I'm on the road 75% of the year, when looking for a place to work there are a few things that I'm always mindful of: reliable wifi, comfortable seating, access to outlets and minimal noise.

Typically I work out of coffee shops, but recently I have been on a road trip around the country talking to entrepreneurs and small businesses. Several of these people work out of coworking spaces, something I rarely do. However, I am quickly falling in love with the idea of coworking spaces. Here's why...

What are your thoughts on work spaces? What do you look for?

Ratings and reviews have become a large part of what influences my decisions on where I eat, sleep and drink while traveling.  I constantly find myself checking tips on Foursquare and reviews on Yelp to help me decide where I want to spend my time and money.  These reviews and ratings are valuable because I know they are user generated and I can trust the opinion of normal people like myself, for the most part.  

Now imagine if we applied these ratings and reviews to workshifting.  I go to Starbucks in Stratford upon Avon looking to get some work done.  I get my coffee, sit down and realize they have free wifi, plugs at nearly every table against the wall and its pretty quite (except at 3:30pm when all the kids get out of school).  So I get out my Nexus One, check in on foursquare and write a tip about the great atmosphere, free wifi and outlets and I tag this tip with our cute hashtag #workshifting.  Or I am at my coffee shop in NYC and I write a tip that the Bean has free wifi however they have only three outlets and I use the #workshifting hashtag.  Next time you are in the East Village looking for a place to workshift you probably won't go to the Bean if you need to plug in.  Now we have the ability to make our #workshifting hashtag valuable.

What are your thoughts?

Photo Credit: Melissa Leon

In the last week I have taken two flights, rode in a bus and on a train.  While on these three modes of transportation I evaluated what type of work could I get done.  How productive could I really be while in transit from one place to another.  I usually sleep on a flight or in a train ride, but recently I have tried to make that time productive.  

I have not been lucky enough to be on a flight with internet as of yet.  So my productivity is limited to what I can sync offline and finish while in the air.  I used my time on a flight from London to Barcelona to answer emails and work on blogs posts.  Once we landed I connected to the internet and synced my emails and sent out my blog posts.  This was a pretty good use of the three hour flight to Barcelona, considering I would usually have slept that whole flight.

On the train I had my broadband card so I was able to access the internet to work on a client proposal and record a screencast for an application.  The train was nice because the seats were spacious and if you get on the train a bit early you can get a seat with table.  The hardest place for me to work was on the bus.  The bus was really cramped and extremely difficult to work on.  The space was too small to try to work on my laptop and the ride was bumpy making it really hard for me to read because I get motion sick.  So I used the rest of the bus ride to catch up on some sleep.  So at the end of it I got some sleep but realized that I can be pretty productive on a train or plane.  

What do you do while in transit to stay productive?  What type of work do you do on planes, trains and buses?

February and March are two very busy workshifting months for AJ and myself.  We are going to conferences, meeting with clients, launching a client website and working on a charity project all while trying to keep our company and team productive.  We have traveled to the UK every six months for the past two years and have had many experiences with their internet options.  So here is what I have discovered. You have three options internet cafes, wifi in cafes or hotels or USB internet broadband cards.  

Internet Cafes usually give you decent speeds for up to 2 pounds an hour.  This is the only place I have been able to make Skype calls on a consistent basis.  However, you have to sit in the same, smelly place for hours.  And hour over hour you end of spending a significant amount of money.  

Wifi in cafes is extremely unreliable and can be expensive although it is available.  In most of my experiences with wifi in hotels I usually end of paying between 10 to 20 pounds per day, which just isn't a realistic option.  However McDonalds, of all places, has free wifi that is pretty reliable.

USB broadband cards are your best option for stable internet for email and general work on the internet.  You can buy a broadband card from Vodafone for 25 pounds which includes 3 gigs of internet usage.  You can also go with T-Mobile, the cost for the card is 20 pounds and you pay 2 pounds each day for 'unlimited' web usage. However, you cannot use Skype with T-Mobile and if you run too many applications at the same times (TweetDeck, Gmail, Facebook, Google Docs) then your bandwidth will be severely limited.  

Those are your options, here is what I suggest: Buy a Vodafone broadband card for 25 pounds for general use and if you need to have meetings with your team over Skype go to the internet cafe.  Also the UK has automatic content lock on all devices that access the internet so show your ID and ask for the content lock to be removed if you want to use Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube or other social networks.  

What are you suggestions for internet connectivity abroad?

Photo Credit: AJ Leon

Recently I have been reading the Starfish and the Spider, a book I have been meaning to read for a while now.  Finally I started it and I am half way through.  As I was reading the first couple chapters there were a few things that made me think of workshifters.  In the first section of the book there is a discussion about decentralized organizations, this is where I started to see direct correlations to workshifters.  

In the book, Brafman and Beckstrom make the point that in a decentralized organization, a starfish organization, to be productive there needs to be a core set of principles that remain constant.  The best example for this is the reference to Alcoholics Anonymous.  Anyone can start a group.  However, the recovery process is exactly the same.  The core principle is the recovery process, but anyone can start a group in any place they want.  This should remain the same for any workshifter.  We should have a consistent set of core principles and/or behaviors regardless of where we are working.  

For instance, in our company, we ask all our employees to log their time in Less Time Spent so that we can manage client hours, we use Basecamp to manage projects and we meet on Skype daily with our project manager to discuss what's on deck for the day.  Those are our core principles that remain constant no matter where we are workshifting.  This is what allows us to be starfish workshifters, no matter what environment we are in we can work productively keeping our core principles in tact.

If you are thinking of allowing your team to start workshifting, you should develop a set of  guidelines that remain constant such as work product or work process.  This will allow your team to workshift while still remaining productive.  

What are the core principle that remain the same for your workshifters?

Photo Credit: Topyti