The woman standing next to me on the platform finished checking her email, and I smiled knowingly. It was my afternoon off, all my clients knew it, but I still felt compelled to acknowledge a couple of messages myself.

She was headed to the dentist, running late because she had tried to get that "one more thing" done before she took off. And she was still trying.

Does workshifting tether us to the job more?

Don't get me wrong - I love the freedom that technology brings. And Wi-Fi is awesomeness. But it used to be that when you left the office, you were gone. People didn't expect to hear from you until the next day. Now people are taking calls and emailing documents from the beach (which is fine when you're working at the beach). But the downside of this results-only workplace stuff is that we're swapping our downtime for "work where you want, when you want, but be reachable."

Maybe it's not workshifting, but perhaps we ought to be a little bit more careful about what we wish for. Or maybe it's just about reestablishing boundaries for ourselves.

What say you?

Photo credit: Pulpolux !!!

We're easily distracted.

The phone rings. A co-worker drops by. The neighbors chat loudly. Unfortunately, with so many attention-grabbing interruptions, staying focused at work can become its own job.

Many workshifters stand by the virtues of the home workspace, which can help alleviate many of these concerns (while admittedly adding others). But what if you're stuck on a train or plane? Or changing things up with a café visit?

These settings can't be controlled nearly as well. Many offices are designed to minimize noise, but public transit and your local eatery surely are not. So how do you cope?

The next time you're working away from both the office and home, don't worry about relocating to avoid distractions. Here's what you can do instead.

Interrupt your interruptions.

With so many diversions readily available for your attention-stealing pleasure, you shouldn't be adding more to the mix.

Although I'd love to press mute on the overly chatty preteen in the corner, I make do with silencing what I've brought with me. A recent study found that out of the top 5 daily interruptions, 4 were technology based.

This makes the solution simple: shut the phone off or leave it on silent and inconveniently far away. Turn off those email alerts that peek in every time you're just getting into your groove. (You can designate specific times to check email instead.) Download software that prevents you from falling into a Twitter or Facebook binge by blocking the sites entirely.

Please don't stop the music!

Pick a favorite Pandora station, throw on some headphones and let the music drown out the distractions.

But Nik, you might say, isn't the music itself distracting? Not if you've got the right genre playing, my dear reader. As much as you might be into Scandinavian death metal (warning: turn down your speakers), the more subdued, atmospheric and instrumental the song is, the more it can help you tune in and then tune out.

The research proves it, too. Productivity-hindering background chatter can be successfully brushed off with background music.

Reel your mind back in.

Good concentration is hard to hold. Looking out the window or eavesdropping on a stranger's conversation is just so easy in comparison. But if you want to be able to work anywhere, you need to train your focus just like any other skill.

You may have heard of the Pomodoro Technique and time-boxing before, which work by compromising with your diversions. But if you still can't concentrate, studies have shown that practicing simple meditation-based breathing can help you build focus and ignore distractions.

To do this, breathe deep belly breaths with your eyes closed. As you go, pay attention to your breathing and whenever you catch your thought train leaving the station, pull the emergency cord and hop off. Refocus on your breathing.

Practice this whenever you get the time. Eventually, you'll start noticing your mind wandering in other situations like conversation or work, and you will be able to just reel yourself back in.

Next time you have trouble concentrating at the café, give these tips a try. You may find that you can work just as well as you do in your normal office.

Photo credit: nicholasjon

Today we have a guest post from Erran Carmel. Erran is a management professor at the American University Kogod School of Business in Washington, D.C. His new coauthored book is titled I'm Working While They're Sleeping: Time Zone Separation Challenges and Solutions.

Timeshifting while workshifting is a key challenge for the global professional.Timeshifting means adjusting your schedule to accommodate someone else's work hours in order to synchronize and "converge" in your thinking from many time zones away.

Timeshifters stay up till 10:00 PM to meet with a colleague in Beijing. Timeshifters decree that every Wednesday is Tel Aviv Day, and the U.S.-based worker starts at 5:00 AM to overlap schedules with the distant tech team.

In fact, timeshifting is so critical that we devoted an entire chapter to this subject in our new book about coordination across time zones. (This post is abridged from chapter 1.) We also coined a term for the hero of our book: the zoner. Zoners are the globalized workers who are comfortable timeshifting and traveling across time zones.

Zoners have a deeply ingrained sense of temporal distance. We think that this temporal awareness is analogous to spatial ability: there are those who can read maps and take directions well and those who cannot (who are frequently lost). We think zoners are born with some of their abilities, but these, of course, are refined with experience.

Zoners are less likely to be confused by time zone computations, while others never seem to remember how many time zones away California happens to be, habitually missing meetings because of the misunderstanding. Zoners are able to keep in mind the perennial problem of time-zone differences.

The tools and tricks zoners use

Zoners use timeanddate.com, everytimezone.com and worldtimebuddy.com when adjusting the time zone on their Outlook calendars and smartphones. They pack their bags with melatonin, and when they wake up in a strange place, they always know what time it is. Zoners are also good sleepers, since their life involves a lot of timeshifting.

They also know the special tricks of multi-time-zone work. For example, one important trick is to tackle time-zone-induced delays by breaking the email chain. The email chain begins when, in asynchronous communication, the sender initiates a message, and the receiver on the other side of the globe asks for clarification. The original sender attempts to explain, but the receiver, still confused, sends another request for clarification. Meanwhile, an entire week has passed. Zoners stop this chain early by picking up the phone to clarify the message and move the task along.

Are you a zoner? Share your stories and strategies below.

Photo credit: Thomas Hawk

Today's post is from Seamus King, Country Leader for Australia, Citrix Online Services Division.

I'm delighted to see that Australian organizations are ahead of the game when it comes to offering mobile work styles. Recent research from the Citrix Global Workshifting Index shows that locally, around 40 percent of companies currently offer workshifting to employees and by 2013 that figure is set to rise to 95 percent, which is slightly above the global average. It is great to see Australia leading the pack.

Workshifting is highly valuable to individuals but also to companies - offering a unique win-win situation.

I recently heard of a really great example of how workshifting actually enabled a company to retain the best talent for the job while the individual was able to maintain a happy relationship with his family.

About a year ago, a possible dilemma was presented to a professional couple. The wife had asked the husband to move to Indonesia because she was getting a job transfer. At first, he had all sorts of doom visions - giving up his career, moving to a country where he didn't speak the language and needing to find a new job. Although his wife was transferring with her company, the single pay check would probably not be enough to support them both in the lifestyle they were accustomed to. Plus, he enjoyed his job and wanted to work and feel that he was contributing and adding value.

The choice was this - either he stay behind, turning his marriage into a long-distance relationship for the sake of his job, or else he try to find a new job in Indonesia, which would probably mean having to take a step down in his career as well as maybe even a pay cut.

For his company the problem would be that they were about to lose a great employee and would have to find and train a replacement. Rather than losing a valued member of their team, the gentleman's company decided they would trial letting him work remotely from Indonesia. Thanks to the company's desktop virtualization solution, and collaboration tools such as Citrix GoToMeeting, he was able to easily work not just away from the office, but on another continent.

A daunting move turned into a brilliant opportunity; he was able to experience the excitement of a new country and keep his current job and income. Six months later, the trial turned out to be quite successful and a win-win situation for the company and the couple.

Organizations are recognizing that giving people the ability to work from anywhere can benefit both parties. The business reaps the rewards of a highly mobile and agile business with increased productivity and lower costs, while people have the flexibility to choose the ideal time, place and device for their work.

Workshifting really makes a difference - not just to employees, but to companies as well. It offers a unique ability to improve work-life balance and to provide a level of flexibility that may not have been attainable with the more traditional work style of the past. I am really pleased to see more businesses globally are embracing mobile work styles, as it will change the way we work and the way we live.

Photo credit: WTL Photos

On Wednesday, we showed you how to add movement into your workshifting routine. Read below for a more extreme version from Citrix's own Chris Latham.

Santa Barbara local Chris Latham, a manager on the Citrix Customer Insights team, has been competing in triathlons for 15 years. Currently she's training for the 2012 Ironman Hawaii 70.3 race located on the Kohala Coast of the Big Island. While Santa Barbara is a great place to train for these kinds of events, there's no substitute for training on location, which allows athletes to become better acclimated and more familiar with the route.

So what's a motivated Citrix triathlete to do? Workshift from Hawaii, of course!

Chris has made a detailed plan on how to realize her dream of training on location while keeping up with her job from March 28 to July 2. From getting manager approval, to gathering the work gear she needs, to finding housing, Chris has got it all figured out.

Get Manager Approval

Before she did anything else, Chris made sure to discuss her workshifting plan with her manager. Together they made sure that Chris would be able to meet all the requirements of her position and made plans for how Chris would communicate with her team while she is in Hawaii.

Get The Gear

After talking with the IT department, Chris discovered that the only things she needed in addition to her usual "occasional workshifting" setup were a wireless data modem (so she can literally work at the beach!) and a VPN connection to provide instant access to the network without having to provide a different connection.

Hardware

• Laptop with power cord
• VoIP headset
• Wireless data modem (Verizon or AT&T)
• Mobile phone
• Pad of paper
• Mechanical pencil

Software

• VPN
• GoToMeeting
• GoToMyPC

Kona Coffee (optional)

Get a Place to Stay

To save on housing costs, Chris used Airbnb.com, an online service that connects people who want to host guests with people who need a place to stay. Then she found someone to sublet her apartment just by spreading the word through her friends on Facebook.

Turns out, getting ready to workshift was surprisingly easy. All that remains for Chris to do is to work, train and race.

Get Going!

The Hawaii 70.3 (or Honu) on June 2 is a 70-mile triathlon, consisting of a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile bike ride and a 13.1-mile run. Chris will be competing with over 1,600 other athletes, including 7-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong. (No pressure, Chris!)

As part of her preparation for the big Honu race, Chris will also be doing the running leg of the Lavaman triathlon on April 1 and competing in various 6-man canoe races at the Kai Opua canoe club from May through June (just for fun).

Chris has a lot of hard training ahead, but she couldn't ask for a better place to do it - or a better workshifting arrangement.

Today, we have a guest post from Baxter Denney, Manager, Database Marketing at Citrix Online. Baxter recently returned from a month-long trip to New Zealand that was half vacation, half workshifting. Below are some tips on how Baxter stayed connected with limited bandwidth.

Simply stated, Americans are connected. We are information obese - with broadband and unlimited data plans feeding phones "more computer power than all of NASA [had] when it sent two astronauts to the moon."

You would think this constant stream of information would breed expert sifters able to navigate the deluge of data efficiently, but the truth is the human brain cannot handle so much information so quickly.

Josh Foer, author and memory champ, sums up the current information wave pretty well in Moonwalking with Einstein: "Much as our taste for sugar and fat may have served us well in a world of scarce nutrition but is now maladaptive in a world of ubiquitous fast-food joints, our memories aren't perfectly adapted for our contemporary information age."

The hyper-connected among us argue that the fire hose of information is a competitive advantage when it comes to business: more information allows things to move more quickly. But with all due respect to the late Senator Ted Stevens, are we just clogging up our own series of tubes?

I have been conducting my own personal experiment in connectivity during a month-long stint in New Zealand. While the main goal of the trip is to vacation, I am workshifting half the time. Knowing I would need Internet, I booked hotels with wireless access.

What I did not realize is that bandwidth in New Zealand is scarce - in my first hotel, the daily limit was 50 MB (about 10 songs, a few minutes of video or 10-15 medium-sized slideshow or spreadsheet files). Just downloading my work inbox after a few days away took at least half my daily amount. I could try and adapt, or I could break out the credit card time and time again as I hit my daily limit repeatedly. Since I neither trade stocks nor put lives at risk if I reply slowly, I had some flexibility in addressing the low-bandwidth challenge.

Here is how I have adjusted:

1. Download judiciously.

Office workers are used to instantaneous email messages, with giant attachments just begging to be opened and viewed. In Outlook, you can set the server to only download "headers" - the subject and sender information, the first few lines of plain text, no graphics or attachments.

You can then make the download call on an email-by-email basis. I found that about 80 percent of the emails I ended up filing for later action or deletion did not need a full read.

2. Meet sparingly.

Before agreeing to meet online, make sure the cause is worthy. If the meeting invitation doesn't have a clear goal, or your input really isn't going to add value, decline it. It may seem like heresy to refuse to meet with someone, but you can often ask the organizer for the meeting objective and then achieve the goals without having to actually meet.

If you do need to meet, keep a laser focus on the meeting goal. (David Allen suggests picturing the ideal meeting conclusion and then working backward to figure out how to achieve it.)

In order to save bandwidth, I often find myself having "IM meetings" as a nice complement to GoToMeeting. You get the spontaneity and real-time response of a meeting without the usage concerns. In GoToMeeting sessions, disable webcams (both showing and viewing) and limit the time you share your own screen.

3. Unplug and execute.

At my organization, very few job descriptions have "read and respond to email" as a primary requirement. Yet it's not difficult to get buried in your inbox all day only to find you haven't accomplished much at all.

Much of the urgency we feel in email communications is an effect of recency. Whatever is happening RIGHT NOW is most important, right? Maybe, but probably not.

While correspondence with colleagues is a critical component of my job, I also need to spend time thinking, planning, reviewing and creating - most of which can be done offline. After handling the truly urgent requests (and, of course, noting meeting times and such), I will close Outlook and work through my offline tasks. I have been able to make significant progress on project planning, reviewing thought-leadership pieces I had set aside, responding to older, lower priority messages and completing many administrative tasks I was continuously putting off.

With no threat of interruption, I was able to get these things done much quicker than usual. On a typical day, I might be able to do 3-4 significant tasks, but when disconnected, I am doubling that.

4. Forget your status.

Image-heavy sites like Facebook, Pinterest and ESPN are bandwidth killers. They are also ways we distract ourselves from our job. When the natural wonders of New Zealand are outside my hotel room, the last place I want to spend time is online reading about my friends' lunch check-ins or checking NBA scores. I limited myself to 2 sessions each day of 5 minutes or fewer for social networking sites and have not missed it since.

The bottom line is that most job challenges are ones we create ourselves and not a function of how connected we are or how quickly we respond. While it would be a lie to say I am as good at my job in New Zealand as I am in the U.S., I have tried to turn my connection challenges into advantages. (I am writing this on a coach bus from Picton to Nelson, for instance).

Hopefully, I can apply these lessons to my job when I am stateside. I would love to hear how others have adjusted to similar challenges while workshifting in foreign lands, so please share them with me via the comments or @tbdenney.

Here at Workshifting, we've talked many times about the benefits of telework and shared numerous reports about its value to your company. Today, we're offering a visual approach because sometimes pictures and images are just quicker than words alone are.

Compliments of Splashtop and Column Five, this infographic tells us all about the new push to work from home on Fridays.  

Has your company joined the movement? Leave us a comment!

Our third post in the Telework Week 2012 series is a guest post from Mick Hollison, who is Vice President of Marketing and Strategy at Citrix.  As vice president of marketing and strategy, Mick leads integrated product marketing and strategy for Citrix including being responsible for integrated product messaging, marketing strategy, and marketing operations. He is also charged with improving the customer and partner experience when trying or buying Citrix products.

The way we work is changing and there is no stopping it. As organizations look to maximize business agility and productivity while ensuring they can attract and retain the best possible talent, the adoption of workshifting continues to rise.  In yesterday's PC era, workshifters were the exception to an overwhelmingly office-centric workforce.  In today's cloud era, they are becoming the assumption.

But what does workshifting really entail and how can offering a more flexible work environment benefit both organizations and people?

Well workshifting, in its simplest form, is the movement of work to the most optimal locations, times and resources. Workplace trends, including the consumerization of IT and increasing adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYO), continue to drive workshifting adoption.   But just how many enlightened organizations are really adopting workshifting? Well, according to a recent global workshifting survey conducted by Citrix, 93 percent of organizations reported their intention to provide flexible work environments by 2013.

Why is workshifting so hot?  Primarily, it is because workshifting allows people who work from home or mobile employees to work anytime, anyplace, and on the device of their choosing.  Many IT decision-makers are well aware of these benefits, and in our survey, 71 percent indicated they are using new workshifting policies to enable employees to shift work to the times, places, and devices that work best for them.  The best part about workshifting is that the benefits aren't limited to the employee. In fact, they extend to the business itself in a number of key ways.

Lower costs, top-notch people, great customer service - what's not to love?

• Reduced business costs - In our survey, 68 percent of organizations believed this was key. Real estate, travel and labor costs can all be minimized through an optimized workshifting policy.

• Attracting and retaining top talent - People have grown to expect flexibility.  Having the ability to work in the location of their choice is a prerequisite for many employees. Organizations can also differentiate from competitors and cut recruitment costs if they enable workshifting.

• Increasing the labor pool- Organizations can employ previously hard to reach people such as parents with family commitments or people with restrictions on the time they can spend in the office.  Simply put, workshifting allows businesses to hire the very best people, no matter where they're physically located.

• Better serve customers - Fifty one percent of senior IT decision makers noted that deploying workers closer to key customers ensured a better, more consistent customer service experience.

Shower the people with love...

• Work/life balance - A happy workforce is a more productive workforce - workshifting enables people to choose when they work based on balancing personal and professional commitments rather than nine-to-five working hours.

• Improve flexibility - Workshifting provides people the option to choose the preferred time, place and device for their work. By adapting their environment to their work style, or body clock, people can drastically improve personal productivity.

• Increased personal productivity - There is nothing better than the feeling of accomplishment. 64 percent of organizations surveyed cited increased productivity as a common goal.
  
  

Workshifting is now a practical proposition for all types of organizations. High-speed internet access, 3G/4G wireless communications and portable computing devices such as smartphones, laptops and tablets empower people to be productive outside of the traditional office environment.  Underpinning this work trend is an important technology trend - desktop virtualization. It enables companies and staff to do much more with less. Companies need no persuasion: more than 9 out of 10 organizations (91 percent) plan use desktop virtualization by 2013 and they are already seeing the benefits, most notably:

• The power to "say yes" to an increasingly mobile workforce with universal device access

• Lower costs via a centralized IT delivery model for all desktops and apps

• A secure-by-design infrastructure that controls access and protects data

• Built-in business continuity, providing 24/7 access for all users, even in an emergency

So, as businesses and organizations around the globe race to develop their own workshifting plans, they should feel safe in knowing they aren't alone.  The basic technologies for enabling an increasingly distributed workforce are also readily available, but if they want to differentiate from their competitors - they better get crackin'!

Photo Credit: novecentino

For the second post in our Telework Week 2012 series, we have a guest post from Sean Ogle (@seanogle). Sean is an expert at helping people turn their passions and skill-sets into sustainable businesses that can be run from anywhere on Earth. As the founder of Location 180 and Location Rebel he uses the power of his blog to get the message out of the benefits of remote work and lifestyle entrepreneurship.

In late 2009 I quit my job as a financial analyst to build a business online. In the years since I've worked everywhere from the beaches of Bali, to the mountains of Colorado, to my home in Portland, Oregon.

When I began my foray into online work, I spent six months working out of a small apartment in Bangkok, managing a team of designers and developers for a product development and e-commerce organization. This meant that on any given day I was working with and managing people on three different continents, and in just as many time zones.

It was a pretty exciting concept at first. I couldn't wait for more personal flexibility in my day-to-day life. Simple things like the ability to work out when I wanted, and more free time for family and friends were some of the biggest draws.

However, I very quickly realized that my new lifestyle required a few adjustments in my thinking order for me to maximize its benefits.

Separate Work from Your Personal Life

The first lesson I learned when I began workshifting is that when you work from home you need to set much clearer boundaries between work and your personal life.

When your office is just ten feet from your bedroom, or in the case of my studio apartment, in your bedroom, it's tough to get away. I'd wake up early to talk to the sales team in the United States before they went home for the day, talk with our intern in London, and then spend the afternoon working with our developers in the Philippines. I'd then end up staying up late to catch the sales team first thing in the morning, turning what used to be a standard8-hour day into a 16-hour horseshoe-shaped schedule.

Due to the evolution in technology, being outside the office can very easily make you more accessible than you are when you're at your workplace - so set your limits and don't be afraid to communicate them with your team. Create a schedule that works for you and your business and stick to it.

Make Time to Communicate

One of the things I was looking forward to most about working remotely was the prospect of enjoying more free time.

Unfortunately, that wasn't quite the case.

While yes, I did have more freedom to roam around the house, or go work from a coffee shop or co-working space, I still had to work as much as I ever did, and sometimes more.

One additional requirement of workshifting was the need for more frequent communication. Without seeing people face-to-face on a regular basis, I found I needed to more consistently communicate the status of projects and show how they were moving forward. This took a little more time than I expected, but it helped my company see that I was as productive as ever in my remote work environment and it kept me in the loop with my team.

Due to this, for the first few months I ended up actually taking less time for myself, until I had established a more regular communication schedule and created a strong track record for remote reliability.

Find New Social Outlets

The potential social black hole of remote working was perhaps the biggest surprise for me.

When you work from home, it's very easy to throw on your sweatpants, sit down at the computer and not leave for days at a time. If you aren't careful, your personal life can quickly disintegrate. Soon, loneliness can overshadow the benefits you previously enjoyed from your flexible work arrangement.

I learned this in the first few months and eventually started building social activities into my calendar. Whether it's meeting someone new for lunch, setting up a meeting in person, or simply going in to the office occasionally (if possible), it's important to continue to exercise your social skills and build relationships. You may even find new social outlets - like local clubs or professional organizations- that will enrich your life and forward your career.

It's Worth It

Now that I've been working remotely on various projects for over two years, I can safely say that workshifting is the ideal work situation for me. Not only has it made me a more productive and happier person, but it has helped me establish a more balanced lifestyle that I could never find in many corporate environments today.

Photo Credit: bramvera

This post is the third and final in our 3-part series called "Building Trust at Work", with Chris Brogan. Chris is president of Human Business Works, providing business, communications and emerging technology strategy for mid- to large-sized businesses. He blogs regularly at chrisbrogan.com.

While talking with Dan Heath, bestselling co-author of Made to Stick, I wanted to discover how we could use what we'd learned (in the previous talks with Dan Pink and Charlie Green) to help both leaders and employees build the foundations of trust necessary for remote work. Heath (and his brother Chip) is an expert on change, and that's why I went to him.

This change FEELS big.

Allowing employees to work remotely is a huge change, says Heath. Most managers and leaders are used to managing by sight in close proximity so that they can notice whether people seem busy. It feels like a major shift, this precedent of allowing people to work remotely, with no supervision and no sense of the outcome. That's why the next step is so important.

Shrink the change.

Heath points out that the best way to approach this change is to break it into small chunks, such as by explaining it's a trial or an experiment. If you ask the boss to trial it with 2 or 3 workers instead of the entire organization, and if you give it 3 months to succeed, then you'll have a better chance of getting the green light. Smaller changes mean that everyone feels a lot more comfortable in measuring what happens and understanding the impact.

What are the next steps?

We've missed something important if all we've done is decide to make the change smaller. You and your boss have to agree on what your definition of success will be and how it will be measured. Remember that we've got to shift from butts-in-chairs management to results-based management. We can't measure people by their responsiveness to email, because that just sets up your teams to be ready and eager for distractions from tasks. So what steps can you take to reach your goals?

1. Seek time milestones for projects. To measure against time is a way to see how distance doesn't matter.
2. Set participation goals. Being remote doesn't mean being out of the loop with office culture. Make sure meetings are kept and that you are able to facilitate collaboration the same as when you're in the office.
3. Consider a satisfaction survey. Even if you're just measuring this for your internal clients, ask for satisfaction ratings (simple ones) a month or two before you make the switch to remote work and then again for the first 3 months after you make the switch. Is anything negatively impacted?

There are literally dozens of ways you might consider measuring success. Be wary of how you want to frame this story, as it matters depending on which battle you're hoping to win.

One thing is for certain: selling the benefits of workshifting hinges on trust. And one way to establish trust is to build success stories between 2 parties, starting small but ending strong, which aligns well with the advice from Dan Heath.

What's your plan to increase trust at work? Which example resonated the most with you?