Yes. So would alchemy, but neither exist. Inbox Zero, we discovered, is a mirage. My team and I learned a lot in the process about what contributes to real productivity gains. They informed our decisions about product design but they aren’t tied to any specific technology choice: We think these insights apply universally.

Inbox Zero: The myth

You could always open your email client, select all, hit delete and, in theory at least, experience a moment of peace. Inevitably though it would be followed by panic, because you know there were important things in that pile you just vaporized: all those opportunities, responsibilities, duties and interactions in your work and personal life now left unresolved.

The alternative, which most of us struggle with every day, is keeping up with an inbox in a uniform, disciplined way. Yes, you can take an opportunity out of your inbox or your brain and write it down (as David Allen suggests), but the real problem is that, so long as opportunities exist or work is in progress, your backlog of to-dos will always be greater than zero, no matter how you track them, define them, or how quickly you complete them. Your subconscious is always keenly aware of it. Even with delegation, you can pass a hot potato to someone else to move it forward, but it always comes back, often hotter the second time around.

Peace of mind

The first step in achieving peace of mind is facing — and accepting — the fact that we will never be “done.” Our perfect inboxes are fleeting. Our task lists will never be empty. The Twittersphere will keep fluttering. And that’s a good thing, believe it or not. If you admit and surrender, you can embrace the world as your oyster. Suddenly, you’ve entered a place of endless possibility for learning and doing.

How, then, does one find peace? Here are three things that we learned in our journey.

Know what you MUST do

Not what you should do, or want to do, or what someone else wants you to do, but what you MUST do to be able to live with yourself, according to your own goals and ambitions and higher purpose. That may involve keeping your job. It may not. It may involve helping a friend, or doing a stranger a favor. Each moment is a value judgment, and only yours to make.

In that moment, seek clarity. We’ve found through both empirical and anecdotal research that identifying MUSTs and organizing around them is the ultimate secret to most successes.

Make sure the list is complete.

We’ve learned that incompleteness is what hurts people’s productivity most. It’s about more than just missing a deadline, however. Not having MUSTs captured in a trusted system leads to difficulty focusing on tasks at hand. Our subconscious interrupts and forces a context switch.

So if there’s paper in folders, voicemails, texts, meeting notes, scribbles on stickies, etc. that represent a MUST, you MUST go find them. Granted, there will always be surprises, even some that you MUST deal with. But incompleteness is nothing more than human error – your error – and is completely avoidable.

Make a plan.

In our company book club, we came across an interesting explanation for the subconscious interruption called the Zeigarnik effect. The gist is that when an objective is incomplete and no plan is in place, the mind interrupts itself with intrusive thoughts until the situation is remedied.

MUSTs take blocks of time and heavy mental energy – they won’t fit into small gaps in between emails. So placing MUSTs in the context of time helps focus, and more importantly, makes sure those MUSTs actually get done. (But don’t go too far out; over-scheduling tasks has risks too. Commitments with ourselves are the easiest to break, after all.) The key seems to lie in these steps: scripting just today where visibility is best, leaving standing whitespace in your calendar most days, and having a complete accompanying list that gets consistent review and prioritization.

With your MUSTs done, booked, and queued up for review, your mental space is freed to focus on the payoff. More days can be good, even great. Temptations still strike during booked MUST windows and we, too, often succumb. It is a journey for us and for us all, but one we’re making progress on by the week.

Shawn is co-founder and CEO of Handle, a priority engine for making people more effective, and runner-up TC Disrupt NY 2013. He is also Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, where he led the first investment in Siri, and currently sits on the Boards of IMVU, PlayPhone, Roku, Telenav and YuMe. 

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1. Unsubscribe. Be brutally honest with yourself about which information you really have time to read, and get rid of subscriptions to anything you rarely, or never, read.
2. Turn off or filter the bacn. Bacn refers to email like messages from retailers  and social network notifications. It’s not exactly spam, because you’ve signed up to receive it, but not necessarily useful either. While notifications from various services (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) can sometimes be useful, you should think about whether you actually read them and how much time it can take to delete these emails. Anything you can live without seeing is a candidate for unsubscribing or automatically filtering and dumping into a folder where it can be reviewed periodically. If you use Gmail, you can use its Smart Labels feature to automatically filter out bacn emails.
3. Use RSS. If you can get the information you need via an RSS feed, you should consider moving subscriptions out of your inbox and into your RSS reader.
4. Aggressively archive into folders. Look for anything in your inbox more than two weeks old. If you haven’t responded already, are you ever really going to respond, and is a response even still needed by the sender? Consider dumping these into an archived folder where you can find the information later if you need it and get them out of the inbox.
5. Use filters and rules. For anything I probably don’t need to read immediately, but may need to search for later in a pinch, I have set up automated rules that route those emails directly to folders and have them bypass my inbox. Mailing lists, emails from certain PR agencies and newsletters are often good candidates for automated filtering.
6. Color-code. Using colors gives you a quick way to scan your inbox and read the important mail before you tackle everything else and makes it much more likely you won’t miss critical email. For example, I currently have emails from my boss, my employees and several other key people in orange; emails from two important community mailing lists in blue and spam reports for blogs / forums in red. All of those catch my eye and allow me to respond quickly to several crucial types of email before I get through everything else.
7. Consider inbox zero. Inbox zero is more of an ideal than a reality for me most of the time, but it’s something I strive to achieve, since I can be so much more productive when I’m not losing track of critical emails languishing unnoticed in my inbox. Even if you can’t maintain inbox zero, getting there even occasionally can be a big productivity booster.
8. Get tasks onto a to-do list. Even if you don’t aspire to inbox zero, getting tasks out of your inbox and into a to-do list can help you get organized and better manage email. Once you move an item to your to-do list, you can archive the email off into a folder where you can read it again later if you need to.
9. Batch process. I try to process my email a few times a day rather than getting caught up in it constantly. My color coding means that I can still glance at my inbox to catch critical items, while letting everything else languish for a couple of hours until I have time to process it all in one big batch.
10. Turn off new email notifications. If you’re getting pop-ups or other invasive notifications of new email, turn those off now! They can be a constant distraction that only increases your feeling of overload, and it detracts from the idea of batch processing email. It can be very hard to be productive and get real work done with constant notifications of new email, especially since the vast majority of email isn’t so time sensitive it can’t wait for a couple of hours until you have time to deal with it.
11. Send less. The more email you send, the more you will receive in return; sending email encourages other people to reply. Before you email someone, think about whether you could use another method. Sometimes a quick IM conversation or phone call can quickly resolve an issue and reduce the amount of email going back and forth discussing an issue.

Still feeling overloaded? Check out my post from last week, where I outlined various hacks to reduce information overload using a combination of RSS, Yahoo Pipes, web APIs and services like PostRank.

Image courtesy Flickr user Jeff Turner.

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So how about turning the process of maintaining inbox zero into a game? That’s the idea behind 0Boxer, a new extension for Gmail that awards points for doing inbox zero-related activities like archiving email and replying, and you can see how your points tally compares against your friends in an online leaderboard. Sounds good, but unfortunately the beta site appears to be broken currently; when I tried to sign in using my Google account, it reports, “Something went wrong. Please try again.” That’s a shame, because the idea is promising; I’ve reached inbox zero many times, and basked in the warm glow of a job well done, only for my grip on that that empty inbox to slip within days, mainly because maintaining inbox zero has little reward for me.

Although 0boxer isn’t working right now it has inspired me to embark on a new inbox zero mission. I’m going to try making it into something of a game by keeping a running tally of how many items I have in my inbox at the end of each day; if my daily average is less than five emails (not quite inbox zero, I know, but better than the couple of hundred or so that are currently in my inbox!) at the end of each week, I’m going to reward myself with a treat.

0Boxer isn’t the only app that tries to make otherwise dull tasks fun by adding a competitive aspect to them. For example, there’s EpicWin, an RPG-like game which turns the act of checking off items on your to-do list into “experience points” that can be converted into virtual items. There’s also Chore Wars, which turns the act of doing household chores into points.

Have you tried to make an otherwise dull task more rewarding by turning it into a game?

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Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Digg CEO Kevin Rose

One of the curses of a modern digital life is an overflowing email inbox. Some online veterans delight in comparing how many thousands of unread messages they have, the way World War II veterans compare battle scars, while others such as VC Fred Wilson and copyright expert Lawrence Lessig have declared “email bankruptcy,” and a whole movement has sprung up devoted to attaining the state of bliss known as “Inbox Zero.” Now Digg founder Kevin Rose has posted his tips on how to get a handle on that never-ending ocean of unread mail that threatens to swamp your inbox.

Rose starts off with his battle scars: 938 unread work emails and 1002 unread personal emails. “The madness has to stop,” he writes. “What was once a 30 minute annoyance is now my full-time job.” Then he gets straight to the tips, which he posts in reverse order, David Letterman Top 10-style. Some are straighforward, and some are on the devious side:

* #5: “Add a http://three.sentenc.es/ email signature and keep them short.” This refers to an email policy of keeping responses to SMS text message-length: in other words, three sentences or less. Rose suggests inserting a Three Sentences email signature to let your friends and colleagues know what you’re up to.

* #4: “Type ‘Sent from iPhone’ under your short responses. People don’t expect long responses when you’re on your phone. Don’t forget to mispell a few words.” Rose even provides an example message: “This all looks graet +1!! Sent from iPhone” (if you don’t have an iPhone, of course, this ruse is quickly going to become obvious).

* #3: “Create a ‘VIP’ filter. Add your boss, investors, and close friends. Flag them red and throw them in a separate folder. This is the first place I check every morning.” This is something that most heavy users of email already do, but is certainly a good tip. Folders are one way to divert the waves of email you face, although you have to remember to check them, too, or you might as well declare bankruptcy.

* #2: “(Gmail only) Keep the spam out. If you’re giving your address to a potentially shady website, tack on +spam to the end, example: yourname+spam@gmail.com. You can then filter those emails into a spam folder you check periodically.” Rose is right; this is one of the great things about Gmail. You can create as many custom addresses as you wish by using the + sign and a keyword, and then filter them.

* #1: “(Apple Mail or similar program) Setup an email bankruptcy filter. This is a little bit of a d*** move, but if you’re getting hundreds of new emails a day, it just might work.” The idea here is to create an auto-responder that sends a message to anyone whose email has gone a certain period (5 days, 10 days, etc.) without being read, telling them to try again.

It’s nice to see that even startup CEOs suffer from the same kinds of email problems we mortals are tortured by. And if you get a message from the Digg founder that says “This all looks graet!! +1! Sent from iPhone,” well, you know what that means.

My theory was that if I could get to inbox zero before the holidays and put a system in place to keep it at inbox zero that I would be able to maintain my tidy inbox by building the right set of habits while my volume of email was lower than normal. By getting in the habit during a down time, it’s been easier for me to maintain the system now that my volume of email is picking back up to its normal amount.

Here are the ten things that I am doing to keep my inbox at zero:

1. Archive or delete mercilessly. In order to get to inbox zero the first time, you need to archive or delete mercilessly. My first pass focused on getting rid of anything that I didn’t absolutely have to respond to right away. I also archived anything more than three weeks old. Be realistic about whether you will ever respond to an email, and keep the must-haves while getting rid of any nice-to-haves.
2. “Must Respond” folder. I created a “Must Respond” label in Gmail (other email programs call these folders), and put it at the top of my labels. Whenever I run across something that needs anything more than a quick response, I tag it with the “Must Respond” label. During my vacation, I was able to keep up with inbox zero by dumping any email requiring a response in the “Must Respond” bucket right from my phone. I called this “Must Respond” as a reminder to myself that the “nice-to-respond” items don’t get this label.
3. “To Read” folder. I also have a “To Read” label that I use when I am pressed for time. Email that will take more than a few minutes to read goes into this folder. This is only for the critical stuff, not those things that I would like to read if I ever had time (those get skimmed & archived). Market research reports, meaty client emails and other important communication gets the “To Read” label.
4. Tasks. I also made sure that I had Hiveminder (my task list of choice) set up to accept emailed tasks before I left for vacation. Any emails that are really tasks get emailed to Hiveminder to get the tasks out of my inbox and into my task list where they belong.
5. Filters. I’ve been using filters for a long time, primarily to automatically add labels to incoming emails. I have filters for each of my clients where any email coming from their domain or being sent by me to their domain gets a label for the name of the client. I also give those labels colors so that I can see at a glance when I get an email from a client. While this doesn’t directly impact inbox zero, it does let me archive with abandon without fear that I’ll lose a client email.
6. Turn off notifications. I don’t check email constantly, and I don’t get little bings and bongs or flashing lights every time I get an email. It’s just too distracting, especially when I am focused on client work. I check it regularly, but on my own schedule. I like to check in on email during my downtime while I’m waiting for someone to call, waiting for a page to load, or during other downtime, and I make sure that I at least glance at it every 30 minutes.
7. Process in chunks. I like to work in chunks, so even when I “check” my email, I don’t usually touch it unless I have at least a few minutes to focus on processing it. I also try to do this processing when I need a break from another chunk of work. For example, if I’ve been working for two solid hours on a client project, I might take a 15 minute break to do an email chunk before getting back to client work. In these email chunks, I respond to what I can, file others into “Must Respond” / “To Read” folders and archive anything that doesn’t need a response.
8. Canned responses. I’m starting to use more canned responses (also called email templates) for common questions or frequent emails. You can still customize them, but it saves a lot of time if you have the meat of the email already in place (Celine gives more tips on using canned responses here).
9. Unsubscribe. One key to keeping email under control is to get less of it. I’m being more honest with myself about email newsletters and other updates that aren’t really valuable. If I don’t absolutely need the information and don’t look forward to reading it, I unsubscribe.
10. Be realistic. Be honest with yourself about how much email you can realistically respond to without sacrificing more important goals. Use shorter responses whenever possible, and don’t beat yourself up when you just don’t have time to respond to something.

The key to maintaining inbox zero is to find a process that works for you and then stick to it. It isn’t rocket science, and it takes a a time commitment to get everything set up at the beginning. However, if you set up a process that really works, you will spend less time on email while doing a better overall job of managing your inbox, instead of letting your inbox manage you.

What are your tips for managing your inbox?

Photo credit: Flickr user shareski http://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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Many readers are likely familiar with the Getting Things Done craze of the past few years. This task oriented methodology has spawned a system for managing the chore that is email, with battle-cries of “Inbox Zero!” resounding around the Internet.

While I’m not exactly an “inbox zero” kind of guy (close enough I suppose), I have found that the concept of “desktop zero” rings quite true with me. If you’ve ever seen a computer desktop covered in icons, we’re talking about the antithesis here. Read on to find out some compelling reasons to strive for desktop zero, and some tool tips on how you can easily achieve desktop zen.

When I was young I bought a coin dish from a garage sale that read, “A clean desk is the sign of a sick mind.” (I added it to my already over-cluttered desktop in my room.) While I still find humor in that memory, the computer nerd in me is pretty particular about my digital workspace being neat and tidy. Just as inbox zero brings clarity, closure, and a sense of accomplishment to each day, so can keeping your computer’s desktop free of clutter and unnecessary files or folders.

A Clean Starting Place

I find it quite satisfying to boot up my machine, and have nothing but a hard drive “cluttering” my desktop. It feels like turning to a clean page in a Moleskin, or using a full-screen text application — there are just no (or very few) distractions to getting started with your work. Not to mention that if you need to drop a file there temporarily for quick use before deleting, it will be easy to find when not amongst dozens of other items.

A Sense of Organization

I’m quite particular about a sound data hierarchy to file things under, yet another place where my physical and digital lives are at odds with one another. If my desktop is littered with random files (email attachments, web downloads, the latest file lazily saved to the desktop to file later) and folders, it just means they aren’t in the place that I should be looking for them in the long term. Though on occasion I’ll relent and (temporarily) drop an alias (‘shortcut’ for those of you new to Mac) of a folder on the desktop if it’s for a project I’m working in the majority of the time. At least that way, stuff it still in its proper place when I’m through.

Revel in Your Wallpaper

Here, we move from the arguably practical reasons to the more fun, and subjective. I love a great wallpaper image on my desktop. Sometimes it’s a great repeating vintage wallpaper pattern, or a too-cute-for-words picture of my kids, or a photo that I took and really liked. Every now and then it’ll do wonders to just zone out for a few while looking at a great image on a clean desktop.

HUD Style Interfaces via Geektool

If you’ve tooled around Flickr (with Mac on your mind) or followed the Featured Desktops on Lifehacker, you’ve seen them. A killer mash-up of geek chic, stunning design, and useful information result in some of the coolest desktop Head’s Up Displays you’ve seen. Some are as simple as using Geektool to push logs to the desktop, while others style the fonts, work along with the wallpaper, and sometimes even a custom theme to all of OS X. The results are generally nothing short of spectacular — and you’re not going to get there with a multitude of files strewn about.

Sound interesting? Well it’s not hard to do. More than anything it’s a mindset. But having a process — and better yet, good tools — will help you clear that desktop in no time at all. Luckily there are many utilities and applications available to drill directly down to just what you want, wherever it may reside on your hard drive. But we’ll start simply first.

A Temp Folder

The things that tend to trip me up most, are those temporary files that I need for a short period of time and then forget about. If I’m just emailing a file or printing something, I drop it on my desktop, perform whatever action I need, and then usually delete it. However, sometimes it’s a bit of information that you may need for more than just a few days. At this point I’ll drop it into a folder named ‘tmp’ which resides in the root of my Home Folder. (example: ~/Nick/tmp) It’s as easy as that. Oh, and as an extra tip, add that tmp folder to your Dock as a Stack view for quick access!

Fresh and Hazel

If you don’t mind spending a few dollars, there are a couple of applications/utilities that I swear by for this kind of organization. (It’s worth mentioning that there are many applications that can fulfill these actions, but these are ones that have proven themselves to me.) Fresh ($9) hangs just off-screen as a transparent tab, where it gives quick access to recent files, as well as a ‘Cooler’, which functions very similar to my tmp folder idea above. Hazel ($21.95) can monitor files and folders and perform actions on them based on user defined rules. So perhaps you’ve got a temporary file on your desktop for 3 days, Hazel will see it’s been 3 days (based on a rule) and move it to your tmp folder where you can access it later on. Hazel’s terrifically powerful, and we’ve written about it before if you want to learn more.

We all approach our workspaces differently, and get different uses out of different methodologies. It’s entirely possible that Desktop Zero is not for everyone. For me, it was an easy and rewarding change to make, but as with all things, your mileage may vary. If you’ve got an alternative method for keeping your desktop (or any portion of your computer) clean and tidy, we’d love to hear your secrets too.

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Inbox Zero

I usually manage to get my inbox under control right before I take a week off during the holidays, but by the time I return to work, it has usually filled right back up with new email. This time, I’m making a real effort to keep it at inbox zero for more than a few hours. I went to inbox zero about a week ago, and I’ve managed to keep it at zero all week by spending a little time each day responding to what I can and moving everything else into areas for response or further reading while creating tasks for to-do items. By keeping up with this process during the holidays while the volume is more manageable, I hope that I’m building up habits that will help me continue to manage my email in 2010. Even if you don’t aspire to implement inbox zero over the long-term, there is something very refreshing about starting the new year with a clean inbox.

Paperwork, Planning and Finances

This is also a great time to get all your paperwork, planning and finances in order. I plan to tackle that pile of paperwork accumulating on my desk that really should be filed, and it’s a great time to get everything ready for your taxes. You should also take some time to set your goals for 2010 and come up with a plan that will help you achieve them.

Relax

Nothing helps me get a fresh start like taking a few days off to relax and recharge. It’s hard to get a great start on the year if you are overworked and exhausted. I took most of last week off to visit family, but the holidays come with their own stresses. I plan to work like mad on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to get the rest of my work done along with some paperwork and other business; however, I’m going to take a nice, long four-day weekend off at home to relax, read and hit the gym to start the new year feeling great.

What are your favorite tips for getting the new year off to a great start?

Photo by Flickr User Daniel Voyager used under Creative Commons.

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TAB Welcomes: Dave Greenbaum

As a new writer here, let me give you the File → Get Info on me.

For my day job, I own a computer repair business here in Lawrence, Kansas. Drawing on my support background, I focus on practical technology from the user perspective; If I can’t find it useful, I’m not that interested in it. My passion is helping people with technology. I’ve worked in corporate IT and academic computing before settling on residential and small office computer support. I’m also heavily involved in our User Group.

My experience with Apple goes back to Apple IIe days; the first Mac I used was a MacPlus, and owned was a IIvx. Ever since then I’ve been a Mac fan. I even met my spouse through the Lawrence Apple Users’ Group and we’ve been married 10 years this June.

At home I use a Mac Pro for my main workstation. I’m proud to say I have every current form factor of Mac just in case a customer needs a part or I need to test something. I carry with me an iPhone and black Macbook, and in the office we have a Mac mini. Dare I even discuss my home-built PC or my upcoming netbook? Yes, because we still live in a PC world and sometimes the Mac is not the best at everything. I have my foot in both worlds.

I’ll bring to TheAppleBlog consumer advocacy and critical analysis. My writing will focus on industry trends that will matter most for an Apple users’ daily life. Some of my past articles have been reprinted by the User Group community around the globe, and I’ve written technology columns for daily newspapers in this region.

In my “spare” time, I enjoy cooking, gourmet food and drink, as well as occasional travel. While working hard, you might find me listening to the Pet Shop Boys or Nine Inch Nails. Since I truly love what I do for a living, I find that I don’t need too much free time.

I love hearing your comments and feedback: good, bad or otherwise. Let’s keep the conversation going!

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The EX-FS10 is slim, even by compact camera standards: It measures just more than 0.6 inches thick. You can, literally, slip it into a pocket unnoticed. Its small size makes its high-speed shooting features even more remarkable; these capabilities are typically found on much larger cameras, like digital SLRs.

The EX-FS10′s burst mode — a feature that’s sometimes called continuous or high-speed shooting — captures 30 shots per second, and allows you to take a series of images in rapid succession. To activate burst mode, you simply press the dedicated “30″ button on the back of the camera, and then press the shutter. That’s it: A series of images is captured.

And the results are fun. You can use burst mode to capture several images of someone running, jumping, or otherwise moving around, for example. You can then choose the best shot from the bunch, or you can use the entire series of photos to demonstrate movement.

You can also use burst mode to create a sort of freeze-frame effect, by capturing a photo of water droplets, for example. I used the EX-FS10 in burst mode to snap a succession of pictures of a water pitcher tipping over, and the result was a shot of the water in midstream, something that’s often impossible to capture unless you have a digital SLR camera.

Capturing movies in slow motion is equally amusing. These videos are actually captured using a high-speed movie mode, which captures 1,000 frames per second. The results appear in super slow motion, though, because the video is played back at a normal speed of 30 frames per second. You can take any normal activity and turn it into high drama this way. Witness a video of my 3-year-old running across my backyard: It looks much more elegant in slow motion than it does in real life.

In addition, the Casio EX-FS10 captures video in HD (720p), and the clips I captured looked very good. They were comparable to clips I captured with the Kodak Zx1, a dedicated video camera. This camera also captures still images at 9.1 megapixels.

The camera is not without its flaws, though: Still photos looked a tad dark. And while my HD videos looked crisp and clear, many of my slow-motion clips looked a bit smeared. At $350, the EX-FS10 is more expensive than most entry-level digital cameras. But it’s a whole lot more fun, too.

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Ask any telecommuter for a downside, and they’ll likely start talking about the isolation. It’s more than discussing last night’s game around the water cooler. When you’re physically in the office simply doing your job, your presence is a constant reminder to the rest of your team of the value you add to the company. No virtual project management site can replace the spontaneous collaboration that happens in the hallway. And when the boss is looking for someone to play a role on a key project, odds are her first thought isn’t going to be that guy sitting 200 miles away.

So how do you sit in your pajamas all day and stay connected to your peers?

It depends on the company, and it depends on you.

It Depends on the Company

It’s not about you or your job. It’s about the culture. How much conversation typically happens in the hallways? Do folks tend to work from home in the evenings or take their work on the road? How much work is planned in advance vs. what happens spontaneously?

If you want to work for a telecommuting-friendly company, consider working for a nonprofit organization or a vendor that services nonprofits. In general, you’d be hard pressed to find an industry more conducive to non-traditional work environments than the nonprofit sector. I’ve attended a number of nonprofit conferences where I continually meet folks who, like me, work full-time for geographically-distant causes.

Of course, if you are working to provide a direct service you need to be where that service is. However, there are opportunities to work for organizations where they may be grateful to have your expertise without the overhead of having you on site. While nonprofits do traditionally pay less than comparable jobs in the for-profit world, the compensation is not as bad as you might think. And you have the warm fuzzies of working for the greater good. Check out the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) for more information about working in the nonprofit technology world.

Regardless of the sector, whatever you do, don’t expect the culture to change to suit you. If your co-workers rarely log in to a project management/collaboration web site; if they never have conversations via IM or Twitter; if emails are rarely longer than 5 words; if their idea of an impromptu conference call involves a cell phone in speaker mode…they’re not going to change for you.

Last week I was visiting my office, as I do each month, and I asked my co-workers to share with me any challenges they’ve had working with a telecommuter. They expressed that they feel bad that I miss some of the casual hallway conversation, but for the most part not much is different. They IM with me just as much as they IM with each other. In fact, after over three years we’ve developed our own shorthand language that works well for SMS and IM. We use a variety of web-based tools to keep in touch and stay organized. It’s just part of our culture, regardless of where everyone is physically.

If you can’t figure out a way to comfortably work in the culture of the company even when you’re not there – without expecting anyone else to change their habits – then you may be wasting your time. Even if you are perfectly comfortable with telecommuting, have an ideal home office, and have your supervisor’s buy-in, you will probably feel frustrated and disenfranchised in the end.

It Depends on You

So you work for a progressive company that loves to communicate via instant messenger or Skype. They use web apps or VPN and nothing important happens in the office anyway. Home office here I come, right? Not so fast.

Your coworkers can’t see that you’re busy. They can’t tell when you’re in a good mood. Except for scheduled or impromptu phone calls or web conferences, you have to be comfortable showing who you are almost entirely in written communication.

There are some people who are able to comfortably write emails that aren’t too long, aren’t too short, and it’s the same as if they were standing in front of you. They make ideal telecommuters. And there are others who have difficulty coming across as they intend in writing. Those folks should stick close to the office.

Here’s something you don’t want to hear: The successful telecommuter practices Inbox Zero. That’s right, you need to make sure that every email is read and dealt with in a timely manner. You’ll need a system for quickly responding to IMs and other messages, even if it’s to say you can’t deal with it at the moment. Superior electronic organization skills are key to a telecommuter’s successful relationship with peers.

If you can’t keep up with your email and other electronic communication when you’re face-to-face with your coworkers, forget working remotely on a regular basis. You’ll have all your typical email from the outside, plus additional communication from co-workers who can no longer just shout at you from down the hall. Imagine how your coworkers would feel if they asked you a question in person and you routinely ignored them for a few hours…or a few days? Whether it’s IM, Twitter, Skype, the telephone or the inbox, you need to get on top of the communication tool that’s as readily accessible to you and your coworkers during business hours as conversation. It’s not always realistic to expect people to call you for everything.

Fellow telecommuters: any advice you’d give to someone just thinking of taking the leap?

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