Working from home has obvious benefits, but it has equally glaring and hard to fix drawbacks: the loneliness, the endless supply of interesting links and the tendency for work to seep into more and more of your personal life. So what’s to be done to make working from home, well work? Fast Company’s Kevin Purdy, a veteran remote worker himself, recently polled fellow web workers about their best tips.

The exercise turned up commonplace but utterly correct advice such as changing out of your pajamas and explicitly planning time for face-to-face human interaction, and is well worth a read in full to those new to the world of remote work or just looking for a well written post to buck them up and improve their work habits. But one bit of advice may be more of a jolt, even to those experienced at resisting the pull of one more cute cat link:

Realize when the problem is motivation, not space. Distractions, temptations, and kids can all legitimately get in the way of doing work at home. But sometimes you have to step back and look at other reasons why you’re avoiding the work that needs doing. Is it really because you don’t want to do it?

This is perhaps the hardest part of working from home. At an office, you are very likely to be found out and penalized if you spend all day checking Facebook or replaying Portal 2, so you at least make a stab at moving forward on even the most painful tasks. At home, it’s up to you to stay motivated, and the things toward the very bottom of the Awesome Challenging Fun list might never get done.

With the web awash in posts suggesting every imaginable variation on the to-do list and providing a seemingly endless parade of gadgets and pointers to be more productive, it’s refreshing to see someone acknowledge that the problem may actually be the content of your work rather than your system for accomplishing it. In that case, no number of colored flags or minute-by-minute scheduling will fully solve your issue. In fact, it’ll probably distract from the true solution, which is finding a way to begin to do more of what you enjoy and less of those truly soul-sapping tasks. Even if that means a career shift of some kind.

Do you ever obsess about tweaks to your productivity routine as a way to avoid acknowledging that the true, underlying problem of simply not liking your work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user edoardocosta.

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Now, with the advent of things like smartphones, tablets, and the iPad, new applications designed for those devices are making it easier and more practical to go paperless.

Penultimate: Your iPad notepad

Penultimate by Cocoa Box turns your iPad into a notebook, allowing you to jot notes and create sketches in multiple colors, separate them into notebooks by topic or project, and then email all or part of your notes in PDF format. It even includes three built-in “papers” (graph paper, unlined and ruled), but you can import images of different backgrounds or papers — or download paper packs — to create your own texture or style. Price: $1.99.

SignMyPad: Simple contract sign-offs

The Android- and iPad-compatible PDF reader SignMyPad has built-in annotation functionality, allowing you to sign and date PDF documents right from your iPad and then email it to another party. You can also save documents into versions for gaining multiple signatures, and the app can import documents from and save them to Dropbox. Price: $3.99 for the basic version, $19.99 for SignMyPad Pro, which adds geolocation tagging.

MyFax: Fax without a fax

If you work with clients or colleagues who still use fax machines, MyFax’s mobile faxing app, available for iOS and Blackberry, lets you send and receive faxes from your smartphone and via your email account. Just snap a photo of the document you want to send (the app is optimized for sending photos of text), choose the recipient from your Address Book and send. To fax by email, attach the document to an email message, address it to the fax number plus an @myfax.com and send. To receive a fax, simply give out your MyFax number, and your received documents will be available as an email attachment. Price: Free app, service costs $10/month after a free trial.

JotNot: Turn your iPhone into a handheld scanner

JotNot lets you scan from your iPhone, email the scan as a PDF or image, and fax the scan to U.S. numbers. You can add pages to documents, creating a multi-page scan, as well as delete and reorder pages and send documents to EverNote, DropBox, or Google Docs. JotNot can scan and save a variety of documents, including receipts, business cards, and notes. Price: Free.

DocScanner: Simple scanning

DocScanner is a scanner app for the iPhone, Mac, Android, Qt, and the Symbian S60 that allows you to scan documents simply by taking a picture. It then automatically crops everything other than the document out of the picture and even detects your document’s paper size. Other helpful features include the ability to search multiple-page documents, as well as words within documents. Price: $4.99.

Business Card Reader: Quickly add new contacts

The multi-platform Business Card Reader from SHAPE Services lets you take a photo of a business card, and then it “reads” the picture, extracts the contact data, and enters it into your smartphone’s address book. The built-in browser even lets you check out a new contact’s LinkedIn page right from the app. Price: $4.99 for multi-language support, $3.99 for Asian languages only.

OfficeDrop: Scan to the cloud

OfficeDrop‘s app scans documents directly to the cloud for storage and sharing. The ScanDrop desktop app is available for both PC and Mac, but the iPhone and Android Scanner apps allow you to scan and upload documents using your smartphone. Once uploaded, the document’s text is searchable, thanks to OCR, and sharable with colleagues. Price: Free

Square: Easy payments and receipts

Square, available for Android and most iOS devices, lets you accept credit card payments directly from your smartphone and uses “smart receipts” to send to customers via email or text message. You can create a display with photos and prices so that customers can view your products directly from your iPad, for example, and then keep track of the number of sales you’ve made in a given day. Price: Free app and reader.

Image courtesy of Flickr user mattjiggins

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In a recent Harvard Business Review blog post, Scott Barry Kaufman talks about the difference between harmonious and obsessive passion.

“Those with harmonious passion engage in their work because it brings them intrinsic joy. They have a sense of control of their work, and their work is in harmony with their other activities in life.”

… “those with obsessive passion perceive their work as representing a passion for them, and view their work as highly valued. A major difference is that they have an uncontrollable urge to engage in their work. As a result, they report feeling more conflict between their passion and the other activities in their life.”

I see a lot of both types of passion within the web worker community. I have friends who have selected a web working career because it allows them to travel the world and have the free time to have amazing experiences while others work constantly and can’t disengage from work for even an afternoon of fun without worrying about what they are missing.

Here are a few tips to help you shift your passion from obsessive to harmonious:

• Delegate. Spend some time with a coworker or employee that you trust and start training them on providing coverage for you when you aren’t available. This is the person you’ll list as the contact while you’re out, and you need to delegate the work to them while you’re out of the office. As a last resort, they can always contact you in the case of a dire emergency, but make it clear that it should be a real emergency before they call you on vacation. If you are a solo web worker, this can be more difficult, but you can usually work something out with your clients to cover some basic tasks while you are out of the office.
• Go cold turkey. Take an exotic vacation on a beach where your technology would be in danger of getting covered with sand and water. This forces you to leave that cell phone and computer up in the room safe. Just make sure to actually leave it there — don’t try to sneak up to the room to check email every five minutes.
• Buddy system. Just like in grade school, you can work with someone else and hold each other accountable. On vacation, you can give your significant other permission to help you enforce your no work time by making sure that you aren’t always checking into work. A helpful friend who can remind you to put your cell phone away can also help.
• Wean yourself off of work. Maybe the cold turkey approach won’t work for you, but you can gradually wean yourself away from work. Start with 30 minutes every evening where you read a book, go out with friends or go for a walk without checking email or other work and gradually increase the amount until you are spending a couple of hours a day — and more on weekends — away from work.

The key is to shift your obsessive work time into fun activities that you enjoy to help bring your work and life back into balance. At first, these activities may need to be fun enough to really distract you from your obsession with work, but eventually, you should be able to shift into a more harmonious balance.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user tashmahal.

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Dear Email, this isn’t working out. It’s not you, it’s me.

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with email, but I know that the majority of my issues with it are a result of user error more than a problem with the technology itself.

User problem #1: Elaboration and niceties

At this minute, I have over one hundred emails in my inbox that need an action or response. Any time I get the nerve to tackle them, I think about having to read through paragraphs of explanation and niceties in order to get to the meat of the message so that I can take action.

As a regular sender of emails myself, I’m just as guilty of adding unnecessary elaboration and niceties to my messages as the next person. I feel the need to start with the typical, “How have you been” and “Here’s the latest this way” chitchat, followed by a detailed explanation of why I’m emailing, but as a reader (and someone with 100+ emails to process right now), I’d love to know I could open each one and find a simple and direct message that tells me what the sender needs. “Hi, Amber. I’m emailing to see if . . .” Ah, wishful thinking.

User problem #2: Deceptive and inadequate subject lines

How great would it be if everyone started using more helpful and direct subject lines? Even just adding simple lead-ins like “Quick question” or “Urgent” could help us hone in on those messages that need attention more immediately than others.

User problem #3: Abuse

We all have to pay the price for those who abuse email, like spammers, contacts who automatically subscribe us to their newsletters, and others who use this more personal and private medium for uninvited messages.

User problem #4: Poor filtering

One big mistake I make with my own email usage is not using filters effectively. There are many types of emails (messages from social networks, newsletters, and other notifications) that could easily be marked as read and archived without my ever having to touch them. The only reason they’re not is because I don’t take the time to set up filters to sort them.

User problem #5: Using the wrong medium

Instead of sending five emails back and forth to set a single appointment, it would be more effective to use another service that streamlines appointment-setting, like TimeTrade, Google Calendar, or SkedgeMe. As with this example, a lot of our communications could be cut down or eliminated, if we’d choose a better medium for them.

But what about the technology?

While user error is a big part of the problem, technology is not completely in the clear.

Technology problem #1: Poor spam filtering

Until we get to the point where spam is successfully filtered out each and every time (which, let’s face it, is not likely to happen), email will always be somewhat of a nuisance, no matter how effective we get with our use of it.

Technology problem #2: Inadequate sorting

Some messages are notifications, some are spam, and a tiny portion are actually important enough to warrant our attention more immediately. It would help if these messages were automatically separated somehow.

It would also be helpful to have smart sorting based on people (example, important people, new people, companies). When I can zoom in on emails from clients and important business contacts, I’m much more likely to stay on task and not get distracted, but by the same token, I’d also like to see a filter to sort out new people, which could help with identifying new prospects and opportunities.

Fixing the world’s email problems might be a tall order, but the good news is that developers are listening. Even better, they’re asking us what we want from the applications we use on a daily basis and how we would like to see them improved.

What suggestions do you have for fixing email?

Photo courtesy Flickr user ilamont.com

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• Focus. Last week, I talked about minimizing distractions, which is a good first step toward giving yourself the space to focus on what you really need to accomplish. Having the willpower to focus and achieve a real state of flow helps you can accomplish a large amount of work in a shorter amount of time. So turn off all of those distractions, avoid multitasking and focus on the work that is important to you.
• Importance. Not all activities are created equal, but most of us struggle to balance the urgent work with the important work. We need to think about how we spend our time and the impact of what we do over the long term. Email is a good example of this concept: most people consider email to be urgent, and some of it is urgent, but most of it is not important. I could easily spend all day on email, but I’d rather accomplish something real and tangible. In a year, will it really matter than you responded to all of your email immediately or would you rather be known for doing something really amazing and interesting?
• Love your work. I think a lot of people misunderstand this idea. Unless you are in a really unique position, most of us have a love/hate relationship with our work. There are things that we love doing, but we also have those tedious or unpleasant tasks that come with every job. The big question is: Where do you focus? Do you focus or dwell on the unpleasant parts of your work or do you get those unpleasant tasks out of the way so that you can focus on what you enjoy? If you spend all of your energy thinking about the things that you hate about your job, you’ll never be happy in your work. Find the things that you love about your job and focus your energy on thinking about the good, rather than dwelling on the unpleasant. Loving your job is all about having the right attitude about your work.
• Live. While loving your work is important, most of us work as way to support the rest of our lives. Workaholic tendencies are common among web workers, so we need to take the time to remind ourselves to take some time away from work to really live our lives. This one is hard for me, but I’m making a big effort this year to take advantage of business travel to see more of the world by combining vacation with trips to visit places I’ve never been. I’m also making more time to meet new people and spend time with family and friends away from our computers to have good food, great conversation and human interactions. Doing something new and learning from it can give you a whole new perspective on a work problem when you least expect it. Even a short vacation or an evening with new friends can help improve your mood and help you feel refreshed and ready to tackle your work with a new outlook.
• Fitness. So many of my friends ignore their health, leaving them drained of energy and lethargic. Getting outside or to the gym to get your blood pumping can make a huge difference in your energy levels and mood. The more social among us can find group activities that can be done in pairs or groups, or you can use your fitness time as a way to spend some time alone. I tend to run in the summer and lift weights in the winter, but I have friends who walk, bike, go hiking, play sports, do martial arts or yoga and so much more. The key is to find something you enjoy doing to improve your fitness. Those endorphins can make a big difference in your productivity.

While tips and tricks to improve productivity are great, the real key to better long-term productivity is in your attitude and how you think about your work.

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Communication has evolved with technology, but many of those now IMing colleagues cut their teeth writing internal memos on typewriters. Cultural and generational clashes are both common in distributed collaboration, and more damaging than they might be if the working relationships had a face-to-face component.

Many have discussed email etiquette, but for the average web worker, the notion of politesse can seem archaic — or even counterproductive in some circumstances. Here, then, are five golden rules for respectful, productive digital communication, whether you’re using email, IM, video chat, phone, or other communications tools like document sharing and time tracking systems.

1. Have an agenda, and meet it

To keep digital exchanges functional, set an agenda. Whether it’s a one-line email, or a one-hour video conference, your interaction will be more productive if you stay on track. Your colleagues will appreciate it, because it shows respect for their time. And it’ll let you identify any part of the exchange that’s off-topic, and end it — perhaps suggesting an alternative time to address it — before it gets out of hand.

Having an agenda helps cut down on time-wasting, but it also encourages responsiveness, since your collaborators know what you need, and don’t need to wade through the waffle to give it to you.

2. Don’t spam

In this context, spam is any form of unwanted or unnecessary communication. It doesn’t need to involve multiple recipients: leaving your colleague a phone message, then sending a text, and following up with an email, is example of spam. Sharing your new document with a colleague who’s on your team, but doesn’t need to use it, is an example of spam.

Spam overwhelms us. It makes us stressed and cranky, and it makes maintaining focus difficult. Be astute in working out what to share with which team members, and learn to differentiate between information for information’s sake, and necessary communication.

3. Respect time constraints

Having respect for the time constraints of your colleagues governs a range of collaborative behaviors.

Give collaborators time to receive your communication, digest it and formulate a reply around the other work they’re doing before you bug them for their response. Prioritize your communications points so that colleagues know what’s most important, and tell them if something’s urgent. Conversely, don’t earmark a task or communication as urgent if it’s not. As well as indicating the reason for your communication, identify your expectations of a response timeframe, so your colleague can prioritize your request.

Remember: while digital communications tools may seem immediate, we’re only human, and none of us can be in two places at once.

4. Be clear

Clarity and directness underpin digital collaboration. But, particularly in written or very short communications, choose your words carefully. Short can very easily come across as terse. Speak in a way that’s appropriate to your colleague, and your relationship with them, as well as the communications medium your using.

Choosing the right tool for the job can influence your ability to communicate what’s needed. Limits on length, or attachments and other inclusions, can hobble communications, so make sure you choose the medium that suits your needs best. Don’t try to wedge a phone conversation into a voicemail, for example — your garbled, rushed message will just add to the “noise” to your colleague’s day. Instead, just explain why you’re calling and ask them to call you back. Explain the details in person when they do.

Being clear is particularly important in shared, multi-party systems like document sharing and contact management systems. Stick to the guidelines your team has set for aspects like naming and storage conventions — it’ll reduce confusion and communications noise, and generally make life easier for your colleagues.

5. Be open

Digital workers can end up hiding behind a smokescreen of task managers, email autoresponders, and voicemail all too easily if they feel overwhelmed. Lead by example. If you’re asking a team member for something, be available to answer their questions about your request. Be diligent about responding to colleagues in an appropriate way using the foundations outlined here.

Accept that good digital collaboration takes time and mutual understanding — it is, after all, communication between people. Relegating a colleague whose communications approach annoys you to the back of the queue is rarely productive; the best way to encourage others to collaborate with you in the way you want is to take the time to explain your preferences to them.

That conversation could eradicate the kind of uncertainty that undermines good distributed working relationships, and cement the foundations for ongoing productive collaboration.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user JR3.

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The key to remaining productive is to not let distractions sidetrack you from your primary job. Here are a few tips for taking charge of your day and kicking a few of the most common distractions to the curb.

1. Social media. Turn it off when you need to focus. Seriously. Shut down your Twitter client and log out of Facebook and other services for at least part of the day when you really need to focus on your work. If you can’t turn them off, you can still disable notifications so that you aren’t having them pop into view constantly. This doesn’t mean that you can’t check social media while you work, but you can minimize the impact by only checking in periodically. Maybe you look at Twitter and Facebook once per hour, or when you finish one task and are moving to the next. But really, if you are checking Twitter every few minutes, are you really going to get as much work done as you would if you weren’t checking it?
2. Visitors. Whether you work in an office or at home, people will drop in and distract you. I’ll admit it, I often listen to music or put my headphones in just to signal to people that I am not available. If people see that you have headphones in, they will at least think twice about bothering you. Leaving your phone headset on can also work. You might try “do not disturb” signs or shutting your office door, if you are lucky enough to have one. I’ve even had pretty good luck with hiding and working in a super secret location until I finished a piece of work that needed focused concentration.
3. Unnecessary or unproductive meetings. I’m a big fan of not attending meetings that aren’t valuable in some way. Now, this probably doesn’t mean that you can blow off your manager’s staff meeting or important meetings with clients, but you can probably skip a few meetings. I’ll often look at the agenda for a meeting, and if there isn’t anything particularly relevant for me, I’ll send the organizer an email to let them know that I won’t be attending. On the flip side, you should be considerate when scheduling your own meetings. Cancel them if you don’t have anything important for the meeting, and always send an agenda in advance to let people know whether or not they need to attend.
4. Email. Most of us get more email than what we can possibly read anyway, and it just keeps coming in! You could probably spend all day just responding to email, but then you would never get any work done. The first thing to do is turn off any pop-up notifications that you get every time someone sends you an email. Next, set up some filters and color code email from important people to help you notice the ones you care about while ignoring the rest. Now, the hard part. You have to actually ignore your email and focus on other work without that distraction. You can occasionally glance at your email on a regular schedule or between tasks and look for anything critical. If it’s not critical, ignore it for a bit until you are ready to spend a little chunk of time focused on doing email.
5. Instant messages. For really serious work, you might think about logging completely out of your instant messaging client. For most of us, we can use custom status messages to signal to people how urgent their request should be before they interrupt you. I recently set my status to “cranky, interrupt at your own risk”, and I don’t think I had a single IM during that time. I also use the generic, “busy – priority interrupts only” status, and you can get pretty creative with these to let people know that they really should think twice about interrupting. It is also perfectly acceptable to not respond immediately to an IM. If a friend or co-worker sends you a message on a topic that isn’t going to be critical, ignore it until you get to a good stopping point or when you are ready to take a break and respond when it makes sense for you.

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Fortunately, new apps and devices are being created almost daily to help us improve our productivity and collaboration.

Coolendar

Coolendar is attempting to go where no calendar has gone before, integrating traditional calendar and task apps into a “planning experience.” It works as a simple list, instead of the standard calendar view, and provides alerts of tasks and plans via email, messenger, desktop, mobile and Twitter notifications. One interesting feature is its use of tags to organize items and create group plans so that events are more social (think Twitter meets Google Calendar).

Making task entries is seamless and intuitive (the example it gives: “tomorrow 8am make sure to grab the #umbrella!”) and allow for one-click rescheduling and recurrence.

Let’s Crate

We all love the days we stumble on solutions that make some aspect of our work “ridiculously easy,” and that’s exactly what Let’s Crate claims to do for file-sharing. Create an account, select a crate for storing your files, drag and drop to upload them, and then send the link to the individual file or crate you want to share. It’s that easy, and the free plan of 1 GB of space includes six crates, 1000 downloads, and a 50 MB file-size limit, with higher-capacity plans being very inexpensive.

MyDataNest

MyDataNest is another online storage and file-sharing solution, but unlike Let’s Crate, it offers the ability to edit files online without installing any software. Files are stored online and are available to your team through shared online work spaces.

Using similar functionality to Let’s Crate, you simply upload your files and then share a link with members of your team. With their basic and free plan, you can upload files up to 50 MB in size, and that includes three collaboration folders, 2 GB of online storage, and 10 GB of monthly transfer. As with Let’s Crate, higher-capacity plans are still very affordable.

GroupZap

GroupZap takes the “cool factor” award in this roundup of apps, offering real-time brainstorming and online collaboration, as if you were in the same room with your team. Quickly set up your group’s whiteboard by simply entering your email address and sharing a link. Then use sticky notes to each add your own ideas and thoughts to the board. Team members can also upload images and files by dragging and dropping them onto the board or use boxes and arrows to further annotate concepts, processes, and dependencies.

Once all the ideas are in place, your team can then use stickers to vote on different items within the board, and when the meeting is over, you can create a PDF to send to your team as a record of the meeting or for follow-up. It even records the brainstorming session to show the progression of ideas throughout the meeting.

GroupZap is free for up to 100 MB per board, with each board remaining active for seven days. There are also pay-as-you-go and subscription options, which extend the life of a board to one year and include increases in storage capacity.

Twilert

Social networking has become the distraction of late, but if you want to keep a pulse on what’s being said about you or your company, it’s hard to navigate away from the live feed for fear of missing something. Enter Twilert, an online app that sends email updates of new tweets on topics of interest to you. Advanced search options allow for monitoring of specific keywords, people, locations, and even links and attitudes (positive or negative posts or questions).

What are some of your favorite productivity and collaboration apps?

Image courtesy of Flickr user imglighting

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Input devices

• The Magic Mouse. For the Mac user, the Magic Mouse is a multi-touch mouse that is itself a button that allows you to click anywhere on its surface to scroll, swipe, and click. Simply brush along the surface of the mouse to scroll, or use two fingers to swipe left and right and flip through pages or photos. Cost: $69 from Apple.
• The Phantom Lapboard. This is a combination wireless keyboard, laser mouse and hard surface that you can use from your sofa or arm chair. The keyboard opens to a hard surface for use with your mouse, and with rotating angles which allow you to find a comfortable setting for creating a mobile desktop. Cost: $130 from Phantom Entertainment.

Power devices

• The TruePower U-Socket power outlet. This power outlet provides two USB charging ports, in addition to two standard three-prong power outlet ports, making it perfect for charging any USB-powered device without a computer, including your mobile phone or PDA, iPod or MP3 player, and digital camera. Cost: $23 from FastMac.
• The Sanctuary. The Sanctuary is a universal charger and USB port for electronic devices (currently compatible with 3,767 devices, or so its product page touts). Charge your mobile phone, iPod or MP3 player, Bluetooth headset, and PDA in this single charging station. Cost: $130 from BlueLounge.

Mobile phone accessories

• The Jawbone ERA. This Bluetooth headset eliminates background noise and auto-adjusts inbound call volume to match your environment. With HD-quality sound, you can take calls and listen to your music collection from the one headset. Cost: $130 from Jawbone.

Audio gadgets

• The Pod à Porter. Pod à Porter is a light-weight neckband for the iPod Shuffle that allows you to listen to your iPod, while keeping the controls accessible, but out of your way.  Simply run the headphone wire through the Pod à Porter, attach your iPod, and you’re ready to go. Cost: $30 from Shapeways.

Video gadgets

• Kodak PlaySport Video Camera. If you’re looking for a sturdy digital video camera, look no further than the Kodak PlaySport. It’s waterproof up to 10 feet under water, has built-in image stabilization, and can handle being bumped around a bit. Cost: $150 from Kodak.
• Veho Muvi Pro Micro Camcorder. At less than three inches high, the Muvi Pro comes in as one of the smallest camcorders, yet still manages to capture high quality digital video and sound and can record up to three hours of footage. Cost: $65 through Amazon.

What are some of your favorite media gadgets?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Jorge Quinteros

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Today, I stumbled across a new prospect for email management, SaneBox, which can automatically prioritize and sort email. Could this new hopeful mean the end of email insanity, as it claims? Time will tell, but it looks very promising.

Works with all providers

SaneBox works with most email services that use IMAP or WebDAV, including Gmail, Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and Mozilla Thunderbird, so you can keep your current email address and software. It works within your current email program by accessing your account and adding unique folders for sorting.

Better layout than Priority Inbox

SaneBox seems to work a lot like Priority Inbox, except that sorting takes place using folders instead of using a multi-section layout, which I think makes it easier to compartmentalize and maintain focus. With Priority Inbox, you see all messages in the same pane, making it tempting to jump around or check out less important emails. With SaneBox, you view one folder at a time, and other messages are displayed as a count within your sidebar.

Smart, easy sorting

When you sign up for an account, SaneBox takes your most recent 5,000 messages and sorts them. All other messages are sent to the archive. The most recent emails are then sorted, based on importance, to either your inbox or to a “SaneLater” folder. As you go through your messages, you can drag and drop messages that you’d like to process later into folders such as “SaneTomorrow” or “SaneNextWeek.”  They’ll automatically be moved back to your inbox at the appropriate time.

Simple tweaks and adjustments

SaneBox learns from your actions. You can sort mislabeled messages into the folders where you would like them to go, so for instance, if you get mailing list emails, you can have them sent to your “SaneLater” folder instead of your inbox, or you can send them to the “SaneBlackHole,” if you would prefer not to see them at all.

This functionality works in reverse, too, so if you see that an important message got sent to the “SaneLater” folder by mistake, you can drag it to the inbox so that it gets a higher priority with future sorting.

SaneBox refers to these adjustments as “trainings,” which you can access and adjust within your control panel at any time. (Side note: Afraid you got a little trigger happy? Go to the “trained contacts” section of your account and remove any rules you’ve set so that emails are filtered based on the original settings.)

Added features to improve workflow

The main sorting capabilities of SaneBox make it worth a look, but there are several added features that help to improve workflow and email management, including:

• Social network refinement, which helps to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of sorting, based on the strength of relationships and connections within social networking platforms.
• Spam folder monitoring that acts more like a temporary black hole, rather than a permanent one like other email programs.
• Multi-level email importance, which allows you to organize emails into five levels to maximize your workflow.
• Encryption and “outside-the-envelope” examination of messages (SaneBox does not read your email) so that sensitive information remains protected and private.

A monthly subscription costs $4.95 and the app comes with a 30-day trial.

What tools and tricks do you use for managing email overload?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Evil Erin

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Despite the proliferation of options for communication, the way workflow, responsibilities, and collaboration are managed in this scenario can be quite different from on-site or partially dispersed teams.

To get it right, team leaders need to consider the interplay of three crucial factors: frequency, transparency, and variability.

Frequency

In an office, communications are incidental, and frequency is high. With dispersed teams, communicating is an effort, and frequency is often much lower.

The concept of frequency affects communication like status updates and meetings, as well as casual team interactions. But it also affects momentum: the timeframes in which outputs are created, and how swiftly they’re taken into the next stage of the project.

Different projects and timeframes require different communications frequencies. You’ll want all the members of your dispersed team to be able to work comfortably to a given level of frequency, or intensity.

So as you’re planning workflow, milestones, and deliverables, consider whether your dispersed team will be working exclusively on this project, or on others at the same time. What does team members’ degree of focus mean for the potential frequency of communications and deliverables? How can you support those needs in order to get the job done?

Transparency

The best dispersed teamwork is supported by strong transparency. Your team members may never meet in person, but they need to get enough of a feel for one another to collaborate closely, and get the work done.

Transparency is important in a number of areas, including availability, progress and outputs, as well as personalities. Setting explicit baseline expectations of transparency — outlining up-front what kinds of project information should be shared, and how, for example — is a good start, but more work may be needed to keep things transparent on a day-to-day basis.

Should all project-related discussions be shared, and is IM therefore a less-than-deal communication tool? Are there times when team members will all be online — and does everyone know what those times are? Are there certain outputs that should not be available to all team members? Will your Yammer steam be strictly business, or will you encourage team members to share more broadly, to make it more fun?

These are the kinds of questions that are easily overlooked, but which can greatly influence the sense of openness and participation of distributed team members.

Variability

It can be easy to see remote team members as resources, or sets of capabilities, rather than real people with real lives. A truly productive, smooth-working dispersed team will flexibly cater to individuals’ needs and differences.

This might mean that you create a rotating schedule for team meetings, so that everyone shares the burden of time zone differences, and the same team member isn’t staying up until midnight every Tuesday to meet with you.

You may encourage team members to share things like personal websites or work histories, so each team member has an idea of others’ experience, capabilities, and areas of interest. You might ask the team to choose the tools you use to share information and communicate about the project.

Promoting the open communication of unexpected hurdles — illnesses and other events that take team members out of the work for a period — may be another way to ensure the smooth running of a team whose members may come online at different times, and at different intervals from the team leader.

Frequency, transparency and variability are critical factors in the smooth running of dispersed teams. Being conscious of them as you establish and support remote team members can have a significant impact on project success.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user lusi.

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The survey also found that 67 percent of respondents spend between one to four hours per week just preparing for status meetings, and 59 percent said that preparing for status meetings often takes longer than the meeting itself. In addition, 57 percent of those surveyed indicated that they multitask during status meetings — so maybe there’s more work getting done than one might think!

The survey was conducted online within the United States from June 6–8, among 2,373 information workers. It was undertaken by Harris Interactive on behalf of Clarizen, the project management system that Thursday covered a few months ago. The survey defined a status meeting as one in which team members are updated on progress and completion of tasks. Brainstorming, strategy and planning meetings were not included.

If you’re finding your meetings unproductive, there are a number of tools available to help, including meetin.gs and yaM. Many of the project management apps that we cover are intended, among other things, to help keep team members updated on project status and what their colleagues are doing and so reduce the time spent in meetings. And there are some techniques, like the Google system that Imran reported on last year, for making meetings more productive.

How much time do you spend in meetings? Are they productive?

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Office 365 is not Microsoft’s first attempt at offering this kind of service; it has previously offered hosted Exchange and SharePoint services with BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services). But by including Office Web Apps in Office 365, the company now has a much more rounded product that enables users to do their work anywhere, on any device, and to easily collaborate with others.

Office 365 vs. Google Apps for Business

One of Office 365′s main advantages over Google Apps is the huge existing installed user base of Office products. Office is entrenched in the majority of businesses worldwide, and Office 365 offers an easy pathway for those users to migrate to cloud collaboration while using familiar tools. Office 365 also has a greater range of features than Google Apps, incorporating office productivity (Office and Office Web Apps), collaboration and intranet tools (SharePoint Online), email and calendars (Exchange Online) and instant messaging and web conferencing (Lync Online).

Unlike some previous Microsoft releases, Office 365 works cross-platform, so it can be accessed equally via Mac and PC and on mobile devices — although there are reports that mobile access from some devices is limited. Office Web Apps, in particular, is an impressive suite of products, and while they aren’t complete cloud-based replacements for the desktop Office apps — they don’t offer the full range of functionality that desktop apps do — Microsoft obviously invested a lot of effort in making the user experience very similar. The interface is familiar, and documents look identical in Office Web Apps and in the desktop applications. By enabling seamless round-trip working between Office Web Apps and Office desktop applications, Office 365 can also work when users are offline, something that can’t be said of Google Apps.

Of course, Google believes that its product is superior. On Monday, in a post titled “365 reasons to consider Google Apps” on the official Google Enterprise blog, Google Apps Product Manager Shan Sinha aimed a few barbs at Office 365, saying that it is designed for usage by individuals, not by teams; that its pricing is complex; and that Office 365 doesn’t have proven cloud reliability, while Google Apps has a record of 99.9 percent uptime. Some of Sinha’s points are debatable: Office 365 does enable co-editing and collaboration, for example, and Microsoft has plenty of experience in offering cloud-based services, even if Office 365 itself is new.

Easy migration to cloud productivity for existing Office users

With its higher price point, Office 365 might not tempt existing corporate users of Google Apps for Business away, particularly as migrating between the two services is unlikely to be straightforward. However, that’s probably not the market that Microsoft is aiming at. Rather, it wants to keep hold of the huge numbers of business customers with existing investments in the Office product line. For them, Office 365 is a well-designed product that offers an easy migration route to cloud-based office productivity at a reasonable price point with products that will feel very familiar to their users. I think that will make Office 365 a compelling proposition for many business customers, in particular smaller businesses that would like to offer their employees the ability to work and collaborate remotely using familiar Microsoft tools but don’t want to have to make an upfront investment in, and then maintain, their own SharePoint and Exchange servers.

Office 365 is available on a number of different plans, starting at around $6 per user per month for small businesses with less than 25 users; enterprise customers have access to plans including dedicated support. For comparison, Google Apps for Business costs around $4 per month.

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What exactly is curation?

In a nutshell, curation is selecting content from the web, based on specific criteria and presenting it to an internal or external audience, or both. With aggregation, the precursor to curation, we generally selected content for our personal consumption and had little filtering control. We usually had to be satisfied with receiving all content from a given source (the entire RSS feed of a site, for instance) without being able to filter out content we didn’t want. With curation, you choose specific items to share from a source and have the option to add your own editorial comments. If you’ve ever tweeted a link or retweeted someone else’s tweet, you’ve curated content.

Did you see that thing I tweeted?

It can be frustrating to try to get information you want to share to everybody on your team who could benefit from it. You all need to be up to speed on your market, competition, technology, trends, etc. If you’re sharing this info in a haphazard way (using multiple communication channels, crossing your fingers that team members will see and act on the info, mixing items of personal and professional interest), then having a system for content curation might be for you.

Where to start?

Curation platforms are still in their infancy; no single tool is likely to be the perfect solution for your needs. You’ll have to explore the various platforms and keep an eye on the evolution of the trend if it interests you. Be on the lookout for curation features to start being integrated into collaborative project management platforms. In fact, Producteev, a task management app that we’ve covered before, will soon allow team members to curate content and attach it to specific projects and tasks.

Fortunately for you, Pierre Tran, a French tech journalist, recently carried out an extensive comparison of a number of curation platforms, and prepared a very useful table in English and French that you can use to start exploring.

The platforms in Tran’s table offer a range of output options (the format in which people will be able to consume your curated content) from RSS feeds to embeddable widgets to stand-alone web pages. Their intended use ranges from collection of business intelligence (BI) for a company’s or team’s internal use (Eqentia, Knowledge Plaza, Factiva) to collecting and sharing interesting images or multimedia (Fancy, Pinterest, Magnify). Depending on what it is you do, the BI platforms might meet the needs of your team but, then again, if your team is composed of graphic artists, the “pretty picture” type of platform might come in handy as a group inspiration board.

You also need to decide if you want to curate exclusively for your team, or if you also want clients or the public to have access to the results of your curation efforts. Most curation platforms are designed for sharing the content with a public audience (Pearltrees, PublishThis), which your team could also access, of course.

Scoop.it

The only curation platform I’ve spent any time with is Scoop.it. It allows you to create a standalone page that resembles a blog and features content you have selected from the sources Scoop.it has helped you gather. There’s also a bookmarklet you can use to scoop up content you see when you’re out and about on the web.

Your team (and your clients, and the public) can subscribe to the RSS feed of your Scoop.it page. In the near future, you’ll have the option to keep your Scoop.it page private if you prefer to use it for your team only. Here’s an example of a Scoop.it page.

You start by entering keywords for your topic, and Scoop.it automatically pulls content from a number of major web and social media sources (you can delete those you don’t want). You can then add your own sources, like specialized blogs, individual Twitter accounts, and more.

For each piece of content, you can add your own comments, which is very useful if you want to point out to your team why you selected an item and what you want them to get out of it. You can also create posts from scratch.

Scoop.it’s still in beta, and has some shortcomings in terms of user experience and functionality, plus it needs to give users more control over the appearance of their pages, but it is still quite usable.

You don’t need a curation platform to curate

The sites that have been curating since before everybody was calling it that use tools that were already out there to get the job done. If none of the ready-made platforms work for you, don’t forget that you can, for example, create RSS feeds based on keywords in Google Blog and News search, and from there curate and furnish your selected content manually in a number of ways.

Copyright

The idea of curation isn’t to steal other people’s content in its entirety and use their work to draw traffic to your site. That would be unethical and illegal, even if you credited them. If you’re sharing your curated content with the public, you need to be sure that what you share with the public falls within the bounds of fair use and link to the complete, original content at its source.

If you read French, I highly recommend Pierre Tran’s companion article to the table he created on curation platforms (Le Guide de la curation (3) – les outils), and another table he created on automated publishing platforms (those with no manual filtering) in English and French.

If you’re already curating for your team, please let us know about your tools and workflow in the comments.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Minke Wagenaar

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Here’s Anderson’s suggested list of common-sense email rules:

1. Respect recipients’ time
2. Be easy to process
3. Choose clear subject lines.
4. Short does not mean rude!
5. Slow does not mean uncaring!
6. Abhor open-ended questions
7. Cut gratuitous responses
8. Think before you cc:
9. Speak softly
10. Attack attachments
11. Make it easy to unsubscribe
12. Think about the thread
13. Don’t reply when angry
14. Use NNTR
15. Pay a voluntary email tax
16. Switch off the computer!

You can get more detail about each of the suggested rules over on Anderson’s blog. He is currently collecting feedback on these rules and looking for other suggestions, and is planning on eventually publishing the charter at a URL he’s reserved here.

Anderson’s efforts to stimulate some debate around email etiquette with a community-created email charter is laudable, but while I agree with the most of the suggested rules presented (with the exception of a voluntary email tax), I question whether publishing it will actually make very much difference to the daily deluge of email we have to deal with. Most people have been using email for an awfully long time, and their habits are very entrenched; getting them to change them is likely to prove a very difficult task, especially as most of these rules only directly benefit an email’s recipients. The people who care about email and its effects on productivity will probably already be following most of these rules already, while people who don’t care about etiquette will likely not be interested in finding, reading and implementing what is a fairly lengthy list of rules. One possible way to educate people about these rules and force them to use them would be to incorporate them into the popular email clients, but I can’t imagine that an email client that nagged its users into improving their email habits would be very popular, as anyone who remembers the much-derided Clippy feature in Microsoft Office will attest. Nevertheless, for people who do care about effective email usage, having a comprehensive guide to etiquette will be useful, so I am looking forward to seeing the end product.

What do you think? Is an email charter a good idea, and could it change people’s habits?

Hat tip to reader Andy Jacobson for notifying us of this effort.

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While I think Joel’s advice is useful, I’d go further and say that if you really want people to pay attention to your email ground rules, you should put them in the body of the email itself rather than in your signature, possibly as the last line of the email before your sign-off – people often don’t bother reading email signatures, particularly if they are lengthy. If the email you’re sending doesn’t  require a response, you could also add wording to the subject line (such as “FYI” or “For Information Only”) to make it even clearer. It’s also important to try to cut down on the number of unnecessarily open-ended questions you pose in group emails (“what time should we meet?” for example), as that’s much more likely to result in back-and-forth reply-all responses, again increasing the volume of email that everyone has to deal with.

While it may take a few extra seconds to formulate and type out that includes explicit instructions, you’ll be saving the time of everyone copied on the email, and over time you may actually end up educating a few colleagues on better email usage.

Looking for some more information on how to improve email efficiency? Dawn shared her favorite tips for reducing email overload recently.

Share your tips for reducing email overload below.

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