competence.
5. Work sketch-ups. Informality will define most “non-routine” work activities; the process models for these activities will be simple “sketch-ups,” created on the fly.
6. Spontaneous work. Seeking new opportunities and creating projects around them is likely to be an opportunistic, rather than strategic, activity.
7. Simulation and experimentation. The culture of Google’s “perpetual beta” is likely to spread to other industries, with rapid prototyping taking place in very public environments.
8. Pattern sensitivity. Extrapolating from history and experience will become less reliable; the ability to detect and parse patterns and trends in society will provide better insights.
9. Hyperconnected. With formal and informal work diffused across organizational boundaries,  the support mechanisms for workers (healthcare, HR, IT) will need to evolve to support fuzzier, ad-hoc relationships between people and departments.
10. My place. The boundaries between home and work life are already blurred. Balancing almost 24/7 availability against burning out will become a critical skill.

Editor’s note: We’ll be exploring how technology is shaping the modern workforce at our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco on December 9th. It’ll be interesting to see whether our speakers agree with Gartner’s analysts.

Do you think Gartner’s views are obvious, fanciful or accurate predictions for the coming decade?

Image courtesy Flickr user totalAldo

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• By The Numbers: Running a Coworking Space

Here’s a short video overview of the service in action:

Managers can setup teams, invite members and assign privileges to allow team members to view each others’ screens. Users can then “clock-in” to activate the monitoring and screen capture service,  and “clock-out” at any time to pause it.

Personally, I’m uncomfortable with the premise of Peerdrum; the need to resort to this type of tool strikes me as illustrating a failure of management and a breakdown of the trust between employers and workers. Peerdrum appears to be based on a corrective philosophy; it assumes that workers left to their own devices will drift from their objectives.

Most information workers multitask and flit from project to project, and creative disciplines often require a level of play and exploration that is not well represented by a series of screenshots — if anything it could distort and damage perceptions.

Fundamentally, if the output of a worker is sound, is this type of tracking really necessary? Rather than a slideshow of screenshots, I think perhaps an open multi-person video channel could help to keep a team pulling together much more comfortably. Experiencing a coworker’s body language, demeanor and conversation will reveal much more than the visible content of their desktop.

Last year, we published a guest post covering some best practices for remote monitoring of workers by the CEO of RescueTime, which emphasized using monitoring tools to enhance productivity, rather than for employee surveillance; Peerdrum appears to be primarily a surveillance tool.

If you’re interested in the topic of how to manage remote workers effectively, it’s something we’ll be exploring in depth  at our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco in December.

Do you think surveillance tools like Peerdrum are necessary in modern workplaces?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Social Media in the Enterprise

However, although we’ve seen online office suites added to the portfolio of web worker productivity tools, database apps have been curiously absent from the mix. Even suites like Google Apps lack a dedicated application for managing, publishing and sharing specialized data, leaving users creating crude spreadsheet-based approximations. The average web worker may not have as much need for an online equivalent of Access as they would of Excel, but it seems strange that a collaborative database tool is missing from online apps suites like Google Apps and Microsoft’s Office Web Apps.

Fortunately, a new generation of tools are providing just that kind of functionality. “Data-as-a-service” providers are emerging that are enabling users to create, manage and publish specialized datasets, providing both authoring tools and opportunities to participate in a web of data, not just of pages.

Factual

When Factual launched a few months ago, I wondered if it was a “Flickr for data.” Indeed, the company pitches itself as an “open data repository” where users can upload and create datasets, as well as add data hosted by Factual to their own sites and apps.

Factual currently hosts datasets as diverse as videogame cheats, hiking trails and U.S. presidents. Interestingly, each dataset also includes a history of changes, which provides a level of accountability.

User can create new datasets by importing files, parsing web pages or using Factual’s extraction tools. Data can be accessed manually through a browser or via a public API.

InfoChimps

InfoChimps is similar to Factual in many respects, but positions itself as a “data marketplace” that enables publishers and owners of datasets to charge for their usage. Publishers can offer free and paid datasets, charging either for API access or for making them downloadable.

Interestingly, some datasets are organized into collections from particular organizations, such as Wikipedia and Data.gov, indicating the InfoChimps has become a useful means for organizations to outsource management of their open data policies.

Google Squared

It’s no surprise that Google is also experimenting in this area, though the company’s Google Squared service takes a slightly different approach, enabling its search data to serve as a source for creating smaller subsets ot data.

Squared can take any set of Google’s search results and format then into a structured table, or “square” which can be edited as well as exported to CSV or Google’s Spreadsheets format. The example here illustrates how a search for “british cities” creates a two-column square that can be expanded with additional user-created columns (i.e. population size) and saved for use elsewhere.

Where is the “YouTube for Data”?

Though Factual, InfoChimps and Google Squared show promise and the value of a web-based database authoring and hosting service, the demise of solutions such as Swivel and the defunct Dabble DB indicate that this application category is yet to mature. Perhaps it will take a company of Google’s scale to offer a “data-as-a-service” application that can truly rival the tools we’ve long used on the desktop and, more importantly, to enable us to share and monetize that data in ways which we haven’t been able to, thus far.

Do you have unique datasets in your business that could be valuable to others?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?

0boxer wasn’t operational at the time, but last week I got the chance to put it through its paces.

Installation

Currently, 0boxer is only compatible with Gmail running in either Chrome or Safari. Setup is a breeze: sign into the 0boxer homepage with your Google account, then click to install the appropriate extension for your browser.

Usage

Once installed, returning to Gmail in your browser will add a new bar at the top of the interface. This bar provides feedback on the “points” you’re scoring and badges you’re unlocking as you manage your email.

You’ll score points for archiving, replying or opening unread messages; I managed to unlock badges for organizing my email after 2am, getting to an empty inbox for the first time I archived, deleted or marked a message as spam. Strangely, the “First Zero” badge was awarded for clearing my Gmail Priority Inbox, even though there were still unread messages in my regular inbox. This suggests that 0boxer can’t distinguish between priority and regular messages. However, 0boxer is unobtrusive and doesn’t impede your regular use of Gmail.

Does 0boxer make a difference?

There’s been a lot of excitement recently about the potential of game design in revolutionizing everyday life; the emergence of services such as Akoha, Chore Wars and EpicWin underlines this trend. Indeed, the decades old Weight Watchers program is perhaps the most famous example of a points-driven ‘life-as-a-game’.

However, after several days usage of 0boxer, my initial excitement of unlocking rewards and accumulating points had dissipated. The game design of 0boxer is perhaps too weak:

• There are no hints or tips on improving performance that can alter your behavior. For example,  the service could remind you to answer a message that’s been “sticking” to your inbox for too long.
• Being awarded a badge is too innocuous. Foursquare sends tweets and emails when achievements are unlocked, 0boxer simply slides in a little Chrome notification.
• The leaderboard of 0boxer users is meaningless. I don’t know any of those people, it might be better to use Gmail’s address book to compare you to other people you actually know (InboxScore, a service that also makes email usage into a game, allows you to compare your score against other users from your domian, which might be more interesting).

“Serious games” like Weight Watchers are underpinned by some expertise in the users’ psychology that it’s seeking to alter. I’m not sure 0boxer has a sufficient depth of understanding of email usage and best practice to do anything other than amuse. You could happily archive and reply to many messages, accumulating badges and points, without tackling underlying problems of communication management.

I do believe that game design has great potential in productivity, so it’s great to see 0boxer make a start in this area. Perhaps the service will iterate aggressively and produce something truly useful in time. However, I suspect that in the future these kind of capabilities will simply be baked into products and services, like Gmail and Outlook.

Tell us what you think about 0boxer and points-based productivity games in the comments below.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?

Imran Ali: Tell us a little about the background of Carrboro Creative Coworking. What were the motivations for bringing coworking to North Carolina?

Brian Russell: I discovered coworking in early 2007. My primary influence was Citizen Space and the coworking wiki; all the amazing support online made it a lot easier to develop a plan to open a space. In October of 2008, Carrboro Creative Coworking opened its doors.

My first step was a comment I left about coworking on a local blog called OrangePolitics. A Town of Carrboro Alderman named Dan Coleman praised the idea and connected me with our Economic Development Director, James Harris. I met Mr. Harris and he helped me develop a business plan. Later I was enrolled in the Town of Carrboro’s revolving loan fund, which included more assistance, especially with my financial plan. Their help has been essential to Carrboro Coworking’s success. The Town later loaned me the money I needed to launch the business.

I’m most inspired by the people of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. Most people come here because of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Together we number about 69,000 people. Our towns have three things that Richard Florida says attracts people to communities: technology, talent and tolerance. Because of these awesome people we can do things that are usually only possible in much larger communities, all while enjoying the benefits of living in a small town. College towns are great places for coworking.

Imran: Do you see much collaboration between residents, what kinds of work are they engaged in?

Russell: Collaboration among coworkers at Carrboro Creative Coworking is rampant. Both casually and professionally. It’s routine for individuals and companies to do business with each other. Plus folks are always hatching new ventures or community projects in the kitchen over coffee.

Most of the people working here are in the web technology business. Though we do have a few writers and folks involved in science. There are freelancers and small companies. Many of the coworkers are coders, and have web development shops and Internet companies. We’re very diverse technology-wise, folks here develop with Ruby on Rails, Django, PHP/MySQL, iOs/iPhone/iPad, JavaScript, Java, Perl, Filemaker, etc. All operating systems are represented, but despite the diversity there are few religious tech wars. It’s pretty amazing how well everyone gets along.

Imran: What were your greatest challenges and surprises in bootstrapping Carrboro Coworking, and the largest operational challenges?

Russell: The greatest challenge so far has been finding product to sell. I see the core coworking business activity as reselling space. Our current office is approximately 3,500 square feet. Before we opened all nine of our offices were leased. Every week I put people on our waiting list. If I had 10,000 square feet I could sell it all right now. There just isn’t space that big in the small Town of Carrboro.

Imran: What are your plans for the future?

Russell: My plan is to grow the business. But I want to do it while retaining the awesome collaborative environment we have here. I believe that it’s possible to do that; it’s all about attention to detail, such as the quality of coffee and speedy Internet. But most important of all is that people treat each other well. I’m working really hard to facilitate that.

Imran: What are the key pieces of advice you’d give to people thinking about coworking and people thinking about establishing a coworking space?

Russell: The first thing you have to do when starting a coworking space is write a financial plan. If you’ve never done one get help. It doesn’t matter if you don’t see coworking as a business. The success of your space depends on it.

Be patient. It takes years to establish yourself and build a positive reputation. Remind yourself it will take two to four years to get stable. Then many many more years of steady operation. Your exit strategy should be nothing short of a radical transformation of your town, one person at a time.

Find out more about Carrboro Creative Coworking here.  And if you’re interested in finding out more about the coworking movement and how it’s helping to shape the future of work, check out our Net:Work conference in San Francisco in December.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• By The Numbers: Running a Coworking Space
• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Hence, it comes as no surprise that the notion of coworking is finding its way into the country. The bustling and vibrant city of Karachi is home to the suite401 coworking community, located in the stylish beachfront neighborhood of Clifton. With resident, nomad and day-pass plans ranging between 750 and 7500 Pakistani Rupees ($9-90), coworking in Pakistan seems as though it’s within the reach of most professionals.

Last month, I had the pleasure of talking to founder, Faizan A. Leghari, on suite401′s history and its plans for the future.

Imran Ali: Tell us a little about the background of suite401. What were the motivations for coworking in Karachi?

Faizan A. Leghari: A friend and I had started Viaduct, a creative design and development company. After six years of hard work, ups and downs, we managed to shift to a bigger/better office, and had ample space to spare. The first thought that occurred to us was that we could utilize the space to help others find an easier way to start their business. Of course since this is a two-fold sort of a thing, given that we operate our own small setup within the same space; but the main idea behind keeping a larger space than what we required was to try and offer such a facility to people who’d want to start up cheap and quick, like we did years ago.

Unless I’m mistaken, we’re the first and only such space working specifically for this purpose. Other “instant office” spaces are either way too expensive or don’t offer the same coworking sort of format that we do.

Imran: Do you see much collaboration between residents, what kinds of work are they engaged in?

Leghari: It’s been quite hard to even get people to understand the coworking concept and get people to use it. We’ve seen many people think along the lines of “what if someone else there steals my ideas/clients.” Still, we’ve had start-ups like MediConnect work from here, as well as small magazine publishers, business process outsourcing companies, consultants and event management people. Sometimes these residents were able to help each other out, given the contacts of one were helpful to the other and vice versa.

Imran: What were your greatest challenges and surprises in bootstrapping suite401 and the largest operational challenges? Have the recent floods had an effect?

Leghari: We’re operating the space at a key location in Karachi, and as such, it’s quite expensive to maintain. Operationally we’re quite well-equipped, since we have UPS for the necessary things like keeping the Internet running, we have a 4MB DSL link as the basic, plus on-demand 1MB chunks through WiMAX for people that need it. We also have a backup generator for running the complete facility and have a kitchenette, an office boy for serving tea/coffee, security etc. All this really adds up.

The floods haven’t really directly affected us, but the recession has been having adverse effects, given the fact that fewer people are starting up new companies or would rather go for a 9-to-5 which pays 100 percent of the time. This makes it more difficult to attract people who have the need for such a space.

Imran: What’re your plans for the future?

We’ve been operating for good part of a year, our aim was to see if we were able to gain enough momentum to maintain such a facility. Given that there is nothing similar in the country and we’re the first to offer it, we have a tough road ahead of us. It remains to be seen if we keep having repeat clientele or long-term residents, which would be the key reason for us to have the space grow further.

If that happens, we’d aim to set up similar facilities, and have a chain offering “nomad” memberships, within which you can travel inter-city and utilize spaces in other cities within the same membership.

Internationally there is already a “coworking visa” which allows spaces worldwide to offer free-days for travelers, or discounts, but this isn’t something official. We’re already listed there and offer free days for any international travelers in our space if they’re members of any other space within the coworking visa community.

Imran: What’re the key pieces of advice you’d give to people thinking about coworking and people thinking about establishing a coworking space?

I believe that anyone who wants to scratch their itch of having a startup, being their own boss and suchlike, coworking is for you. It gives people the opportunity to start with the minimum possible investment, no long-term contracts, and you have an instant office available to you with all the required facilities. Working from home is what some startups may opt for, but having an office-like environment around you puts you in a different sort of mode altogether. Work is taken seriously, and separation between work and home is always helpful. Furthermore, if you have a client visiting, it’s always good to have a set up within which you can serve them better.

For someone thinking about establishing a coworking space: go for it! But bear in mind that in Pakistan at least it is still quite a new concept and you’ll have an uphill battle for the most part. It would go well if you already have a set of friends with startups, that would need a space, and you can provide them that and have instant customers for you.

On the other hand, don’t lease out a space and bear that burden if you think that you won’t be able to get anyone interested. That’s the worst thing you can possibly do. Also, know when you have to pull out. This is just another business, and if things seem to be going south, a gradual shut down is much better than dragging it along; clients may stop, but your expenses won’t.

You can find out more about suite401 at its website and Facebook group.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• By The Numbers: Running a Coworking Space
• Making Coworking Corporate Scale
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

As the first generation of coworking spaces begins to reach maturity, it’s gratifying to see this innovative model of working now permeating beyond the technology sector into other industries. Indeed, niche coworking communities are now emerging to serve particular disciplines outside tech.

Tech investor Fred Wilson recently highlighted In Good Company and Green Spaces – providing coworking services for female and green entrepreneurs, respectively — in a wide ranging post about coworking spacess in New York. Along with The Writers Junction in LA, which is tailored towards writers, it seems that these flexible work spaces are increasingly attractive to a broader demographic.

Green Spaces

Currently operating in New York and Denver, Green Spaces is seeking to provide local incubators for environmental and sustainability entrepreneurs. Monthly plans range from $50/month to $495/month, covering everything from a hotdesking to a permanent desk, with drop-in access available from $20/day. The residents are certainly a diverse bunch with everything from concierge service providers and magazine publishers to activist organizations and green realtors. Green Spaces seems to be much more eclectic than simply being “green”;  it’s actually a hub for progressive people and projects.

In Good Company

Also based in New York, In Good Company is focused on supporting women entrepreneurs through a combination of events, office space and a program of training activities; coworking is just one of a number of its offerings.

The Writers Junction

Based in Los Angeles, The Writers Junction, as the name suggests, is a haven for writers of all persuasions. The membership plans offer full- and part-time usage from as low as $89/month up to $140/month. Residents include journalists, screenwriters, directors, doctoral students and actors.

There’s a great two-minute video, with commentary from community members, that underlines the warmth of what appears to be a modern-day artists’ commune.

Bringing Together Communities

Each of these coworking spaces appears to be successfully nurturing and serving the needs of communities that may have lacked a focal point or hub prior to having a physical home. I’ve heard rumors of a nearby town here in the U.K. that’s toying with the notion of a coworking space for physical fitness professionals — bringing together gym coaches, dieticians, physiotherapists and “wellbeing” professionals, among other healthcare disciplines. Could we be seeing a reboot for many industries that had previously remained ensconced in disconnected silos?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d): By The Numbers: Running a Coworking Space

Photo by Flickr user Hyku, licensed under CC 2.0

Inman provides commentary on all of the good and bad aspects of working from home, from commuting and office banter, to relationships and timekeeping. Here’s his take on how a relationship between partners is warped by working from home:
Each of the ten situations is disturbingly familiar and I’m sure many of you will be squirming as you flip through the panels. You can read the full comic at “Why Working From Home Is Both Awesome And Terrible.”

Which one of those panels represents your homeworking life?

Artwork copyright © 2010 Matthew Inman, used by permission.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

However, despite Apple’s restrictions on third-party development kits — notoriously codified in clause 3.3.1 of iPhone’s developer terms — there are toolkits available for layman app developers.

One of the most popular is the web-based Appmakr; though designed for simplicity, large brands including Newsweek, the US Army and AllTop have all utilised the service to create and publish their official iPhone apps.

AppMakr is really designed for packaging RSS-driven sites into standard iPhone interfaces, breaking the development process down into seven steps:

1. Art – name your app, upload a splash screen and a home screen icon.
2. Tabs – import RSS feeds into individual tabs of content – feeds can formatted as video, text and photos and includes hooks into podcasts, Twitter, Youtube, Blogger and iTunes.
3. Customise – add header images to the app’s interface as well as the enabling users to share content via email, Facebook or Twitter.
4. Notifications – creators can manually send ‘push notifications’ from AppMakr to all downloaded instances of the app.
5. App Info – describe how the app will appear in the iTunes App Store.
6. Monetize – advertising from several third-party networks can be incorporated into your app.
7. Publish – the final step, complies and builds your app ready for testing or distribution via the App Store.

AppMakr includes an integrated iPhone simulator, so you can effectively test the app as you move through the seven steps.

With no prior knowledge of AppMakr, I managed to build a basic app that aggregated mainstream news, local and social media in around an hour. Indeed, half of this time was spent creating icons, headers and other screen furniture for the app.

If you’re already a member of Apple’s iPhone developer programme, you can link your Apple account credentials with AppMakr and publish your app with no charge to AppMakr using your own brand. If you’re not a member, you’ll need to publish under AppMakr’s brand with a charge of $999. That may sound expensive, but it’s likely less than the cost of hiring a competent iPhone developer for a day’s development work.

AppMakr’s not suited to anything that needs specific hardware functions such as the iPhone’s camera, GPS, accelerometer or microphone, so you won’t be creating games or productivity apps!

However, it’s a great tool for packaging a website as an iPhone app; whether that’s for a client or your own content.