The findings lead to the notion that American workers are focused on getting more done in 2011. With an estimated 247 billion emails sent daily (according to Pingdom), Americans are focused on how to become more productive in our post-recession economy and how to get more out of their business communications.

This survey was conducted online in December, 2010 by Harris Interactive on behalf of Intermedia. Respondents were employed US adults who have a New Year’s business communications resolution.

The survey also found that workers resolve to get organized, and respond more quickly to business communications. We’ll talk about these tomorrow and Thursday.

What are your New Year’s resolutions? How connected do you want to be while away from work in 2011?

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The reason we manage to stay focused during those tasks is that they require us to remain present in order to guarantee success. That ability to stay in the moment also produces the side effect of satisfaction. Our happiness is never higher than when we have our mind on what we’re doing. That’s a good lesson for web workers.

Job satisfaction, looked at from the perspective of this study, has a lot to do with focus. And for people who work from home, that’s probably not great news. If you’re a remote employee, you generally have unfettered access to the Internet, which means you also have about a million things vying for your attention. You’re probably adept at multitasking, but that same ability to split your focus could lead to unhappiness, which would also lead to burnout.

Maintaining focus is easier said then done, however. So how best to keep your mind on one task? Break that task down to make it easier to identify what’s required to do a truly great job. The difference between really exceeding in the task, and just doing a “good enough” job, is all about attention. If every time you set out to do a task, you set higher standards for yourself than you did last time, you’ll have an easier time maintaining focus and avoiding a wandering mind.

You should also avoid compulsively checking your email, and turn off those audio notifications for new mail. It might be hard to do, depending on what kind of work you do, but even if you can manage to avoid the email crush for a few hours a day, that period of unbroken focus should help improve the quality of your day by quite a bit. Having email “quiet time,” or, even better, keeping specific times during which you open your email app, should make for better email communication, too, since you’ll be more focused on those conversations.

Focus isn’t easy to achieve, especially with so much potential for distraction at hand, but as a remote web worker you have certain advantages over traditional workers. You won’t be as distracted by coworkers, for instance. Also, you have more freedom to set your own schedule, so you can plan attention-heavy tasks for times when you’re less likely to be tired and more prone to distraction.

Even if your task is undesirable, focusing on it to the exclusion of all else will provide a greater sense of satisfaction, and should help you feel happier in your job. It won’t be easy, and work is one of the places your mind is most likely to wander, but if you’re aware and take an active hand in keeping present and in the moment, you’ll have a much better chance of getting things done.

What methods do you use to help you maintain your focus?

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The Problem: Getting Bigger All the Time

A recent study conducted by Duke University found that the “hidden” cost of obesity on productivity was around $73 billion in the U.S. And that’s above and beyond the healthcare costs related to being very overweight.

According to the researchers conducting the study, “[o]besity’s hidden costs… stem from the fact that obese people tend to be less productive than normal-weight people while at work — simply accounting for the extra sick days they take misses a big part of the picture.”

Obesity isn’t the only health issue that can lead to less-than-optimal work performance. Smoking, eating poorly, and not getting enough exercise have also been linked to decreased productivity.

The trend in the U.S. is increasingly toward larger waistlines and more sedentary lifestyles, which, in turn, is leading to a drop in the ability of workers to do work. For at-home workers, who tend to be within easy reach of the fridge and at a computer for eight or more hours a day, the effect can be even more pronounced.

Web workers also tend to miss out on some benefits that encourage an active lifestyle, like subsidized gym memberships, so it can be hard to encourage worker health at home. But if you’re having trouble motivating yourself, think about it this way: greater health equals greater productivity.

The Solution: Exploit Your Freedom

Web workers have an advantage over traditional office workers. When you work from home, generally speaking, you have a degree of flexibility built into your day. If there’s a gym nearby, you can get out to that for a half-an-hour each day. Even if you have to pay for your own membership, the increase in energy you’ll get back as a result should make up the cost thanks to your ability to work longer and harder. If you’re lucky, you might even have a gym in your building, or in your own home, in which case not using it just can’t be justified from a cost/benefit perspective. Getting out during the day at least a few times even just to walk should help stave off more serious problems like obesity, too.

Use an exercise ball as your office chair for a portion of the day, if you feel you can’t peel yourself away from the desk. Crunches and push-ups in quick sets between tasks is another great way to get a little bit of exercise throughout the day with relatively low impact. It might draw some funny stares if you were in a traditional office setting, but that’s the beauty of working from home.

You can eat what you want when you work from home, but here again it can really be an advantage. You won’t be tempted to just be lazy and eat out every single day for lunch. Instead, you can save time, money and help yourself feel better by preparing healthy meals in advance to be eaten during the week.

There are some great tips for how you can eat more healthily at work, and the same logic applies when working from home. And you have less of an excuse than your office-bound colleagues because healthier ingredients should be ready to hand if you’re being smart about your grocery shopping.

The Benefit: Better Work, Done More Quickly

If you’re healthy, you’ll produce in a healthy manner. That means you won’t have to work as hard to get things done, and the quality of your work will be more consistent. I find that I’m much more focused and able to concentrate when I’m being active regularly and eating the right things. A good work out will clear your head, and might help you come up with a solution to a tricky problem.

It can be hard to keep active, but now studies are emerging that say you should do so, not just for the sake of your own health, which isn’t reason enough for many, but for the sake of your wallet. When it comes to the bottom line, many are much less willing to let things slide. I know I’m more likely to stay fit when I think about it as a matter of being professional versus not. Maybe that’s the kick in the pants you need, too.

Want to learn more about the health impacts of a virtual workforce? Check out our Net:Work conference in San Francisco in December.

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The intrusive things that can affect your ability to get work done include instant message alerts, according to the study, which was conducted by Helen Hodgetts at the University of Cardiff in the UK. Even, apparently, if you only give these things a moment of your attention before returning to your primary task, you still lose a fairly significant amount of potentially productive time over the course of a day.

Speaking to LiveScience.com, Hodgetts had this to say about the study’s findings:

“Email notifications and instant messages all cause a break in focus of the task in hand, even if they are attended to only very briefly. We might find ourselves needing a few moments to regather our thoughts, and remember what it was that we were about to do before we switched our attention to the interrupting on-screen notification.”

Instead of using visual cues, Hodgetts suggests opting for auditory indicators of new mail, messages and content. If a chime sounds indicating a new message on Adium, my preferred messaging client, I can acknowledge it and continue working without breaking pace. Not only does that save me time, but it also helps make sure I maintain my train of thought, and less valuable information is lost as a result.

I’ve dropped Growl (visual notifications for pretty much any good program on the Mac), and after reading this, I’m going to disable dock bounce and menu bar item visual cues, too. Attention span is my No. 1 challenge as a web worker, and I’ll do anything that might help improve mine.

Do you find visual alerts distracting?

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In a recent post, I blogged about the telecommuting trend, including a data point from a WorldatWork study that found a 39 percent increase in the number of telecommuters in the U.S. between 2006 and 2008. Many businesses are actively seeking to embrace remote working, and Simon’s post on GigaOM Pro, “Enabling the Web Working Revolution” (subscription required) describes some of the other benefits and research on telecommuting.

Today, Cisco Systems released the results of its Teleworker Survey, in which the networking giant surveyed almost 2,000 of its employees to better understand the social, economic and environmental impact of telecommuting.  Here are a few highlights from the research regarding telecommuting statistics:

• $277 million per year in estimated cost savings for Cisco and employees.
• 47,320 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions saved by reduced travel.
• 69 percent of the employees see increased productivity.
• 67 percent said that their work quality improved.
• 80 percent had an improved quality of life.
  
• On average employees telecommute 2 days per week.
  

I talked to Rami Mazid, Cisco’s VP of Global Client Services & Operations, about the research and he said that one of the biggest surprises from the study is that people actually spend more time working when they telecommute. Of the time saved by not commuting, 60 percent was spent working more while only 40 percent of the time saved was consumed by personal activities. Mazid also described his personal use of telecommuting at Cisco. Based on his calendar and work scheduled for the day, he decides whether or not he should spend the time working from his office at Cisco or from home. Even when he goes into the office, most of his team meetings are conducted online using WebEx to accommodate employees working from other locations.

Cisco is also redesigning some of its office buildings with the remote worker in mind. Employees who work almost exclusively from home can opt out of having an on-site office altogether. The offices have areas where workers can drop in to work for a day without having an assigned space. A little over a year ago, Intel did something similar in one of its buildings in Oregon. It was a pilot office focused on open spaces and better accommodating remote workers. The company created a bank of first-come, first-serve offices for people who spend most of their time working from home, complete with storage lockers. Most employees still have permanent cubicles, but this is a great way to make better use of expensive office space when many increasingly spend little to no time in an assigned corporate space.

Cisco has several products that are designed to make it easier for people to work remotely, so it’s clear the company has an interest in encouraging telecommuting. But Cisco walks the walk in addition to talking the talk, and are seeing tangible benefits from encouraging employees to stay home.

What have you seen companies do to encourage telecommuting and support remote employees?

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