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The value of stillness

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:01:30 +0000

As Tom Waits once crooned, “I never knew I needed you until I was caught up in a bind,” so perhaps it’s not as ironic as it first appears that Pico Iyer, an essayist best known for his peripatetic lifestyle and travel writing, has plenty to say about stillness. It’s often only when we feel a lack of something that we learn to value it, and in the current world of 24-hour electronic stimulation and constant information bombardment, we start to feel the need for a little solitude and peace.

It’s a problem that many remote workers can identify with and one Iyer (who works in Japan with colleagues half a world away) recently spoke to Knowledge@Wharton about in depth. In the lengthy interview he identifies the lack of stillness in the lives of many plugged-in professionals, saying:

Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think. Some of my friends go for runs every day. Some do yoga. Some cook. Some meditate. All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world.

It’s a problem that Iyer himself solves with pretty extreme means, living in Japan without a TV or a cell phone and sharply rationing his time online. But he’s also conscious that this solution wouldn’t be possible without the technology he so drastically limits. “I couldn’t live in rural Japan on a tourist visa while my family and my bosses are in New York without technology. It’s only e-mails and fax machines before that that allow me to live 6,000 miles from the office,” he says. But as much as he values the tech that gives him location independence, he also deeply values silence. Why?

In my experience, silence is where we come upon depth and spaciousness and intimacy. It’s also where we find things inside ourselves we didn’t know we had inside ourselves. When I’m talking superficially to a friend or answering an e-mail or going through my round of activities, I’m really talking from the surface of my personality. And there’s very little that comes out of me that surprises me. But when I’m in silence and I can collect myself, so to speak, and begin to think slowly down through the depths of myself, it’s an amazing journey into a kind of outer space, except it’s inner space, into these areas that I never would have imagined exist. . . .

I think silence is both the cradle of creativity and the one place where you can see what to do with your noisy, non-silent life. In some way, I’ve always felt that the paradox of any technological revolution is that you need to go offline in order to find wisdom and emotional clarity to make the best use of your online life. Online is an amazing wonder world, but you have to step back from it in order to see how to navigate it. I think that’s where silence helps.

If Iyer’s crisp explanation of the need for stillness jolts you into realizing that you have too little quiet time in your life, but living in the Asian countryside either isn’t possible for you or isn’t your cup of tea, how do you proceed? Iyer notes that there are many ways to bring stillness back to your days and speaks approvingly of some companies’ efforts to give their employees space to find solitude:

When I was visiting the campus at Google, for example, I was impressed to see the meditation rooms and the trampolines and the playpens and the way that the company makes sure its workers have a lot of time free from the office, because that’s where creativity takes place. When I wrote the piece in The New York Times about quiet, I was impressed to hear from one of the leading voices of Silicon Valley who wrote to me and said, many of us here observe an Internet Sabbath. We’re the ones who have helped to give the world the Internet and who’ve helped to expand possibilities with it. But we also know that it’s really important for us to spend a day every week or a couple of days offline to nourish ourselves and to be able to have the vision to see how best to guide the Internet revolution.

I was struck that it was Intel that was the one that experimented with enforcing quiet time, four hours of uninterrupted time every Tuesday for 300 of its workers. It realized that only by turning off the machines could people come up with the ideas that would make Intel a visionary company.

If you’re intrigued, check out the long but interesting interview for more on meditation, multitasking and what, if anything, is wrong with kids these days.

Do you have enough stillness in your life and, if not, how could you get some more?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Pierre -M-

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Rypple teams up with Spotify to reimagine goal setting

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:01:13 +0000

Goal setting is traditionally one of the most top-down aspects of business. The CEO sets the agenda with responsibility for fixing targets to reach that goal, cascading down the ranks until the employee on the ground is handed his or her expected piece of the puzzle, often with little to no understanding of how it fits into the larger vision the organization is aiming for.

Now Rypple is teaming up with much-buzzed-about company Spotify to reimagine all of that. The social performance management company (a Net:Work 2010 Future Ideas Lanchpad finalist) worked with the digital music firm to develop Social Goals 2.0, Rypple announced this morning. The platform’s new goal-setting capability is built on the objectives and key results (OKR) model developed by Intel and allows teams to set common goals, see what colleagues are working on and monitor how individuals’ efforts are impacting objectives.

It is also designed to be more user-friendly than existing goal-setting tools, says Rypple’s co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Debow. “Social Goals 2.0 is about delivering something managers and their teams will actually use day-to-day,” he says. That means more engagement and understanding of how specific tasks fit into overall strategy, even as that strategy evolves, according to Johan Persson, the organizational development manager at Spotify. “For a high-growth company like ours, things change quickly,” he commented. “Rypple enables us to be more transparent across the organization and keep our employees focused on what really matters.”

That’s good for the company, claims Rypple, but also good for the motivation of individual employees, who can see more easily how their work advances the company agenda. “We believe people want to make a meaningful contribution — not just spend their days doing useless busy work that doesn’t move the business forward,” says Debow. Rypple is hoping this new feature helps both organizations and team members track and appreciate that contribution.

Is keeping employees in the loop about how their work contributes to the company’s goals an issue at your organization?

Image courtesy of Rypple

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I'm Moving to Mac

Scott Blitstein — Tue, 04 May 2010 18:00:31 +0000

Over the last few months I’ve seen my trusty IBM ThinkPad start to deteriorate. We’ve been through a lot, this laptop and I, as it’s been a faithful companion for nearly five years now. It’s been tweaked and configured just perfectly for me, with software and utilities perfectly chosen to fit my needs. Its screen is fading, its battery life is down to under an hour, and the entire right-hand side is held together with electrical tape. The performance is also starting to be an issue. I attend weekly team meetings via Skype; even a basic video chat was bringing the machine to its knees.

Obviously it was time for a replacement, but the adventure I took to get there has been a wild one. You see, for the first time in my life, not only did I consider a Mac as a viable option, but I’ve gone ahead and made the switch.

I guess you would say that I’m a PC. I’ve been using PCs since I purchased my first one nearly 20 years ago. From DOS to Windows 3.0 to Vista, it’s been my world. I’ve learned the ins and outs of using and managing the various OS flavors. I’m comfortable with shortcut keys, have compiled thousands of tips and tricks for hundreds of software packages for Windows. I’m not an evangelist or a fanboy, but I’ve been quite productive using my PC and really haven’t been affected by virus, spyware or the “typical” issues that are used to describe a bad PC experience.

On the other hand, Macs have been a mostly unknown entity. Although those who know me will speak of my legendary disdain for iTunes, I’ve never really been “anti-Mac.” I’ve helped friends and clients purchase and set them up so, it isn’t that I had no exposure to them, it was just that the time I had spent with them didn’t really do anything to convince me that there was a compelling reason to convert.

This time, I guess it was peer pressure more than anything that even got me thinking about the switch. Co-workers and friends have been raving about them, and whenever the discussion changed to my laptop replacement, the “get a Mac” proclamations became too much for me to dismiss. So I started to seriously consider it. I researched models, made lists of software, thought about pros and cons, chatted with friends and did my normal over-analysis. It’s an important decision though — my computer is so closely tied to my livelihood that it isn’t something I could take lightly. I found that my primary concerns were tied to three major areas — support, software and overall usability.

In my upcoming posts I’ll be outlining not only my pre-purchase thought process and evaluation experience but I’ll also be documenting the transition, my retraining, software changes and choices, usability challenges, and some great surprises that I’ve discovered in the process — about Windows, about Mac and about me.

If you’ve made the switch from PC to Mac, or vice versa, let us know how it went for you in the comments.

Photo by stock.xchng user andrewatla

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A Comparison of Freshbooks vs. Harvest vs. Blinksale

Simon Mackie — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:00:03 +0000

With so many invoicing web apps available (many of them covered here on WebWorkerDaily), choosing one can be a daunting task. Even limiting your options to the most popular services doesn’t help that much, as the costs of the various plans vary so little. So we were excited to see that Stuart Bowness, of Victoria, B.C.-based design studio Simple Station, has posted a useful comparative review of three of the most popular invoicing apps: Freshbooks, Havest and Blinksale.

Bowness used the apps in his business for about a year each, and his in-depth, insightful observations of the merits and issues with each of the services are based on long-term, real-world usage and worth noting.

Especially interesting are his notes of problems or quirks with each of the apps, which could be very handy when it comes to picking the right service for your business. According to Bowness, Freshbooks’ time tracking is “difficult when you have multiple employees,” its project management is “dismal” and its reports “suck.” Blinksale, meanwhile, offers neither integrated time tracking nor the ability to integrate with a payment gateway, he says, and cannot create estimates. Harvest is similarly unable to create estimates or integrate with a payment gateway, according to Bowness, and recurring invoices are not handled that well. And he finds it “ridiculous” that SSL support is only available with the $90-per-month plan.

Freshbooks is the most feature-rich, Bowness notes, but while it does everything, he says that it “doesn’t do anything particularly well” and its interface is not intuitive. And Blinksale is perfect if you are a freelancer, but not if you have staff. Bowness’ personal favorite is Harvest, which delivers simplicity while boasting a substantial feature set (although not as complete as Freshbooks’).

Which do you prefer: Harvest, Freshbooks or Blinksale?

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Bubbles: A new Site-Specific Browser

Mike Gunderloy — Fri, 30 May 2008 21:00:00 +0000

We looked at site-specific browsers last year – desktop applications that capture a single web site so that you can interact with it outside the bounds of your browser. A new entrant in this field, Bubbles, is out with some intriguing features that advance the state of the art.

The new features revolve around an API that lets you customize Bubbles for particular sites. WIth these customizations, you can do things like show notifications when a new email arrives at GMail, or upload to Flickr via drag-and-drop. Bubbles is currently Windows-only and in beta, with a developer community starting to coalesce around it.

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Mobile Internet Devices: Can They Benefit You?

Jason Harris — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:38:49 +0000

Recently there has been quite a bit of activity in the world of Mobile Internet Devices (MID). What does this new class of computing device have to offer the web worker?

Lets begin with hardware. For the most part, MID’s include:

Large, bright screens that are high resolution (for their size)
Built-in Wi-Fi
Touch screen or hardware based-keyboard
Media expansion through SD Cards
Bluetooth for use with wireless keyboards and other devices
On-board camera

Mix this fantastic array with the right software and the result is a productive device for staying in touch with your business contacts wherever you can get a Wi-Fi signal. MIDs allow workers to easily communicate via email, IM, Chat, and blogging. Additionally, with office productivity applications you can create and edit office documents, gain web access, and watch audio/video files for entertainment.

Nokia was an early leader in this category of mini computers with their N770 device. After this the company refreshed the line with the N800 and the newly released N810 (covered before).

Focusing on the N800 and N810, these devices run a version of the Linux operating system and have a full suite of available applications that allow users to: interact with email, browse the web, conduct VoIP calling with Skype/Gizmo Project, and many other tasks.

The N800 and N810 look very similar, but the N810 features a slide out QWERTY keyboard and a faster processor. Nokia released a new version of the N810 with WIMAX capabilities earlier this week at CTIA. The inclusion of WIMAX technology will mean when the WIMAX networks are built out, you’ll be able to access the net when outside of the reach of Wi-Fi signals.

Intel is also jumping into the MID fray with the release of their Intel Centrino Atom processor. These devices will be made by multiple manufactures and are being debuted at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai, China. The new MID devices are mostly running Linux and are being aimed at a variety of audiences: from those seeking business connectivity to users looking for entertainment options.

It will be very interesting to watch the near-term developments in this part of the computing world. Mobile internet devices, with their small size and vast array of capabilities have much to offer to the mobile web worker.

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Intel Pilot Program Welcomes Mobile Workers, Employees Rejoice

Jason Harris — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:00:57 +0000

Last year Conan O’Brian, the NBC late night talk-show host, walked through an Intel campus and made light of the sterile, uninviting cubicle environment that plagues so many ‘traditional’ work spaces we all work in today. To see his funny and spot on critique, check out the clip.

Intel, while being hospitable despite being the targets of Conan’s jokes, took the criticism to heart and is currently testing out a new configuration to their office environment. At three Intel campuses the computing giant is starting a pilot program to foster teamwork and community amongst its workers by integrating a new type of workspace. Described as a living room, the new spaces feature lower cubicle walls, TVs, and smaller and more numerous conference rooms.

Additionally, there are open spaces with lots of couches, comfortable chairs and tables. These spaces are very accessible and are meant to cater to Intel’s population of knowledge workers who travel amongst disparate workspaces: whether their working environment means multiple Intel campuses, working from home, or any combination of the two. Newly configured conference rooms are adorned with whiteboards and accommodate 1-4 people. There are fun areas too which include large LCD TV’s, Nintendo Wii’s, and Xbox 360s!

Intel deserves credit for paying attention to the new workspace. It’s great to see them accommodate the mobile workforce and allow their employees to collaborate in a new and innovative environment. Teleworking may or may not be on the way out, but it appears Intel is finding new ways to welcome the mobile worker into it’s way of doing business.

What is your ideal working situation? Would you like to solely work outside of your companies’ location, or do you prefer a hybrid of being able to work on and off-site? We look forward to awesome discussion in the comments.

(Photo credits go to Josh Bancroft)

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