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?

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37signals’ tools are very popular choices, but I also received several responses from startups that started out using Basecamp, but made the decision to switch to something else. I think that indicates that a lot of people are pretty familiar with Basecamp already, so in this list I’ll share three less-commonly used tools that different startups have chosen to use to collaborate, and the reasons why they use them:

1. Redmine. Startup Gloto uses Redmine. VP Technology Tony Jacobs says, “The basic requirement is to make sure that each product, customer project, and internal project is tracked separately. The wiki (despite being a fairly weak implementation) is good enough to hold the stuff we need to see, and it will track documents and files in addition to wiki-formatted input. The related bug tracker is essentially a wiki for each bug as well, allowing richer links. We added [G]it as [an] SCM tool (in addition to our subversion repository), and Redmine integrates with both nicely. The key things that we looked for during the review is that the tool is actively maintained, reasonably stable, supports easy backup/restore operations (MySQL dump is the preferred method) and is easy to use. Having the tool look good was important too, because we expose this interface to our customers on occasion, and we always want to present a good face.”
2. Producteev. SubMate co-founder Jonathan Benoudiz says, “At SubMate, we love Producteev because it’s really easy to master and provides a seamless workflow integration with the “Email-to-task” and the instant messenger integration (we use Gtalk  a lot). We all have iPhones and it’s pretty cool to be able to check how everything is going on at the office with the iPhone app when on the go. Sometimes when I commute, I have 15 minutes to spare and just have to launch the app and identify a quick task that I can complete from my iPhone. We are a young startup that grew from two to five in two months. With Producteev, we can just add new team members and told them to browse completed tasks to be more familiar with how the product evolved.”
3. ScrumWorks. Unicast Director of Product Michael Tuminello says, “We use [ScrumWorks] with in-house and remote teams and have found it to be very effective. A web-based drag-and-drop UI lets individual team members take on daily tasks and track hours against them. On the product management/design side (where I am), a desktop client lets you enter, estimate and prioritize individual backlog items (work items). You can pull reports to see how the team is progressing against the project timeline, and it all ends up in a database. Our VP of engineering has been able to write custom code to pull the data and look at it in Excel pivot tables for additional information outside the scope of ScrumWorks itself, like helping to determine the relative ROI of individual features.The Java client can be a bit kludgy, but overall it’s a very effective program, and Danube is very responsive to feedback.”

What collaboration tools do you use in your startup?
Photo by Flickr user Stephen Cummings, licensed under CC 2.0

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Landing Work

While your first visit to Haystack may leave you with the impression that the site is only meant to help out clients, it’s already proved useful for many designers. Some web designers report landing projects within hours of posting a listing on Haystack. The general idea is that the site can better match prospective clients to your services who are browsing online — you might not be highly ranked enough to be found through search engines, but your skills can make you stand out among other web designers on Haystack. 37Signals takes care of promoting the site via advertising, blogging and marketing to its user base.

Any web designer can post a listing on Haystack for free. That includes anyone from freelancers to big web design companies. The basic listing includes one portfolio image, the type of budgets you generally work with, the nearest big city to where you work and a contact email for your company. A Pro listing, priced at $99 per month, allows you to post more images, change placement and place for your logo. The Pro listings do seem to show up first in search results. Clients can search for web designers based on budget and location.

Scoping Out the Competition

You’ll find that Haystack has a few uses beyond landing clients. It’s an easy way to get an idea of what your fellow web designers are up to. You can check out prices, portfolios and services offered for a whole list of web designers in one place. You can tell quickly how well your prices fall in with your competition’s, as well as learn about how they’re landing clients — valuable business information no matter how you look at it.

There are some design reasons to look at what other designers are up to, as well. Need a little inspiration? Browse through some of those designs that have been posted on Haystack. You might see a technique or style that sparks a new idea for a project you’re working on.

Haystack’s Background

The minds behind Haystack are already well-known for creating tools. The site is a new offering from 37signals, the same company that created Basecamp, Backpack and other well-known tools. Haystack is a logical extension of these tools — 37signals’ original application, Basecamp, grew out of a tool that the team designed for their own use. With the 37Signals team’s roots in web design, it’s easy to understand how they would come to create Haystack.

That background has definitely contributed to the site’s overall usefulness. While it takes a slightly more subtle approach to inviting web designers to join than it does to inviting prospective clients to shop, Haystack is built to be an effective tool for the web designers posting listings.

Have you listed your company on Haystack? Has it generated any leads for you?

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“The concept of an intranet has been perverted over the years to be a bunch of different things,” said Jason Fried, CEO of Chicago-based 37signals.” Our idea of what an intranet needs is what we have encountered over and over and over when we used to do client work. People just need a place to share common information. They need a place to keep track of very simple calendar items – when a meeting is, when something is going on. And they need a way to share documents. So we see Backpack as a new breed of intranet – returning to the original promise of the intranet: a closed system for people within an company to share information.”

“Backpack is perfect for distributed companies. We have 10 people at 37signals. Five of those people are in Chicago, and five of those people are in five other cities around the country. So we’re a very distributed company – that’s how we work. In fact the five people in Chicago don’t usually work together, we work from home,” he added.

Three things got my attention in the new, somewhat lower priced multiuser Backpack:

Backpack pages are dirt-easy collaborative workspaces. You – or anyone you let into a page – can add lists, notes, whiteboards, files and pictures as quickly as you could arrange this information in a desktop spreadsheet, for example moving items from your to-do list on a page to their to-do list on that page, just like what people do in physical offices. “That’s the whole concept of Backpack pages: they let you put together whatever sort of information you want. What people want to do is share information that the entire organization needs.” Fried added.

Backpack will make sure everyone gets the word. Whether you want to spot changes via the new Newsroom feature online, or want to get a steady RSS feed to your iGoogle home page or want email updates or text to your cell phone, Backpack accommodates your web working style.

Offices – even virtual offices – need a supporting web of reminders (“Expenses due Friday or else.”) to make sure things run smoothly. Emailing gets old very quickly as a way of communicating non-urgent information and is a terrible medium for organizing the kinds of multi-person projects distributed companies thrive on. Backpack’s reminders make it easy to get the word out without belaboring the point.

Fans – and there are over 350,000 users presently of Backpack – of the old single user Backpack don’t need to pay for multiuserness they don’t need: The Solo plan for a single user provides up to a hundred pages, calendar, 1 GB file storage and SSL for $7 a month down from $9. Other plans range from free to $149 a month depending on users, pages and storage.

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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