5 posts tagged “digital outlook”

Then try our latest My Rock Band application and tell me what you think.

Just developed widget for Price Caspian and put live this week. Would be interested to hear your thoughts.

Interesting article by Steve Lohr from the New York Times about the impact of all those wonderful communication tools on our daily lives. Basic point he makes is that the phone, email, text or instant messenger, are only wonderful one at a time. We may think we're great multitaskers but our productivity goes way down when we're constantly being interrupted... or more precisely, we allow ourselves to be interrupted. Just to be clear, when I say productivity, I mean our ability to get our work done quicker (and better) and go home early.

I have rambled on this subject before, but here are some of the working practices we've introduced at Digital Outlook (and need to re-focus on) and some tricks I use.

Would love to hear your suggestions and experiences!

Working Practices

• Email aliases, filters & cups of tea - We're keen to ensure everyone pulls together so, like most companies, we have an alias that allows you to send emails to the entire company. As the number of people in the business grew, so did the number of emails, and it got to such a point that it was totally overloading us, it was essentially internal spam. After chatting with people, we came up with the simple idea of creating four or five aliases for general, but not urgent emails such as interesting articles, personal requests (e.g. anyone able to rabbit-sit...?) or fun stuff. Stephen then helped people set up filters that meant alias emails didn't hit people's inboxes but could be checked when YOU want rather than when the sender decided to press go. The last piece of the puzzle were cups of tea, or rather the fun forfeit to ensure people sent emails to the right alias. The first couple of days we drank and made lots of tea but then BANG... the inboxes were cut right down.
• Messenger & desk busy-signs & cups of tea - We're in an open-plan office and all use messenger. One of the biggest distractions was the quick IM ping or desk-side interuption. The "hi" or "have you got a sec?", when you're in the middle of a report, just doesn't help and, more often than not, requests can wait an hour or so and are not urgent enough to merit an interuption. What we did was create busy-signs for people's desks and encouraged the use of them on IM for when you needed to concentrate and focus. As per above, people that interupted because they didn't notice (or chose not to) were in the tea-lady role again. Mine's black no sugar. ;-)

Both REALLY worked well by all accounts. We've had new people join and not introduced them to the above as much as we should so things have slipped, but will roll out again soon.

My Tricks

• Work offline - When I'm writing a report, a difficult email or trying to think something through, having little messages pop up when new emails come in, or just knowing that there may be mail in my inbox just a click away, is hugely distracting. All I do is set my Outlook to work offline (bottom-right) and bingo. This way I can check emails when I'm done, answer them and move on. REALLY worth a try if you don't do this. I know it's tempting to check but they can wait.
• "Keep free" time - Shared calendars are great but what I hate is that, very quickly, your week can be totally filled by other people sticking in meetings that, once sent, are quite hard to decline... do you want to be the ONE person out of ten that causes scheduling hell? What I've done is quite simple. I've got some regular "keep free" time or meetings in my diary which encourages people to ask me whether I can move it to some other time rather than just book in regardless. I also then, at the end of each week, plan in "keep free" time for proposal writing etc. for the following week. I'm basically not treating my diary as just for meetings but for slow and concentration time scheduling also. Try it.
• Work remotely - While the busy-signs are great, for certain types of work I just need to be left alone. I therefore book regular time out of the office which I reserve for this type of work. I don't always make it because more urgent stuff comes up, but it's my choice. Again, really worth doing. You do need to plan your week more to ensure you've got everything you need to work remotely that particular day but that's just a question of a little pre-week planning. 
• No calls - Another distraction is the phone, whether landline, mobile, sms etc.. I simply switch it to voicemail or off when I really need to concentrate. I usually never do this for more than an hour but, unless there's a global crisis (which I couldn't do anything about anyway), I'm sure things can wait that long.

Well that's it. A collection of group and personal working practices to regain control, to use devices to serve me (rather than someone else) and to get home earlier.

Would be great if you have any others to share.

OK… we all know about “social media”, whether you call it community, buzz, viral, 2.0, or word-of-mouth. Some of us believe that embracing it as a marketing channel offers potential and we base this belief on our experience, instinct or, in some cases, blind faith in what others tell us.

We embrace, hold up and shout about the success stories…hallelujah! But what about ALL those social media campaigns, virals or sites that simply didn’t deliver… that bombed, where we expected to hit 10m uniques and… well, we didn’t? I have absolutely no proof to back this up, but I would expect that, if anyone did a survey of campaigns that “failed” (defined as not achieving the original measurable targets) and “succeeded” (defined as having hit or exceeded) across various different disciplines such as PR, media, promotions and social media, social media would come out the worst.

While many companies' forays into social media are driven predominantly by blind faith, fueled by hype and buzzwords like YouTube, UGC or 2.0, more and more companies base their decisions on experience and genuine instinct. While we work with clients that belong to the latter, I worry that the broader social media industry (whether publisher, tech company, agency or consultant) can continue to ride the wave of false euphoria for quite a while. At some point though these blind faith believers will start asking questions and what then? They’ll be absolutely right to do so and who will have the answers? Why should companies invest in a medium they don’t know what to expect from in terms of return, when they have other media such as advertising or PR where they can plan with a lot more accuracy? My concern is that if, as an industry, we don’t tackle this now, all those blind faith believers and faith peddlers riding this social media wave will wash us all ashore.

Don’t get me wrong… I believe that social media will have a significant (and hopefully positive) impact on society as a whole and that it is already a powerful medium for businesses to engage with their customers. I also believe though that this is a very new and rapidly evolving medium which makes it difficult (or nearly impossible) to predict results, but unless we find a way to do it, we're stuck.. Isn't it time to throw out the crystal ball, wash away the tea leaves and tell clients that spending $100k on the next “hot” social media activity is simply a bad idea? It may get them into the trades and, who knows, it may even work, but unless we can say, with reasonable certainty, that it will deliver those 10,000 test drives, why should they do it?

The solution I see is for the industry to learn to work with the unknown, looking elsewhere for planning models that work in ever-changing environments such as the R&D industry. Perhaps we should therefore suggest that our client runs a series of tests at say $10k each, knowing that most will fail and one should work, but all will teach us something? They shouldn’t expect 1,000 test drives from this, they shouldn’t even expect 500… what they should expect is an understanding of how their remaining budget WILL get them their 10,000 test drives and whether a small incremental spend will get them 20,000 more. This is the R&D model where everyone expects failure and plans for it, where investment is incremental, in parallel and itterative, and where major funds only get released once there’s data to justify it.

This may not be the solution we or our clients want, as it is still uncertain and it’s more difficult to sell in internally, but ultimately isn't it a better way to plan for the unknown with a higher chance of delivering great results for everyone?

For ages people have been talking about the knowledge organisation replacing the manufacturing and services businesses of yesterday, as the migration to either the low cost or the high tech takes hold... organisations where knowledge workers are the essence of your business.

Over the past couple of months, as I get more into the likes of del.icio.us, Vox, and other knowledge sharing services, I've been wondering whether this is yesterday's news... or in fact totally wrong from day one?

With the computer and phone as cheap as chips, people able to network using the likes of LinkedIn, and work in teams from wherever they want, I'm assuming that providing the "tools of production" be that technology, access to skills or an office environment doesn't really set you apart. Access to capital and a product you have a defendable level of ownership over obviously still do to some degree... but I don't believe that's enough for the long term. Capital is becoming more readily available and if you don't innovate (knowledge workers again) your product will be replaced at the blink of an eyelid.

Now with knowledge also becoming more and more "open source" is it something that a business can really claim to "own" and therefore help set it apart or do we actually need to figure out what an "open source" business looks, feels and works like?

I believe we do and would be interested in hearing your thoughts.