REPRISE: Wearable Tech in the Oil Field

Note: The blog is taking some well-deserved rest for the Holidays (that is code for I am pretty much out of decent ideas, and I doubt most folks are spending their holidays reading blogs anyway), and will be re-running some of best, or at least most interesting posts from 2014. Maybe you missed these the first time around or maybe you didn't really miss them, but either way they are presented for your consideration. Thanks to everyone who stopped by in 2014!

The below post first ran back in June and features an amazingly cool two-and-a-half minute video showcasing a real world and real workplace application of wearable technology. Wearables like Google Glass might never catch on as a consumer device, but almost certainly will have a big role in all kinds of work applications. I liked this video so much I used it as an example in two or three talks I did in 2014 and it was almost always met with 'Wows' from the audience. Hope you enjoy it if you have not seen it yet.

Fresh 2015 content resumes next Monday - have a great weekend!

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VIDEO: Wearable Tech in the Oil Field

Quick shot for a busy Friday - if you are at all interested in how, where, and for which type of workplace use cases are likely to be impacted by the introduction of wearable technologies like Google Glass, then check out this short video from Wearable Intelligence, a developer of custom applications for industry that can be deployed on the Glass platform (Email and RSS subscribers will need to click through).

In the video embedded below, we see how custom apps overlaid on the Glass device, allow field workers to access training information, log status reports, verify safety procedures have been followed and more - all while keeping their hands free to actually get their work done.  

Really interesting and definitely cool, right?

Glass and probably eventually other wearable devices are going to become one of the essential tools for the types of field workers that need to simultaneously access and interact with lots of data and content, but also can't have their hands tied up with smartphones or tablets, since they actually have to work with their hands.

It is early days, but as you can see in the video the possibilities are almost endless.

And one more thing, I doubt any Glass-hating types would dare to hassle any of these oil field workers that you see in the video for wearing Glass. The irony in all this? Glass and other wearables might end up developing into a real working person's tool as much as a prop for the snobby elites.

Have a great weekend!

REPRISE: How far would you commute each day for your dream job?

Note: The blog is taking some well-deserved rest for the next few days (that is code for I am pretty much out of decent ideas, and I doubt most folks are spending their holidays reading blogs anyway), and will be re-running some of best, or at least most interesting posts from 2014. Maybe you missed these the first time around or maybe you didn't really miss them, but either way they are presented for your consideration. Thanks to everyone who stopped by in 2014!

The below post first ran back in June and was a good example of a non-robot, non-technology, and non-sports type post that for some reason seemed to resonate a little bit. It hit on a normal issue for careers and workplaces - commuting, and the challenges that really long commutes to work can present. The example in the post is pretty extreme, but I think it helps us think about the kinds of 'life' tradeoffs we are willing to make for 'work'.

 Happy New Year's Eve!

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How far would you commute each day for your dream job? 

How far would you be willing to commute, (to keep it simple let's assume we are talking about commuting via driving your personal car), in order to work at your dream company/job?

I have to admit it is not a question I have personally thought about very much these last few years as my 'commute', if you could call it that, has typically been taking a short flight of stairs to my lower-level office/lair/Fortress of Solitude.  But lots of folks, heck still the large majority I think, are making the pretty much daily grind to an office, store, warehouse or whatnot. Despite how much we like to talk about the nature and practice of work and workplaces changing, for most of us 'work' remains a place we physically go to just about every day.

So how far of a drive is too far?

I only thought about the question this week after reading a post on the LinkedIn blog titled, Inside Story: LinkedIn’s VP of Mobile on Driving in the Snow, Houzz and Anticipatory Computing. I clicked through to the piece because of the 'Anticipatory Computing' phrase, that just sounded really interesting and cool, but as it turns out the more interesting nugget from the post was about how this VP from LinkedIn (Joff Redfern) had a ridiculous commute his first four years with the company.

How ridiculous? Check this Q and A from the piece:

Q: What’s not on your LinkedIn Profile?

A: During my first four years at LinkedIn, I had one of the longest commutes. I lived in Lake Tahoe, California, but worked out of headquarters in Mountain View, California. It’s about 250 miles each way, so I put over 110,000 miles on my car. That’s the equivalent of driving around the world more than four times. It gave me lots of time to think and one of the benefits is that I’m pretty awesome at driving in the snow. 

Did I read that correctly? 250 miles each way to get to the office? Even taking into account the fact that there was probably no way Mr. Redfern was making a 500 mile round trip every single work day, even still, just a couple of times a week that kind of a grind will be almost impossible to sustain.

How someone could manage a commute that crazy, and not go insane is kind of an interesting question I think, and you could substitute '500 mile commute' with, 'Has to work 18-hour days for a year in order to ship our first product'. I think there are at least three key elements you'd have to have in place in order to make it work:

1. The work itself has to be an ideal (for you) combination of challenge/excitement/opportunity/reward that will set you up perfectly for the next 10-15 years of your career such that you simply have to bite the bullet and devote yourself to that work for a year or two (or four).

2. You either have to have just about zero responsibilities outside of work (no spouse/significant other/kids/dog etc.) that might either literally starve (in the case of a dog) or be starved for attention (every other person in your life), since you are working all of the time. Or, you have someone in your life who has decided that they will take care of everything outside of work for you while you are working all of the time. I suspect it would be really tough for anyone to pull off a regular 500 mile commute if they had a spouse, a couple of kids maybe, at home that they actually wanted to see awake once in a while.

3.  You have to be (reasonably) healthy before taking on such a grind. The combination of working crazy long hours and a long commute will start to break you down physically (and likely mentally too). You will eventually start eating poorly, not getting enough exercise, definitely not enough sleep and that combination starts to take a toll. If you are not set up to reasonably handle that kind of physical punishment you are more likely to end up in an ER somewhere than accepting a fat bonus check or a bunch of stock options for your hard work. Everyone can handle a long day or two or maybe five, but keep stacking them up, week after week and month after month? Good luck with that.

So how far are you willing to commute for your dream job?

Permanent Availability

Good Monday morning!

Let me ask you something, and be honest - Did you check your work email over the weekend? Tap out any quick messages or replies from your smartphone while you were out shopping or at the football game or 'spending time with family?'

I bet you did.

Everyone does it seems these days.

This is not a brand new story, but it popped up again over the weekend - Germany Examines Ban on Employees Checking Work Email at Home, a review of some potential legislation to effectively eliminate most 'off-hours' Emails in that country. The country's Labor Minister Andrea Nahles says that it is "indisputable that there is a connection between permanent availability and psychological diseases." 

Love that line. 

It sounds a little far-fetched, but even the idea that some combination of workaholism, unhealthy workplace culture and expectations, and enabled by technology that leads to this notion of 'permanent availability' could lead to psychological diseases is at least fascinating.

And some German companies like Volkswagen, at least partially driven by work contracts and labor rules are adopting the 'no Email after hours' policies. So whether it becomes a government forced mandate or an employer-driven initiative (and possibly something that is collectively bargained), it seems there is at least some traction developing in Germany for a ban or at least a significant restriction on after-hours work communications.

Let's jump back across the pond to the USA, where those two conditions, some kind of a ban on after-hours email via legislation, or individual company/labor contract agreements to effect the same, are very unlikely. 

So then, why should we Americans care or even think about this?

Well for two reasons I think.

One, regardless of where you are from, if there is some validity to Labor Minister Nahles' claim that email addiction can lead to psychological diseases, then we 'always on' American worker types are even more in jeopardy of falling victim to burnout, stress, depression, and such.

And two, as HR and business leaders, it probably is time to think about the workplace effects of this new 'permanent availability' with respect to productivity, engagement, retention, and overall performance. Are we really getting the best or most optimal performance, (and working towards being a great/super/amazing/classy place to work), if we have as an organization effectively expanded everyone's working hours to, essentially, all of the time?

Some time back I postulated that you could discover everything about a company's culture by examining one weekend's worth of corporate email traffic.

How much email volume is there on the weekend? Who is driving that? How are the response rates and times, particularly when upper management is sending emails out to subordinates? 

That kind of thing.

I think if you believe that doing great HR is really about helping organizations perform at their best, that you should be paying attention to what is going on with these 'banning after-hours email' issues. Because even if you know that these bans will never take effect in the US, the reasons that they are even being considered are pretty important, and universal.

Have a great week! 

CHART OF THE DAY: How we spend our time

Today's Chart of the Day comes from our friends at the Bureau of Labor Statistics from their recent American Time Use Survey, which collects information about the activities people do during the day and how much time they spend doing them.

So what do most of us (employed people ages 25 - 54 who have kids under 18 at home) do all day, or at least all 'work' day? Here is the chart and some FREE comments (lamentations) from me after the data:

A few things stand out really quickly from this data of the average 24-hour work day:

1. While the average person sleeps just a shade under 8 hours a day, I don't know anyone that is likely to report that much sleep. It seems like most folks I know are maybe getting 6.5 or 7 hours a night. So the 7.7 seems really high, what do you think?

2. The single largest slice of the average day, unsurprisingly, is work (and related activities including commuting from/to work), with 8.7 hours per day spent. That kind of seems in line to me although I bet if you ask around your circle of friends and colleagues most people will say they work more than that. I kind of think there could be some fudging in both the survey numbers and what folks talk about privately as well. We like to think we work more than we do, but come on, are you really grinding away 10 or 12 hours a day like you would like (certain) people to believe?

3. The most interesting thing about the chart, and for many of us, also the most interesting thing about how we spend our time, is what we say we are doing when we are not at work or asleep. Taking out the 'responsible' stuff from the chart (taking care of others, household activities), and that still leaves something like 5 - 6 hours a day (remember, these are working days), of more or less 'free' time. No one I know will admit that they feel like they have that much free or leisure time each day. 

I don't have any really prescient or even pithy conclusions to draw from this data except for just thinking about (and similar to what I blogged about earlier in the week), how I am spending my time and whether or not I am getting closer to the various goals I have.

What do you think? How does your day stack up against this data?

Have a great day.

The best productivity app...

...is not some new system or process or technology or yet the umpteenth re-imagining of the 'To-do list' - ('This time it is better! We have gamified, mobile-enabled, and socially powered the 'To-do' beyond a simple list and into a cloud-based 'List-as-a-service' platform!)

I think the best hack or approach to understanding why you are not getting enough (or anything) done (this can be at work, with personal stuff like fitness, or even hobbies), is to first understand just how you are spending your time and attention in the first place. And more importantly, whether that 'thing' you are doing RIGHT NOW is getting you closer to your goals for the day/week/lifetime or farther away.

So despite all of the more sophisticated ways to try and monitor and track productivity, like apps that can sit in your browser and monitor which sites you visit and how long you spend on them and for keeping track of offline activities you can keep some kind of activity log or journal (Note: you will give up on this in about 2.3 days), and finally for fitness/exercise there are a slew of apps and gadgets that can help you keep track of the time spent exercising, we still (most of us anyway), hit the end of the day/week/month not having made enough progress on the really important items we need to get accomplished.

We have the ability to monitor/track/analyze everything, yet we still feel like we are coming up short. And that is kind of a crap feeling at the end of the day or week or year. (Admittedly, I started thinking about this when I saw the date today was December 1, and time is growing really short to get completed some '2014' goals I had).

So let's circle back to the title of this post, 'The best productivity app'. I imagine it will get at least a few clicks from people that see that headline and think 'Yes, I need that! What is the name of that App?'

The terrible news is that I have no idea what the best productivity App might be, there is an entire cottage industry of productivity 'experts' to offer their thoughts on that question. Google them, I guess.

But since I baited and switched you with that title, I will offer my take on what the best Productivity app would do.

It will have one input box that asks you 'What is the most important thing you need to get done?' 

It will also have a checkbox indicator type setting, (minutes, hours, days, etc.), where you would set up periodic 'push' notifications that will ask you the following question:

Is what you are doing RIGHT NOW getting you closer to completing XYZ, (the 'important thing' you need to get done), and you would close the notification by saying 'Yes' or 'No'.

And that is it. That is the entire app.

No integration with Evernote or Slack or Trello.

No fancy dashboards or social sharing capability.

No API so you can share the data from the 'Stop doing stupid things' app, (that may or may not be the name, but it doesn't matter), with your favorite fitness watch.

And you would not be able to shut off the notifications (short of deleting the app), until you mark that 'Important thing' done, (and you could set up a new one from there).

Maybe there is an App out there already that does this, but failing that, anyone (me too), can set it up pretty easily with recurring calendar events/notifications. The technology doesn't really matter. What matters is the question and the answer.

Is what you are doing RIGHT NOW getting you closer to completing XYZ, (the 'important thing' you need to get done?)

Have a great week!