We all know that some personality types find that the lack of structure when telecommuting hobbles their productivity. And most of us have experienced the phenomenon that some environments are less conductive to certain types of work than others, from noisy offices interrupting concentration to sunny days luring you away from a stack of unappealing tasks. Now a new study by economist E. Glenn Dutcher that’s soon to be published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and was outlined recently in The Wall Street Journal, put this anecdotal evidence that remote work productivity gains vary depending on the person and the task to the test. The WSJ’s Week in Ideas column summarizes:

Researchers assigned two tasks to 125 participants. The first was rote and repetitive; the other involved coming up with as many unusual uses for ordinary objects as possible, a test often used by psychologists to measure creativity. About half the participants did the tasks in a supervised lab, the other half remotely.

On the uncreative tasks, people were 6 percent to 10 percent less productive outside the lab. The fall-off was steepest among the least productive third of workers. (People who reported procrastinating on their homework were also, unsurprisingly, poor telecommuters—as were men.) On the creative tasks, by contrast, people were 11 percent to 20 percent more productive outside the lab.

“Lack of structure often abets creativity,” concludes the column, but the inverse is just as obviously true. The abundance of alternatives at home, from that suddenly urgent load of laundry to the siren song of your favorite guilty pleasure TV show, can make it harder to get routine (read: mind-numbing) tasks done. For these less exciting to-do items, this new research suggests, locking yourself into working by heading to the office might be a better bet. And if you’re prone to picking up the remote rather than face even relatively enjoyable tasks, this is probably even more true.

Do you find you have to corral yourself into certain environments to get boring tasks done, and if so, where do you head?

Image courtesy of Flickr user herval.

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Once you’ve signed up, bookmarks can be added via the website or (much more conveniently) via Firefox and Chrome extensions, as shown in the screenshot above. These add-ons are a bit fiddly; you must be signed in for the Chrome add-on to work, while the button for the Firefox add-on is hidden down at the bottom-right of the window. It also took me a while to figure out how to clip content from a web page.

Once saved, pages can be tagged, shared with contacts and made public (note: this effectively publishes a public cache of the page you’ve saved; there may be copyright implications in using this feature). Editing bookmarks/saved content like this can only be done via the website, not at the time of saving it with the extension. Bookmarks can also be imported from Delicious, Firefox, Chrome or any other service that lets you export your bookmarks in Netscape bookmark format.

By default, the website shows your saved pages in “fancy” view (thumbnails) and displayed in chronological order, but you can switch to a list view if you prefer. Bookmarks/saved content is searchable via the search box, although, strangely, it doesn’t seem to include page titles in the search. Mobile support is provided via a mobile-optimized version of the website, which works well, and there are also RSS feeds available: a private feed that contains all of your bookmarks, and a public one only containing those you’ve marked as public.

Copyto.co is free for storing up to 50 bookmarks, which should be enough to give the site a try to see whether you might find it useful. More than that and you’ll need to purchase a subscription, which costs $15.99 per year, or $1.99 month. While Copyto.co is similar to traditional social bookmarking services like Delicious (recently sold to Avos Systems) and Pinboard, its clipping functionality also means it’s competing with note-taking apps like Evernote and OneNote. Combining bookmarking and clipping services means it’s something of a compromise. As a simple bookmarking service, it works pretty well, although it doesn’t have the more-advanced social features of Delicious, and it’s more expensive than both Delicious (free) and Pinboard (one-off payment of $9.33 currently), plus, I find its extensions to be a little clumsy. As a general-purpose clipping tool, it’s nowhere near as powerful and flexible as Evernote, and once again, its extensions aren’t as well-designed. However, it’s still a new service, so I expect the developers will work on making the extensions easier to use, and I can certainly see Copyto.co being useful for certain use cases: researchers who need to clip and share specific portions of webpages with others, and developers who often to grab code from the web, for example.

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Once installed, Trails stores the text and images that you clip onto pages that it calls “spreads.” These are viewable in a sidebar  (via View->Sidebar->Trails or a keyboard shortcut). You can create as many spreads in your booklet as you like, and they can be can be set up as one-, two- or three-column pages.

Adding content to your booklet is done via some new Firefox context menu items: As you’re browsing, highlight some text or select an image and right-click to select to add it to your booklet. Before text is added to the spread, it pops up in a window giving you the opportunity to edit it. Content can be deleted and edited after insertion on the page, too. Trails automatically puts the URL a particular snippet or text or image came from below each piece of content on the page, as well as recording the time and date that it was clipped on.

Once your booklet is complete, it can be printed, exported in PDF format or published to the Trails Public Library online.

As a note-taking tool, Trails is nowhere as powerful and flexible as more full-featured, multi-user solutions like Evernote or OneNote.  However, it does fit seamlessly into a Firefox-based workflow, and as the booklets that it creates are nicely-formatted and can be exported as a PDF, it makes for a very easy way to share well-presented research with colleagues or clients.

Trails can be downloaded from the Mozilla Add-Ons repository.

(via ghacks)

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ReSearch.ly’s premise is that “search is a social act which relies on trust and community.” Developed by the folks behind PeopleBrowsr, ReSearch.ly creates “instant communities” around the things you publish, respond to, or search while you use Twitter. Your searches become “sharable objects” and the site purports to add context to your searches by providing additional related information–all from tweets on Twitter.

The site provides what they refer to as “degrees” of access to, and filtering of, information:

1. Geo Search. This is a local or regional search of the Twitter community that can increase relevant results, such as places to go for an evening out.
2. Local Trending Retweets. By seeing what others are retweeting, you can see what’s popular, and immediately participate in conversations of interest.
3. Your Community Search. You can search your Twitter stream for specific niche communities, and filter out less relevant conversations.
4. Search Within Search: You can drill deeper within a particular search by, for example, adding geo-searching to a topic-based community search.
5. Degrees of Separation. This is an analysis of your web of networks: who is connected to you and to other Twitter users.
6. Related Search. This allows you to enhance your search by providing other relevant information such as related hashtags, links or @ references.
7. Share Your Search. You can share your search, and make the way you are compiling and experiencing information into a social activity.

The premise of ReSearch.ly seems reasonable and potentially useful: When you search for tweets, you’ll be able to get more context to the content of interest. For a first-time user, the reality may be a bit confusing.

I tested the site by searching for “Napa” because I’m going to Napa Valley soon. By viewing search results through the Global filter, I quickly learned that “napa” is a word in Indonesian. But when I narrowed down results to my Twitter community (my followers or people I’m following), I begin to see much more relevance: reviews of Napa wines, mentions of Napa hotels, and tweets about Napa Valley events. I was able to narrow results to only male or only female Twitterers, only positive or only negative tweets, or only retweets. I could also click on the United States tab to get a broader view of who was tweeting “Napa.”

When I hovered over a person’s tweet, a “Degrees of Separation” link appeared. Clicking on that link showed the path between me and that particular Twitterer–how I might be connected to that user and, by extrapolation, how much I might be able to trust him or her. Based on the information I discovered, I could opt to follow individual Twitterers.

Search results also included charts showing global use of “napa” in the past 7 and 30 days. I could view the “Sentiment” for the word, and its popularity. I could also see words surrounding the original search term, such as “valley” and “wine,” but also “napas” and other words in Indonesian. Below that, I could see the most tweeted links where Napa was mentioned, related hashtags including #wine and #loveindonesia, and @ names referenced in tweets mentioning “napa.”

After that, there were images of pictures and videos where “napa” was mentioned, including wine-related images, plus random images where I couldn’t discern the context. They could have shown up because “napa” has other meanings internationally. A quick tweet to my followers revealed it’s short for “kanapa,” meaning “why.” So I learned something, but not directly from ReSearch.ly.

I’m all for slicing and dicing search results in new ways. At first blush, I found the results from ReSearch.ly to be curious. But ReSearch.ly is billed as a social search platform for “online marketers, brand managers and social media experts” that provides demographic data, psychographics, and instant viral analytics, along with location, gender, and retweets. I saw the location, gender and retweets data, but I didn’t immediately see how the information would help me as an online marketer, brand manager or social media expert.

I did another search for “SXSW” and the results were more relevant, most likely because SXSW is a much more distinctive term. The breakdown of the search results, however, didn’t seem particularly useful. Then again, I was searching not as a marketer or social media expert, just as someone thinking about attending the SXSW 2011 Interactive conference. I did discover when adding “Interactive” to the search that there are SXSW Interactive events in other cities happening in January. Now that’s interesting.

In conclusion, the service is complex enough that users may need more help from the company. You’ll need to decide whether the value of ReSearch.ly’s “social search” goes beyond mere curiosity by adding social pathways and context to search results.

What are some of your experiences with “social search” so far?

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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

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Printing is still an important part of every web worker’s workflow, and though it’s quite arcane, much of our communication and documentation is still conducted via a paper trail. Not only does this leave piles of paper to manage, there’s the economic cost of all of that ink and paper and, importantly, there’s also an environmental cost involved with printing that we all bear as a society.

In a recent issue of Wired UK, Thomas Counsell from the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing speculated that up to two percent of greenhouse gases are a result of paper consumption, largely driven by the production and disposal of new and used printed paper.

Counsell’s research is focused on technologies that use a combination of ultrasound and chemical solvents to remove toner from printed documents, enabling paper to reused. Though Counsell’s research is still very much in the labs and somewhat fantastical, there are alternatives, available today, that can help us make environmental and financial judgments about the paper and ink that we use.

The Paper-Less Alliance‘s web site not only provides handy advice on how to reduce paper consumption, but also provides free software, in collaboration with PaperCut, to help individuals and companies visualize their paper consumption in terms of a carbon footprint, trees, energy use and financial impact.

GreenPrint offers an inexpensive software solution that adds a new printer profile to Macs and PCs. As documents are sent to the “virtual” GreenPrint printer, they’re analyzed, and attention is drawn to wasteful or unnecessary areas, which users can then choose to remove from the final printout.

For example, many documents often have a page with just a few words or lines on the last page; GreenPrint automates the discovery of such inefficiencies.

Adobe’s Tools for Sustainable Design are yet to be released, but were previewed by Adobe’s CTO, Kevin Lynch last Spring at ETech 2009. Lynch demonstrated some great demos, including:

• optimizing a box pattern to use less paper
• tools that show the toxicity and chemical impact of various ink colors
• embedded guidelines from organizations such as Greenpeace
• calculating the number of trees or soy plants required for a print job
• suggesting digital rather than hard copy outputs

More recently, designer Matthew Robinson conducted a somewhat unscientific project entitled “Measuring Type,” which explored how much ink commonly utilized typefaces tended to use. Robinson discovered that Garamond had the highest ink efficiency.

Though I tend not to print much anyway, preferring the flexibility of digital documents, these four initiatives have forced me to understand the true cost of printing and show that software can help us make value judgments about environmental issues.

A year ago we saw controversy and ridicule around one researcher’s carbon calculation of a Google search, yet our various applications and tools still aren’t doing a great job of reporting their environmental impact to users. As we see software emerge to help us understand the environmental impact of printing, I hope we’ll start to see other categories of software and hardware reveal their environmental impact and cost.

Coincidentally, the Daily Beast just published a great article on the advantages and disadvantages of going paper-free, entitled “My Paperless Life.”

Are you mindful of the environmental impact of your printing? Which strategies do you employ to reduce waste?

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What do I mean by that? Well, for one, you have Twitter’s trending topics, but more than the 10 you normally see, and they’re arranged in a tag cloud. I also noticed that some from the official Twitter search page aren’t actually present, but it looks like it’s cut out the hashtagged, frivolous stuff, and left the more meaty subjects.

Clicking on any of the tending topics (Bing calls them the “Hottest Topics on Twitter”) generates a search for that term, which at the time of this writing isn’t returning any results. The site is still in beta, and this will no doubt be resolved, possibly by the time you’re reading this post, even. You also get to see some links below the Hottest Topics pertaining to individual trends, complete with some examples of tweets containing those links below it for context.

For now, it seems to be more of a promise of what’s to come than a fully functioning feature, but what it does provide, along with Bing’s usual helpful sidebar results, promise a much more thoughtfully organized, searchable and usable service for people using Twitter for research or to track trends. There’s even a “retweet” icon next to each Twitter result, which leads you directly to your Twitter page, so you can share your discoveries with your followers.

I’ve been skeptical of Bing in the past, but if this is what the future holds, it won’t take much to convince me that Microsoft has some great ideas about search.

What do you think of the new Bing Twitter search?

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If you’re looking to take the pulse of the web at any given moment (and you don’t want the static or excess sensationalism that goes along with using Twitter), Google Fast Flip is as good a place as any to start. It sort of feels like a concise, pre-filtered Alltop that provides a macro level view of some of the web’s most influential and respectable news sources.

Current sources include Esquire, BBC News, the New York Times, TechCrunch, and Salon.com, in addition to about 35 other magazine, news and general information sites that receive regular updates. You can browse all of these by popularity, by subsection, by topic, or by source using Google’s new visual interface that works a little like Apple’s Cover Flow technology. Each site is represented by an image capture of the relevant page.

Clicking through to a source doesn’t actually bring you to the site in question, as I would’ve initially guessed. It actually opened up the relevant article in a reading interface, but doesn’t redirect away from Google Fast Flip. The reader view gives you a set portion of the article viewed as an image file, the idea being that you can see a quick preview before clicking through to the full story at the site itself. It sort of feels like searching through microfiche in the basement of the local library.

Arrows at the side of the image in reader view allow you to browse other stories in the category you’ve chosen, and an expandable tray allows you access to the thumbnails of all the stories in that series. You can also email and “Like” any story you find, which requires sign-in with your Google credentials.

Is it useful? Speaking as someone who depends on the Internet news media for my online career, I think it may be. It’s a great way to see what the major outlets are talking about all at once, without having to visit each individually. I can see people arguing that an RSS reader does the same job without as much distracting visual flair, but for people who process information visually, Fast Flip might prove more effective or more comfortable overall.

Do you think Google Fast Flip will catch on as a search tool? Do you see yourself using it over something like Alltop or RSS?

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I carry my gear in a Timbuk2 Laptop Messenger Bag. The Washington, DC/Northern Virginia area can seem a little sterile, so I wanted a distinctive and durable bag to haul my gear. While I am seeing more folks sporting Timbuk2 bags out and about, they are still outnumbered by those carrying the typical dull employer- or client-issue laptop bags.

Inside my bag, you’ll find:

• 15″ MacBook Pro running OS X, Windows 7 RC1 (soon to be upgraded to Windows 7 RTM), and Windows XP. The Windows 7 RC1 virtual machine is just for tinkering at this point. On the Windows XP virtual machine, I am running Microsoft Visio Professional 2007 and Project Standard 2007. Mozy is always there for backup when I am online. Depending on the project I’m working on at the time, my MacBook Pro might stay home in lieu of a client’s standard notebook PC that is on loan to me.
• 80 GB iPod that is a couple of years old because I like to work to music or podcasts. My newer 120 GB iPod serves up tunes for my gym workouts.
• Bose ear buds.
• Charger for my iPod.
• Ethernet cable for those times Mr. Murphy prevents me from finding WiFi.
• XtremeMac microphone for my iPod to record meetings as needed.
• BlackBerry 8820: this goes with me everywhere. The phone is due for an upgrade this fall. My plan is to go for one of the newer Android phones or (gulp) an iPhone.
• Charger for my BlackBerry.
• Plantronics Virtual Phone Booth for Skype and Gizmo5 calls.
• A leather folio with an old school yellow legal pad. True, this is not a lightweight addition to my load but they’re typical in many of the meetings I attend on client sites in my local area. The legal pad and folio stay at home if I am going on a long trip. While I am a big Evernote and OneNote user, I still like to take handwritten notes and draw diagrams and charts during meetings and then transcribe them later. One of these days, I will get better at taking notes on my laptop during client meetings.
• Moleskine notebook for capturing WWD post and other article ideas.
• Pocket change in case I am on a client site and need a caffeine fix.
• Pens because there is nothing more embarrassing than a technical writer without a pen.
• 4GB thumb drive that includes PortableApps and MojoPac.

My Other Gear

While many of the WebWorkerDaily crew pack along a camera, mine only comes along on special occasions and isn’t part of my regular kit.  I also don’t use a mouse when I am using a laptop.

My D-Link DWL-G730AP AirPlus G Wireless Pocket Router/Access Point jumps into my bag when I know I am going to be spending time in a hotel that has only wired broadband in its rooms.

How I Roll

My technical writing career has been a mix of onsite and offsite work with periods of intermittent travel. This means I try to stay flexible with the gear I carry including swapping out my MacBook Pro for my MacBook Air and messenger bag for a backpack for my (now rare) long trips.

What’s in your bag?

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In the past, I primarily used wikis for this sort of information organization, but they really aren’t the best tool for the job. Considering how many tools can simply save web pages or otherwise collect information without requiring you to cut, paste and format it, it’s far faster to move beyond a basic wiki. And if you have a team member who isn’t particularly technically savvy, an option with a shallower learning curve than a wiki is probably good. Here are a few choices that could be useful.

Evernote

Evernote‘s web application provides a particularly easy way to capture information in just about any format. You can capture photos, add videos, and search it easily — and organize it into notebooks. Until recently, you had the option of keeping notebooks private or publishing them to the web for anyone to see. A recent upgrade to the application, however, makes it possible to make the notebook accessible to specific individuals, making it an easy way to collect information for a project like a web site redesign: Have the various people involved save web sites that they feel are good examples for the project, save copy that you’ll need to reference ,and organize any other information relevant to the project all in one place.

The only downside to sharing notebooks on Evernote is that, for the time being, the feature only works on the web-based application. If you’re using one of the many handheld or desktop versions of Evernote, you’ll have to go to the web to make use of a shared notebook. However, as Evernote has been very good about rolling features out to mobile platforms so far, I think there’s a good chance that it’ll expand the shared notebook feature to other versions in the future.

Archivd

If you’re working on comparing options across several web sites, such as researching a new piece of software for your company’s use, Archivd has some particularly useful features. Using the application’s bookmarklet, you can save a web site, as well as specify the information you’ll want to compare — like price or feature sets. It can also automatically extract information from web sites. Archivd is particularly easy to get someone new to web applications started with, although it may be less useful if your research includes significant amounts of information that aren’t available on web sites.

WebAsyst

Adding files to your research, such as older versions of a project you’re updating, is one of the key features of WebAsyst. The site allows you to add any kind of text note and organize it quickly. You can set your notes to be shared with specific individuals, and you limit exactly what is shared with whom. WebAsyst also offers the option of using the web-based application, or downloading the software and setting it up on your own server. If you need an internal system for your company, WebAsyst makes setting it particularly easy.

What tools do you use for sharing project research?

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