Happy 2015 Everyone!

We’re going to kick start the new year with a look at some new tools to help you be more efficient in the new year.

This post has been written by Monique Craig, a passionate blogger and marketing specialist who works for Oneflare, an online marketplace which connects customers with local service providers.

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All remote workers will at some point in their freelance operation face one great challenge – getting things done without any external supervision. If not for the deadlines that remind us about our work, we’d probably just end up flooded by everyday activities and forget that we had any projects to complete at all.

Fortunately, technology comes forward to help remote workers improve their concentration and their productivity – here are 6 new and lesser-known tools that can revolutionize the output of any freelancer who longs for that spark of inspiration to come their way.

MindMeister (http://mindmeister.com/)

This tool is perfect for brainstorming – after signing up, you’ll get access to a board where you’ll be able to create a mind map. You can add links, images and other media, connecting the dots in different ways to reflect your priorities. Once completed, the map can be easily shared with other people. Once they sign up, they’ll be able to see the map and edit it. Bonus point? The tool features a small chat box for real-time feedback and discussion.

IDoneThis (http://idonethis.com/)

This is an app that takes the ‘to do’ list making to the next level. Instead of writing things down, first you need to actually do these things and then capture all your completed tasks in the app. It’s perfect if you’re working with a team and want to track the project progress. The app will create a history of all your ‘dones’, which you can later show to your supervisors, without wasting time to compile a coherent list of tasks completed in a certain time frame.

Habit List (http://habitlistapp.com/)

We all lose a lot of time on unproductive habits. This tool will be perfect for either those who want to get rid of a habit that disrupts their work schedule or those who find it hard to establish a good habit that promotes productivity.

If hitting a gym three times a week or performing a backup procedure at the end of each working day is a challenge, the app can help you face it. Habit List will simply keep you motivated by giving you a buzz for repeating a desired action. Before you know it, the things you couldn’t get used to will become your new habits.

Producteev (https://www.producteev.com/)

This tool will provide you with a wide range of functionalities to keep your projects on track. You can create, assign and schedule tasks for yourself and your team members, later tracking their progress. It works across all kinds of devices and operating systems – the tool works great especially for dispersed teams, which can be updated at any place and time.

Pocket (https://getpocket.com/)

Integrated with Google, Pocket is an app for easily saving all kinds of web content – articles, video, images. All your items will be stored in one place and you’ll be able to later view and organize them on any device – even offline! Perfect for those who get easily distracted by cool web content and lose lots of time browsing it.

Crate (https://letscrate.com/)

This tool is a great alternative to other file sharing platforms, like Google Drive or Dropbox. With its intuitive drag and drop navigation, you’ll never lose time on searching and uploading your files. A single file or a collection – called a crate – can be shared by means of a single URL. If you’re a cloud enthusiast, you’ll simply love this tool.

Nobody promised working in remote to be easy. Still, all tools listed above might be just perfect for seasoned, as well as beginner freelance professionals wishing to improve their productivity and get more things done in less time.

Last week our internal Open Knowledge Summit took place at Downing College, Cambridge. The summit is a meetup of all Open Knowledge staff, where we put our laptops away and spend time working in groups on different key topics. As a dispersed organisation getting together physically at least once a year is essential to ensure we can function as a united and effective organisation.

Amazing work colleagues is what it’s all about!

While the previous two summits I’ve attended (written about here: July 2013, January 2014) have focused on our mission and external face this year we spent 5 days looking at how we work internally. Our sessions were kindly facilitated by Penny Handscomb from Omidyah Network, Fiona Thompson (our interim CEO) and Dirk Slater, founder of Fabriders (who facilitated last year’s retreat).

Open Knowledge is an usual organization, made up of a dispersed team and as such many issues that might not be so significant in other organisations get amplified. We also have to add into the mix that we are a non-profit with a core mission around openness and community building. Key issues for us are: building trust (of our management and of each other); internal communications; clarity around responsibility; rethinking of organisational structure; transparency of processes (including financial) and staff employment contracts.

You little RASCI!

One of the tools that we dedicated considerable time to during the week was RASCI, a form of responsibility alignment matrix. This is a way of ensuring clarity around strategically important decision-making. It can also be used for task implementation. RASCI stands for:

• Responsible – The person responsible for the decision
• Accountable – The person ultimately answerable for the quality of the decision (the buck stops here…)
• Support – Those allocated to help complete the decision making process
• Consulted – Those consulted about the decision (two-way communication)
• Informed – Those informed about the decision once made (one-way communication)

In the past quite a lot of confusion in the organisation has resulted from failure to specify a responsible individual and from misunderstanding by staff around who would be consulted.

In the Hopbine pub for a board games night. We liked ‘open data man’ in the Dweebies card deck!

Personal and Organisational Values

We carried out a series of enlightening exercises looking at values (both personal and organizational) and seeing how conflict arises when we feel our values are compromised. Here we had a look at the ladder of inference which leads us to jump to conclusions. During the week there was some great sharing as we started to recognize when this was happening!

Although I won’t share our list or internal organisational values here are a couple of my favourite quotes from the session:

Conclusions

I’d be lying if I said that the summit was easy, or even that enjoyable. It was hard work, complicated and at times extremely uncomfortable. In some ways it reminded me of the our Google Hangouts Christmas party – awkward but necessary. Asking difficult questions of yourself, or of your organization, is not a simple task but it can move you to a different, and hopefully better place. So by the end of the summit it felt as if we were all finally on the same page. The plan is now to take what we’ve learnt, sprinkle it with a little goodwill and move forward! Fingers crossed!

Our annual cheese competition. This year I won with a Wookey Hole Cheddar!

More images from the summit are available on Flickr

We all know that being a remote worker gets a bit lonely – it’s great to be able to reach out to colleagues when you can. I’ve written before about our efforts at creating our own watercooler spaces at Open Knowledge. In that post I said:

One of our team is a DJ on the side and he shares Spotify playlists with us most Fridays. These playlists are great and get us talking.

The fab Christian Villum who creates our playlists has now taken things one step further! He, and his OK:FM posse, are beginning to pull together our own OKFM radio station – be it an online station that exists through crowdsourced playlists!!

He began by asking the staff to suggest songs for the Open Knowledge “Songs About Change” playlist. I think the topic was chosen in response to our recent summit.

Christian then compiled all the suggestions (see some of our suggestions below) into a playlist, so that we have a proper soundtrack for the weeks to come! Here’s the Spotify playlist for Changes.

The plan is to collaborate on future playlists on areas we are interested in! And there may even be a Twitter account for OK:FM in the pipeline. Watch this space! Music really is the universal language!

The week before last I presented at the OER Schools conference in Leicester. The event was organised to support a landmark decision by Leicester Council to give blanket permission to teachers in the Leicester area employed by the council to share their learning and teaching resources under an open licence. All slides and videos from the day are now online.

One of the workshops I attended (led by Miles Berry, Principal Lecturer, Subject Leader for Computing Education at University of Roehampton) was looking at OER resource building in the area of computing – the idea behind it was to get students and teachers thinking about attribution and licensing). Some of the tools we looked at during the session made me reflect on a post I wrote about Children and technology back in January 2014.

The new UK Computing curriculum was published in September 2013 and aims to teach children “children computer science, information technology and digital literacy: teaching them how to code, and how to create their own programs; not just how to work a computer, but how a computer works and how to make it work for you.”

This is a significant rethinking and requires work beyond Powerpoint and spreadsheets! In the workshop I attended we were looking at KS1 and KS2 – for a full description of what is required to be taught at those levels see this PDF. At the start of the session Miles pointed out the curriculum clearly states that the should be time in the day for non-national curriculum activities. While many teachers laughed out loud at statement Miles suggested that they should use reference to justify work that they felt was appropriate – such as teaching about open content and licensing.

So here are some of the tools that we looked at or were mentioned during the session:

Coding tools

I mentioned Scratch in my previous post but here are a few tools that build on it:

• Enchanting is a free and open-source cross-platform educational programming language designed to program Lego Mindstorms NXT robots. It is powered by leJOS NXJ (Java for the NXT).
• Scratch Junior is from the MIT who’ve worked on Scratch. They’ve redesigned the Scratch interface and programming language to make it developmentally appropriate for younger children and released it as an app to be used on ipads and phones.

• Snap (formerly BYOB) is a visual, drag-and-drop programming language. It is an extended reimplementation of Scratch (a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab) that allows you to Build Your Own Blocks.

Image finding tools

We did quite a bit of work around finding usable images online. I attended a Jisc Digital Media workshop on this a while back, which gave me a good grounding. Other tools mentioned that I’d not come across include:

• Photo pin which uses the Flickr API and searches creative commons photos, very user friendly
• Pixabay which is great for Clipart

• John Johnston image search which gives you the embed code and allows you to stamp an image (and add the attribution to the actual image)
  

  Other stuff

  Other sites mention here are:

  • The South West Grid for Learning with lots of teaching resources and the SWGL Digital literacy area
  • Teaching Copyright from the Electronic Freedom Foundation and Copy Rights and Wrongs from the Education Network
  • Child Net International for ideas around net safety
  • Claire Lotriet’s blog with lots of great ideas about teaching computing

  Conclusions

  The OER Schools conference was an excellent event and for me is the first time I’ve really felt that open education and OERs is becoming mainstream and part of people’s everyday working practice. Open education, and open learning and teaching practices in particular, has a great deal to offer the distributed world that we live and work in. Young people need to learn about the brave new world we live in and be able to embrace the opportunities it brings. I’ll be looking out for any new work in this area!

  Miles has made his slides on how ‘to create a medium term plan to teach an aspect of IP or open licensing to primary pupils’ available from Google docs.

  
  Filed under: teaching Tagged: teaching

Time zones can be a bit of a nightmare for distributed teams. At Open Knowledge our staff stretch from the US to India with quite a few places in between. Sometimes when an all-staff meeting isn’t going that well it’s worth reflecting that someone might have got out of bed early for it while another person is ready for a good night’s rest.

Our fantastic systems guy Nigel Babu has put together a useful app for us all to use. He found it via a blog post from Doug Belshaw – a fellow remotie!

The app lets us see what time everyone else is on and where they live, you can also use arrow keys to try out different times – very useful for meeting organising! All the code is available on Github.

Just as an aside I use Worldtimebuddy to help me work out more general time zone queries. There is nothing so frustrating as missing an important meeting because you were working in the wrong time zone!

When I was made redundant from my previous job I discovered that finding a new remote working job wasn’t going to be an easy task. Back in 2012 I did a scout of remote Working policies at universities – most had little to offer. The future looked bleak! Luckily I started work for Open Knowledge!

Since then finding a remote working job has become a little easier. There is now quite a few websites dedicated to employing people

• Remotive – apparently “remote + productive = remotive”. This search site contains mainly developer type stuff (with partners from InVision, Zapier, iDoneThis, Sqwiggle, HelpScout, Ghost, Formstack, Blossom, Customer.io & CloudPeeps) but there are some other jobs on there.
• We Work Remotely is a site 37Signals on the back of their excellent ‘Remote’ book. You can also follow them on Twitter.
• Working Nomads – “A curated list of remote jobs, for the modern working nomad.” Mainly tech jobs.
• Remote Employment – Flexible home based jobs working from home. This used to be pretty good for more general types of job but seems to be suffering from a tumbleweed moment :-( These were the guys I won my award off back in 2009!
• Skip the drive – US focused but has a cute Telecommuting Savings Calculator on the site
• The Guardian Jobs – They aren’t that clear on whether remote means from home or the middle of the outback but there are some interesting jobs here!

Other ideas

Most of these are shamelessly stolen from colleagues (thanks to people who will remain unnamed):

• Check out this Skillcrush post on the 25 best sites for finding remote work.
• Look for tech startups and non-profit-sector / open source tech organisations – they are leading the way in remote working
• Some general careers sites will let you do searches (and setup saved searches and notifications) and will have an “allows remote working” filter (or if not you can just put keyword “remote” in your query).
• Good sites to look at include Hypothesis, MySociety, Mozilla, Ushahidi, Akvo, Automattic, Canonical (although check out Glassdoor.com, lots of dodgy reviews). Wikimedia. Not edX itself but some third-party consultancies based around edX. RedHat claim that 25% of their employees are remote if you feel like going corporate.
• If you’re happy to work for a commercial company then Flexjobs have recently released their “Top 100 Companies Offering Telecommuting Jobs In 2015“

So happy hunting!

I’ve just been lucky enough to spend another 3 days with my wonderful work colleagues! As a dispersed organisation Open Knowledge are really taking the need for F2F meet-ups seriously, and so it was decided that time together in London would move us much further forward than a series of online chats.

Open Knowledge staff

While our previous summit of the year focused on personal development this time we were given the opportunity to think about the future of our organisation and contribute to areas including strategy and approaches to interaction with the community. Quite a lot of our focused discussions probably won’t be of too much interest here but I’d like to share some of the more general meat from the 3 days!

Training

During the 3 days we covered two main training areas: Constructive feedback and Performance Management Processes. The key advice in the feedback session was that when giving feedback you should focus on the Situation (time, place, circumstances), the Behavour (what the person did) and the Impact (how it made me feel or the how I saw it effect others). Using this SBI approach allows us to be both honest and kind – so passing on a clear message with no beating about the bush! Giving feedback isn’t always easy as it involves competing values in honesty and kindness, but it is necessary and we should think of it as being a gift (receivers should be grateful but don’t have to chose to use it!). We should be aiming to give about five pieces of positive feedback for every one piece of negative feedback (this aligned well with my own criticism sandwich approach) and the main aim is to reinforce good behavior and redirect bad ones. Feedback So to sum up feedback should focus on acts not attitude, be goal-orientated and directed to the future, be multidirectional, continual, timely and should support proper action. It all made positive sense though isn’t necessarily so easy to do in the real world. One thing I took away from the session is the need to be specific (talk about about real actions rather than just general things “you messed up”) – I intend to take more notes straight after things happen so that I have details of these specific behaviours. One activity that I really enjoyed here was looking at our own communication styles. The 4 styles on offer were driver, animated, amiable and analytical (A fuller explanation of the styles is given here – though animated is referred to as expressive). In a work environment when communicating I’d see myself as animated (talkative, friendly, enthusiastic, approachable, sometimes unclear in my line of thought, subjective in decision making, a tendency to be a little haphazard). The important thing to remember is that you might not always see eye-to-eye with people who communicate in a different way. The performance management training ran through the new processes we will be using internally and their timeline. There was then a call for SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-based and Time- bound). All useful stuff – and a good effort to make our approaches more professional.

Agile Methodology

Alongside our staff development session we also slotted in some staff choice sessions. One of these (led by the truly wonderful Tryggvi Björgvinsson) took a look at agile methodology (a series of related methods and techniques normally used in the software development world) and how these could be used more generally in our working environment. The agile principles are well documented in the agile manifesto and when originally written were a radical change for those working in software development. In the software world a chosen methodology is usually driven by team values: the bigger the team the bigger the methodology and the more critical the project the more dense the methodology. Although not all agile principles could be applied in my working life (for example I often work alone or in teams primarily consisting of external people) there were some ideas that I already buy in to. So I’m a big believer in sharing work early and getting feedback at points along the way – this allows me to follow an interactive process with change going on throughout a project. I’m also keen on creating things that are ‘good enough’ and getting them out there – though I also like to support with significant documentation (this blog is a good example of that). To me it seams that agile is really a way of thinking, it’s about being reactive and open-minded, a great working method to aspire to. One concept I really like that agile supports is “the art of maximizing work not done”. There is a general suggestion that we write a list of all the things that could be done and and then chuck a whole lot of these (probably the ones that are time-consuming and have little impact) out – think about how much time you just saved yourself! It is about simplicity, decluttering and flexibility. It reminded me of George Orwell’s 5 Rules for Effective Writing which I often refer to and try to follow – which argues for the use of simple plain English in order to be clear and inclusive. Of course simplicity isn’t always appropriate but there are many moments in our life when it makes sense for us to take a step back and focus on what really matters.

We just can’t stop playing board games… (thanks to Christian Villum for the photo)

The summit was a great opportunity to realign ourselves as an organisation and I think there was very much a feeling of ‘onwards and upwards’ from now on.

My now ex-colleague Ira Bolychevsky is doing some investigation into online meetings with the intention of building an app that makes online meetings more bearable. She would really appreciate people’s input!

In our experience meetings can suck a lot. Online virtual meetings often introduce their own unique level of pain and frustration, but also the opportunity to make meetings better with technology … so we are working on a new application to ensure better meetings.

To help us figure out which cause of frustrations to focus on first – we’d love your feedback and input. Please fill in this 2 minute survey. If you totally love meetings and never have any problems, then go ping @shevski on twitter. If you leave your name and email address at the end, we’ll send you an invite for priority access to try out our app when it’s ready.</blockquote>

You can access the survey here!

Filed under: general

In the past numerous articles on the blog have touched on the benefits of remote working and how employees can prosper from carrying out work related activities from the comfort of their own home. However we haven’t had many articles that focus on what remote working means from an organisational perspective. This article by CEO Benjamin Fountain does just that.

Benjamin is CEO at London’s exciting new web development company Zed Zed. Their new ground breaking concept is based entirely on people working from home. Zed Zed has recruited a specialist workforce who are looking for a fresh approach to working life and those who are tired of the typical 9-5 office based roles. Zed Zed believes that this is the future of recruitment and by embracing what people want the company aims to produce a highly effective team.

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I’m passionate about Startups. I have been managing a web development company for over 10 years and our work is centred around the start up field making innovative and exciting online applications.

During the past year we have been working as a team to develop the new age of web development and online application deployment. At the start of this year we launched ZZ.co.uk and the response has been incredible.

ZZ.co.uk is a new startup which will bring remote working contractors together under one brand to offer companies around the world, international deployment, 24/7 development and the ultimate in tech team customisation.’

So.. Why does Zed Zed recruit in this way?

Having worked in an office throughout almost all of my professional life I found it extremely tiring and demanding having to repeat the same routine on a daily basis. Although working in an office has many positive aspects including the chance to interact with colleagues there are also negative effects which include the following…

• A recent study outlined how the average person in Britain spends 54 minutes a day commuting and ‘feelings of happiness, life satisfaction and the sense that one’s activities are worthwhile all decrease with every successive minute of travel to work’. In addition, commuting can lead to high levels of stress as a result of delays, unpredictable weather and of course a lack of control. This is clearly a cause for concern as stress within the workplace can lead to a lack of productivity but more worryingly it could potentially result in both mental and physical issues for employees.
• Carrying out mundane, routinized activities on a frequent basis coupled with the highly stressful nature of the role can be tough. For example, sitting at your office table for 8 hours a day could be highly frustrating and potentially demotivating because as people we are keen to experience new things on a regular basis.

At Zed Zed we strongly believe that our team should be treated as people rather than entities which is why we encourage them to choose their own hours and days of work. We believe that remote employment can help increase productivity amongst team members as well as help stimulate their minds. In addition we understand that commuting to work can be difficult for many people and remote employment sidesteps this issue completely which enables ZZ Team Members to spend more time with their families. We feel that this flexibility helps the team to remain stress free whilst effectively carrying out their responsibilities.

We appreciate the fact that our team have lives beyond that of the workplace and we look to accommodate this at all times by giving them freedom and encouraging them to enjoy their work rather than have the feeling that work is almost like a ‘chore’ that they have to do. Our business model enables them to work for the company part-time so that they can also work with us even with their full-time job. This can have a significant impact on their earnings whilst at the same time giving them a chance to try a new career.

Ultimately, Zed Zed believes in the responsibility of adults and of the incredible talent available who can’t necessarily commute to a job. We believe people should not live to work but that work should be an enjoyable part of their life which they can’t live without. We recruit team members who have a passion for life and their work which gives us a strong and dedicated team.

Tarjei Vesaas, the Norwegian poet behind the Boat in the Evening once said “Almost nothing need be said when you have eyes.”

The thing is when you work in a different place from your colleagues that seeing is gone. You don’t know what their space or their view is like, you can’t imagine how they work. There is no communal window, no shared perspective.

Mozilla recently published a post in which they showed images of their developer’s desk space. It was something I’d been meaning to do with Open Knowledge colleagues for a while.

Today at our All-hands call people shared the view out of their window, or a place they’d recently been working in. I thought it might be interesting to pull these photos of desks and views together: no names, no comments, no explanation. If nothing else it shows what a diverse organisation we are. It also reminds us that when you work with someone, and your only contact is through wires, it makes sense to remember that they might see things differently from you.

The Emporium of Dangerous Ideas aims to re-establish the importance of dangerous ideas as agents of change in education – to shift the axis of what is possible! It is for everyone who is passionate about education including college, university, school staff and students as well as those engaged in education throughout the creative communities.

They’ve recently shared a great idea for remote workers or office workers working in education.

A Dangerous Idea for creativity at work

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to work in a very different environment from your usual workplace? Would you like to try it out and become an office surfer? Would you like your organisation to Host an office surf? Would you like to meet people from other professions and sectors? What? … Spend some time in a different work environment, doing your work or work as a host, welcoming a surfer to experience your working environment.

Why? … Two reasons (among many!):

1. To become more aware of the physical work environment, and the effect it has on your work. Does your workplace help you to be creative? How is the new environment different? What about it is helpful? Any ideas you could take back and implement in your own workplace?
2. To meet new people and have interesting conversations. The random coffee scheme that was organised by Education Scotland has put hundreds of people together for interesting conversations, and ideas have grown out of it. Benefits?

As a Surfer you get:

• the chance to see what working in a different environment feels like, and how it suits – or doesn’t – your work and your style
• to benchmark your own work-space against the one you are visiting, and against best practice, and come away with ideas for improvement.
  As a Host you get:
• feedback on your work environment from a fresh pairs of eyes, based on rigorous research rather than just personal preference
  You both get and interesting and unexpected connection.

The Emporium of Dangerous Ideas gets:

• stories, photos and videos from surfers and hosts about their experiences
• the assessment of what makes a creative environment
• lots of great learning to share

Results of the office surf will be shown at the Emporium Finale in an exhibition of creative change. This will take place on Friday 19 June 2015 view programme and book online: http://events.collegedevelopmentnetwork.ac.uk/events/show/5200

If this sounds like a Dangerous Idea that you would like to be a part of, please contact Dawn Brooks for more information on how to take part.

Any responses should be in by Thursday 30 April 2015.

Recently I’ve been reading up on Mindfulness. Mindfulness, according to Aleksandra Zgierska in 2009, is “accepting and non-judgemental focus of one’s attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment“. It is a “mind-body approach to well-being that can help you change the way you think about experiences and reduce stress and anxiety” [Bemindful.co.uk]. I really like some of the core concepts, such as: focussing on the present, acceptance of the way things are, openness to new information, being fully present and beginner’s mind. I’m no expert yet but I’m going to keep reading and trying out…

Sarah Pike is interested in how we can de-stress our lives as remote workers and has written about 10 apps that help create a stress-free workday.

Sarah is a freelancer and college writing instructor. When she’s not writing or teaching, she’s probably binge-watching RomComs on Netflix or planning her next camping trip. She also enjoys following far too many celebrities than she should on Instagram. You can find Sarah on Twitter at @sarahzpike.

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Studies show people who work out of the office are more productive than their in-office peers. However, that doesn’t mean that working in your pajamas means you’re living a stress-free life. If you’re working from home and need a little help de-cluttering your mind, here are ten apps that can help reduce your workday stress.

1. Asana

One of the biggest obstacles to working from home is finding ways to effectively communicate with the rest of your team. Asana helps to streamline the communication process by eliminating the need for email. The app allows you to organize tasks, create shared projects and add comments to each task your entire group can see.

2. Stop, Breathe & Think

Meditation is a strong catalyst for helping your mind and body recover from a stressful day of work. Throwing a few minutes of it into your workday has shown to help lower your stress and make you more productive. The Stop, Breathe & Think app makes the mediation process personal by asking questions pertaining to your current state of mind and wellness, then mapping out meditation techniques to suit your situation.

3. Simply Breathe

Mastering your breathing can help you reduce and even eliminate stress during the workday to help you relax. Download Simply Breathe to incorporate interactive games and sounds designed to help you focus your breathing. It also helps you set long-term goals, track your stress and share your progress with others to help motivate and inspire.

4. Elevate

To perform better on the job at home, you need to train your brain. Apple named Elevate the best iPhone app of the year for 2014 because of its proven ability to help elevate your brainpower. The app uses 25 mini-games to improve your cognitive skills in memory, reading comprehension and focus. If you find yourself having trouble completing a task, take a break and hop on Elevate to re-orient your brain.

5. Personal Zen

If you find yourself getting frustrated with your workload, download the Personal Zen app. A team of psychology professors created the app to help reduce anxiety and worry by reconditioning the way you think. It’s a simple design that forces you to follow around a happy face while ignoring an angry one. Researchers found playing it for 25 minutes can help you feel better throughout the day.

6. Find Me Coffee

Maybe you need a change of scenery, or perhaps you’re just looking for an extra boost of energy to get you through the day. Either way, Find Me Coffee is a great resource for freelancers and coffee lovers. The app locates the nearest coffee shop and provides you with directions on how to get there. It’s the perfect way to break up the workday while getting you up and out of the house.

7. Oh, Ranger! ParkFinder

Sometimes you just need to stretch your legs. The Oh, Ranger! ParkFinder app puts you in touch with nature by locating the nearest parks and outdoor recreation areas where you can take a walk. Studies have shown taking a walking break in the middle of the workday can help reduce stress while also making you more calm and alert.

8. Spotify

Music has been shown to be capable of lowering blood pressure, slow our heart rates and decrease levels of stress hormones in our bodies. That’s why you should consider downloading the popular music app Spotify. The app allows you to put together your own playlists of your favorite artists for free, or you can buy the premium version to listen offline. Try searching for “deep focus” playlists for the moments when you really need to buckle down.

9. MapMyFitness

It’s no secret that exercise and healthy eating make for better overall lifestyles, but did you know they could also help you be more productive at work? Regular exercise can help improve both alertness and energy levels. Apps like MapMyFitness are great because they can help plan exercise routes and provide you with a way to log your daily food intakes.

10. Timeful

Working from home can blur the lines between everyday life and work, making it difficult to find a balance. Timeful is a time-management app that helps you find time for those small tasks you know need to be done, but never seem to quite fit into your schedule. It allows you to designate specific times for certain tasks throughout the day and helps you develop habits to keep yourself on track.

The best apps for remote workers are the ones that allow you to work from home while also maintaining a happy work-life balance. You might think playing on the Internet would lead to less productivity, but research shows access to the Internet actually helps increase overall happiness. Happier people make better workers, and these apps can surely help you de-stress and find a better balance between home and work.

I’ve kind of had a stressy time of late. Nothing serious but I have been in need of some Zen time. For my birthday some of my friends have decided that I need to chill out and I just wanted to share their lovely gifts! My friend Kevin Mears also drew a fab picture of me being Zen! Now I just have to practice what I preach! ;-)

Not long ago we published a post on Hunting for Remote Working Jobs. In a very useful follow up Monique Rivers takes a look at the kind of questions a company might ask you in your interview for a remote position.

Monique is an Australian tech blogger who also loves good food and fashion. She works at ninefold.com. Ninefold is a company providing efficient and powerful virtual servers for all those occasions when a business needs to move their ideas into the cloud.

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Together with the rapid growth of communication technologies, we have witnessed remote work explode in popularity. If you still think working from home is a rare solution, just have a look at these statistics. Every field offers remote jobs that might fit your current preferences and lifestyle. How to make a good impression during an interview of a remote job? Here are top 5 questions you should prepare for when applying for this kind of professional opportunity.

What is your daily schedule?

Recruiters will want to see how well you know yourself: when you’re focused and what your top hours for productivity are. They’ll be interested whether you’re a morning bird or a night owl.

Remote jobs are often flexible and almost never tied town to the classic nine-to-five schedule – workers all over the world can work in shifts for one company. Recruiters will be interested in your strategies for organizing your work. You need to know your natural rhythm and analyse your daily schedule before you answer this question.

Which communication tools would you use in this situation?

Working in remote teams, you won’t have the chance of catching someone in between meetings for a quick chat. In order to be a productive member of the team, you’ll need solid knowledge on virtual communication and which methods are most efficient for your purposes.

Recruiters will be interested to see whether you’re well-versed in modern communication technologies like email, video hangouts, online chats or project management software. Moreover, they might give you a specific example and ask you to suggest which communication tool is the best one to use. It’s your turn to show that you know how to make remote projects proceed smoothly.

What are your requirements for a productive workspace?

Asking this question, recruiters are making sure that you’re aware of all the physical aspects of working remotely. They’ll also need this knowledge to see whether the company should provide you with specific equipment.

By Ali Edwards, Flickr, CC-BY

Whether you work from your kitchen counter or the couch, you’ll always need a few basics – a standing desk, high-quality scanner or even coworking office. Define your preferences and requirements – always mention them during the interview.

What tools do you use for managing your calendar/schedule?

Recruiters are really interested in this aspect – they might ask you questions about details, such as whether your calendar is open for everyone to see or what kind of events you post there. Organization is key in remote work, so recruiters will want to know what your tools for time management are and whether you’re familiar with crucial apps and platforms.

This also shows how much thought you put to organizing your work. It’s possible that joining the company, you’ll need to make a few changes, but the basic idea of organization needs to be there in the first place.

What is the organization system on your computer?

Recruiters will also want to know how you keep track of important files, notes and links on your computer. You’ll be sharing files with your coworkers and if they’re not properly named, you risk cluttering their workspace with things they cannot categorize at a glance.

Before you apply for a remote job, make sure to have an organization system in place: for storing files, managing issues like multiple tabs open in your browsers or keeping track of important links.

Working in remote has many perks, but it surely isn’t for everyone. When applying for a remote job, make sure that you have the required skills and actually like to work on your own. Remember that your professional history will be scrutinized as well – if your past positions involved a degree of autonomy, your chances at landing a remote job are much higher.

I am having a play around with Tableau Public for some work I am doing on the PASTEUR4OA Project. Tableau Public is free software that can allow anyone to connect to a spreadsheet or file and create interactive data visualizations for the web. It took me a while to get started (my operating systems on all my windows machines and macs weren’t up to date enough!) but now that I’m in I’m really getting the hang of it.

I can’t embed the javascript code here but you can go to my Tableau Public profile to see the interactive versions.

I started off with looking at how many guest posts had been submitted and in what month they tend to come in. You can see from the visualisation that March is a really popular month, followed by September and August.

I then looked at how many guest blog posts are submitted by year. It looks like the number is on the decrease, see this visualisation.

I finished by looking at the gender of my guest authors. The main trend there seems to be less male authors over time – not sure what I’m doing to drive them away! ;-) See this visualisation for details by year and this visualisation for totals (26 Females, 36 Males – 64 in total).

I’ll continue to work on Tableau public for the project – hopefully my data visualisations will improve over time!

In November representatives from 200 countries will gather in Paris to hash out a plan of action to reduce climate change. Some see this as a ‘last chance’ for action as the the amount of human produced CO2 in our atmosphere is on the rise. Population growth, deforestation and increased consumption of fossil fuels are all to blame.

For many modern companies with a social conscience working in a distributed way is well aligned with reducing environmental impact. Eric Bieller argues that working remotely could be an important factor in reducing climate change and makes a call for companies to seriously think about changing the way they work.

Eric is the co-founder of Speak, a tool that provides instant communication and presence for remote teams. His team’s goal is to enable a future where the office is no longer a necessity and people are free to work from anywhere in the world. You can find Eric on Twitter (@ericbieller).

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Over the last century, motor vehicles have become commonplace in our society, becoming a hefty contributor to this increase in CO2 emissions.

Increase in registered vehicles on the road since 1975
(IHS Global Insight and Wells Fargo Securities, LLC)

Increase in CO2 emissions since over the last century
(Source: http://www.epa.gov/)

In fact, transportation is estimated to account for as much as 31% of human emissions.

(Source: http://www.epa.gov/)

Meanwhile, deforestation has reduced the planet’s ability to filter CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Continuing on this path could mean devastating consequences for future generations, including rising global temperatures and shrinking of polar ice.

And while the financial crisis of 2008 may have reduced car ownership, subsequently reducing the amount of human produced CO2 in the atmosphere, in the last few years this number has started to creep back up towards pre 2008 levels.

(Source: http://www.epa.gov/)

Unfortunately there is no single solution to this problem. If we are going to solve climate change and help dial back CO2 emissions, we’re going to need to attack the problem from multiple angles, starting with our reliance on motor vehicles.

The death of the commute

One of the biggest reasons for increased car ownership, and the subsequent rise in CO2 emissions, is that commuting has become commonplace over the last century.

Cars have made it possible to live in the suburbs but work in the city center. And while this has afforded many people the freedom to live and work where they want, it has also made commuting a way of life for our culture.

In fact, a commuter spends an average of one work week in traffic over the course of a year.

All this time adds up to literally tons of extra CO2 building up in the atmosphere. This also adds up to years of collective productivity that is being lost as we sit in traffic on our way to work.

Ditch the commute and start working remotely

Knowledge workers are in an especially unique position to ditch the commute and start working remotely, as their jobs can typically be done from anywhere. The only requirements are a solid internet connection and the right tools.

In fact, several large remote teams have managed to build extremely successful products, despite being separated by distance and time zones:

Automattic has created a celebrated culture of remote work, with hundreds of employees scattered across 28 countries.

Github is another great success story, with approximately 75% of their employees working remotely.

Buffer has also managed to build a fun and unique culture by embracing remote work.

Taking real steps toward working remotely

I’m not saying that your entire workforce should become remote tomorrow. After all, you can’t just flip a switch and suddenly have a happy and productive remote team.

But why not dip your toes in the water by allowing employees work from home one or two days out of the week? Even a modest remote work policy can give workers a greater sense of freedom and lead to increased productivity. It’ll also show them that you trust them to be autonomous and self managing.

These are certainly small steps, but on a global scale this can really add up! Every minute spent working instead of commuting equates to less CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere and more time spent being productive.

Conclusion

Climate change is a serious matter that’s going to call for serious action if we’re to solve it. But this means that society’s old habits are going to have to change.

Technology has made it possible for us to stay connected to each other even when we’re working on opposite sides of the planet. We’re no longer shackled to the office and doomed to spend hours of our lives stuck in traffic. But it’s up to us to make a change. It’s time for us to cut our ties to this old way of life and start embracing the future of work.

What do you think? Can working remotely make a serious dent in reducing climate change? Let us know in the comments section below!

Flicking through the weekend papers I found this interesting article in the Independent on a new company offers you to keep your job while you travel around the world.

Remote Year is “a one year program where you travel around the world with 100 interesting people while working remotely.“. Remote Year will go to 12 different locations, 1 month each. There will be 3 legs of the trip:

• Europe: 1) Prague, Czech Republic 2) Ljubljana, Slovenia 3) Dubrovnik, Croatia 4) Istanbul, Turkey
• Asia: 5) Penang, Malaysia 6) Ko Tao, Thailand 7) Hanoi, Vietnam 8) Kyoto, Japan
• South America: 9) Buenos Aires, Argentina 10) Mendoza, Argentina 11) Santiago, Chile 12) Lima, Peru

By Giorgio Montersino, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Sound like exciting stuff, doesn’t it!!?

The Independent article explains that Remote Year costs participants “around £18,000 for the year – £2,000 paid upfront, and then £1,300 each month” and then follows the story of Cassie Utt who will leave her job in the hydraulics division Eaton and travel for a year.

Travelling and working remotely is on a lot of people’s wish list but few have done it. Over the years I’ve enjoyed reading about Lea Woodward’s travels – she writes on Location Independent and tweets her tales. I’m not sure I could work from anywhere long term…but a year does sound good! Now what to do about that Mortgage, those kids and that husband of mine….??? ;-)

At Open Knowledge we’ve started running our (internal) skill share sessions again. Today’s was a very useful introduction to Github and Jekyll. GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service that we use a lot at Open Knowledge, Jekyll is a “simple, blog-aware, static site generator” and has recently been used to create our revamped Open Data Handbook.

The full video of the session is available on YouTube and embedded below.

Our host (Paul Walsh) took us through what a content management system on the web is, the limitations of some services like WordPress (limited control of presentation and data, security, maintenance and cost) and the benefits of using Git (open by default, zero maintenance costs, lots of scope to customise) for static sites. His slides are available here.

Key terms in Git hub

We then had a go at creating some Mark up (i.e. content) and a pull request and using some Jekyl metadata.

I am using Git hub to create pages to store the data visualisations I am creating for the PASTEUR4OA project – so all very useful.

Thanks to Paul Walsh and Mor Rubinstein for organising and running the session.

Useful links

• Github: http://github.com/
• Jekyll: http://jekyllrb.com/
• Guide to Markup: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
• Contributing to the Open Data Handbook: http://opendatahandbook.org/contribute/
• Github app for mac: https://mac.github.com/
• Sourcetree – another Github app for mac (more techy): https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/

If you haven’t seen it yet you need to check out the Work We Want web site. The site has been created by the Glasshouse Collective (which “was formed to meaningful throw stones at the Glass Houses people build using the Internet”) and commissioned by the Space.

We face a radically different future of work, which is being shaped by the web. The days of the steady 9-5 are over, as workers around the world come online. Competiton for jobs is global, work is bought and sold on demand, and the price of labour is falling. How should we respond as a global workforce? How can we prepare for a different future of work? Are we going to compete, co-operate or exploit our fellow workers? The Work We Want explores these questions through a series of creative processes:

The site has some great resources: videos, graphics, games, a blog and real-life stories. Take a look!

Guilt features a lot in my working life. I’m thinking maybe guilt features a lot in remote worker’s lives generally. So there’s guilt that you don’t have to get in a car and drive somewhere everyday, guilt that your day is more flexible, guilt if you take a few minutes off to load the washing machine, guilt if you spend time paying a bill online during work hours, guilt if you eat lunch at the computer, guilt if you eat lunch…

Guilt if you are not working and you should be, guilt if you are working and you shouldn’t be.

Guilt, guilt, GUILT, GUILT!!!!

Add to the mix parental guilt, 3 frisky children, end of term activities and the summer holidays looming – you can see that I am becoming a guilty wreck. The Summer is going to be a guilt-fest!

In his article Being a Remote Worker Sucks – Long Live the Remote Worker Scott Hanselman argues that remote workers:

“work at least as hard, if not more so, than their local counterparts. This is fueled in no small part by guilt and fear. We DO feel guilty working at home. We assume you all think we’re just hanging out without pants on. We assume you think we’re just at the mall tweeting. We fear that you think we aren’t putting in a solid 40 hours (or 50, or 60).”

Because of this, we tend to work late, we work after the kids are down, and we work weekends. We may take an afternoon off to see a kid’s play, but then the guilt will send us right back in to make up the time. In my anecdotal experience, remote workers are more likely to feel they are “taking time from the company” and pay it back more than others.”

Mobile technology doesn’t help either. A recent survey of 3,500 professionals conducted in the U.S. and five other countries found at least 58% said they have feelings of guilt in this hyper-connected world.

So how do we deal with these feelings of guilt?

I don’t have an easy answer but here are a few thoughts I have.

• One of the top tips psychology gives for dealing with guilt is that you need to recognise the kind of guilt you have and its purpose. You feel guilty because you want to be an effective and dedicated member of staff. Just feeling the guilt means that you are already on the right track. Joe Bloggs next door doesn’t feel guilt because he lounges on the sofa all day picking his feet, he doesn’t care, you do.
• When my children were very found I remember a health visitor telling me that I need to think about the food they eat in terms of a week, rather than a day. I try to apply the same approach to remote working. There are busy days and there are not so busy days, it’s give and take, but overall my organisation gets more than enough out of me.The old remote worker adage about clear boundaries really applies here. Don’t be answering emails while putting your kids in the bath, and don’t be watching YouTube when you are working. Set up time boundaries and things will be easier.
• Keep brief notes on what you do all day. You needn’t share these with anyone but they will help you see how productive you’ve been.

• Reward yourself for completing tasks – when I’ve finished working on that spreadsheet I’m going to have a cup of tea and a 10 minute read of a book. It’s a well deserved treat – so no guilt there.

I’d like to end with some wise words from Natali Vlatko on recognising your true value.

“Don’t let the guilt of working from home eat away at your deserved free time, unless you’re just watching animated gifs all day. Make yourself heard and your presence felt, then the proverbial wall between you and your team will come down. Your value shouldn’t be undermined just because you’re not sharing a cubicle with someone.”