Time and time difference: two factors that can make a big impact on a remote work setting.

You and your team live apart from each other. You work independently. A team member may work on his tasks by himself in the little corner of his house, in the park, in a coffee shop, or wherever it is that he feels like working that day.

Then again, each member of your team has the luxury to sign on for work. You may not keep the same working hours. Or even if you do, or you should, the team member can just send you a message—through email or text message—that he has no Internet connection and would be logging in as soon as he finds a connection somewhere, or till the power gets back, etc. The reasons for these could be plenty.

And you in your office cubicle, working away the hours, hoping that you’d get help from your teammate soon.

There are times, however, that you start working and think that your teammates have done the same. When the time comes that you need them, you click on your YM and scroll up or down for him, only to find out that he’s invisible, or he’s not there at all!

What do you do? You end up doing their task for them.

You may ask, why not email them and let them do it?

Because some tasks are urgent, and thus cannot be postponed for another second.

Now, we have come up with a monitoring device—a software that a team member has to sign on once he starts working—to check on each teammate’s progress and performance.

But this thing works only when you are in the same timeframe. What if the team member is on a night shift, and you are on day shift? You want to talk/chat with them, but that would mean you have to log in at nighttime.

Would you? I do so, sometimes, especially when the task is urgent.

Therefore, I say that in a remote-working environment, I feel like I’m living in a time warp.

Check out this book!

Aside from the fact, that one of the authors, Bernard Lopuz, is a fellow Iliganon and La Sallian, the book has its own merits. It promotes Linux and will definitely give you some insights about setting up databases in a Linux environment.

Linux Recipes for Oracle DBAs is an example–based book on managing Oracle Database in a Linux environment. Covering commonly used distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle Enterprise Linux, the book is written for database administrators who need to get work done and lack the luxury of curling up fireside with a stack of Linux documentation. The book is task–oriented: Look up the task to perform. See the solution. Read up on the details. Get the job done.

Cover photo credit

As websites and microblogging communities become more interactive, there comes also the proliferation of widgets and apps.

I am even thinking of having an app or a widget designed for my website projects. Subscribers or even visitors can then use apps or widgets for a more enhanced experience with my sites. This part of the project is in the development stage, and I will push for it to be launched soon.

In any case, Yahoo! has also come up with their new widgets. In fact, the company recently gave awards to students for “developing mobile widgets deemed creative and useful.”

The winning entries compromised:

– A widget developed by students from Nanyang Technological University, to help customers locate DBS Bank branches and ATMs. The widget also has additional features such as an expense calculator and access to current bank promotions.

– A widget developed by the student team from Temasek Polytechnic for food company Kellogg Asia. This includes calorie and body mass index (better known as BMI) calculators and other health tips.

– A widget developed by students from Singapore Polytechnic to encourage travel with Malaysian Airlines. Features include a tool to help travellers determine the most attractive fare, destination guides, weather forecasts and a currency converter.

– A widget designed by the Nanyang Polytechnic student team for travel website UEEEU.com. This includes a language translator, a world time indicator, destination guides, hotel and vehicle search and reservation functions, and a travel planning tool.

Source: PCWorld, Yahoo Gives Students Prizes for Widgets

Have you also been told to write down your dreams or wishes for them to come true? Well, it’s true. Somehow when you put down all your ideas, see and read them on paper, you get a vision of them and the ideas become doable or achievable.

This is what David Allen, productivity consultant and author of Getting Things Done, meant when he said to use “capture tools” to be more productive. In other words, these capture tools are those things that help you capture your ideas and help you concretize them. Cool isn’t it?

Over at BNET is a video of David Allen talking about how to organize information by using capture tools like digital or paper notes to get it outside your head and onto your to-do list. But, he says, these tools only help if you take the next step in processing that information and checking it off the list.

HERE is the video.

I got a Google surprise when I launched my Firefox yesterday. My iGoogle homepage was wider and I now have more useful choices of applications to add.

Plus the other features that I get to see only when I hit the Home button are also displayed on the left side. I can just point my mouse on any one of them and voila!

They call this “full canvas views.” It’s cool, actually.

Take a look:

1. The iGoogle homepage. As I have said, with this new template, it’s much easier to navigate from one function to another.

2. The Gmail on iGoogle. I don’t like this part much. Because from this page, I need to do one more click (that is “Launch Full Gmail”) to get to view my email and enjoy its full feature. You see, in the old iGoogle, when I clicked on Gmail from the homepage, I’d be directed to the “full Gmail” already. That’s definitely one click less. As a Lean advocate, that means a lot to me.

In the last couple of months, Google has been spinning new interesting services: the Google Chrome and the Google Mapmaker made available in the Philippines.

I have yet to try the two, so until then.

Related story:
iGoogle Gets an Upgrade

PCWorld outlines the qualities of a top-notch project manager. Here’s the list:

1. They possess the gift of foresight. Good project managers are able to anticipate and head off problems that can jeopardize deadlines, budgets and user acceptance.

2. They’re organized. Organization seems like an obvious characteristic of a star project manager, but it manifests itself in a variety of ways, including in an ability to stay focused on the big picture and to prioritize competing responsibilities. “In most projects, there are so many things that have to get done that it’s hard to stay on top of everything and in control of everything,” says Fumi Kondo, managing director of Intellilink. “Being able to prioritize work for your team is a critical aspect of what a project manager has to do.”

3. They know how to lead. Project managers have to interact with and influence a variety of stakeholders including their project teams and project sponsors. Since many project team members don’t report directly to the project manager, the project manager has to find ways to motivate workers over whom they have no direct influence and who can make or break a project. Project managers also need to be able to inspire the confidence of stakeholders and sponsors in the event the budget or timeline needs to be renegotiated or additional resources are needed to complete the project.

4. They’re good communicators. Successful project managers effectively use e-mail, meetings and status reports to communicate their ideas, get decisions made and resolve problems. They also understand that they need to discuss their project in the context of whatever is most important to their audience, she adds.

5. They’re pragmatic. Sometimes project managers can be too analytical, says Kondo. “They analyze things to do death before they move ahead,” she notes, which slows progress on a project. Good project managers focus on getting work done with the resources available to them.

6. They’re empathetic. “Project managers rely on others to be successful,” says Kondo. She adds that project managers can’t effectively influence others if they don’t understand what motivates their stakeholders. They need to learn stakeholders’ concerns about a project, take those concerns seriously and address them.

I’m managing two projects, and I say I’m still a work in progress when it comes to #s 1 and 3, and needs improvement in #s 2, 4, 5, and 6.

I got these from PC World:

Mistake No. 1: Projects Lack the Right Resources with the Right Skills.
Mistake No. 2: Projects Lack Experienced Project Managers.
Mistake No. 3: IT Doesn’t Follow a Standard, Repeatable Project Management Process.
Mistake No. 4: IT Gets Hamstrung by Too Much Process.
Mistake No. 5: They Don’t Track Changes to the Scope of the Project.
Mistake No. 6: They Lack Up-to-Date Data About the Status of Projects.
Mistake No. 7: They Ignore Problems.
Mistake No. 8: They Don’t Take the Time to Define the Scope of a Project.
Mistake No. 9: They Fail to See the Dependencies Between Projects.
Mistake No. 10: They Don’t Consider Murphy’s Law.
Mistake No. 11: They Give Short Shrift to Change Management.
Mistake No. 12: Project Schedules Are Incomplete.
Mistake No. 13: IT Doesn’t Push Back on Unreasonable Deadlines.
Mistake No. 14: They Don’t Communicate Well with Project Sponsors and Stakeholders.

Click here to read about each mistake’s impact.

I am most guilty of Mistake No. 10. If I were to paraphrase Mistake No. 13, I don’t push for reasonable quotas and deadlines. I can be lenient at times. I can also tweak Mistake No. 4 by saying that I get hamstrung by too much attention to details and processes. Bad, I know, and I vow to improve on this in the coming days.

Plurk is a new microblogging community that has made Netizen busy these days.

Plurk’s slogan is “your life on the line.” It’s very apt as you will be interacting with your friends, called plurkers on a timeline. It is also like being in a bar, where everyone seems to be talking all the at the same time and you can eavesdrop or join in any conversation.

With that setting, it’s no wonder why I plurk. Here are more reasons why I plurk:

1. the Friendship - you build a community with friends and you get to know them in their most candid. It’s also an effective way of sharing links or interesting websites. It reminds me of the wholesome chat rooms in Yahoo before.

2. the Communication - you can ask questions, post a question, answer questions and get quick responses. Through this, also, you get more ideas for future projects.

3. the Challenge - you are encouraged to plurk every day or every hour because there’s a reward by doing so. The rewards can be in the form of more choices in icons, among the famous ones is the banana dance; customize the look of your plurk; have a plurk display name.

4. the Karma - when you’re up for that challenge, you get more karma. The rewards are computed through karma points. My idea of karma before bordered on the negative, but with plurk’s karma, the term is put on the positive light.

5. the Plurk - It’s fun, it’s hilarious, it’s simply plurk! See let’s catch up at Plurk

I’m a Firefox user and a subscriber to Delicious, and I love them both. Today, when I launched my Firefox, I was told to update my Del.icio.us, and so I did.

But what is this I read?

“From now on all your bookmarks will be instantly accessible both in your Firefox browser and from your bookmarks page on the Delicious website. This means that any changes you make to your bookmarks in either location will be synchronized. For example adding or deleting a Delicious bookmark in Firefox will add or delete it from your bookmarks page on Delicious.”

My worry is what if I just wanted to clean up my Firefox bookmarks, yet wanted to keep that bookmark in my Del.icio.us page?

I was again testing the usability of one of my website projects today and thought how else the site can be improved.

I know a LOT has yet to be done, but the issues on usability is to me the most urgent one. After all it’s what users see. They don’t see the codes or the back-end system that makes the website work.

NZHerald online has good tips for website usability. After I’ve read its top tips, though some of them I already know, still I found good insights there.

Here are the questions that the tips addressed.

1. I’ve a lot of information to put on to my site. How can I organise it so visitors find what they are after?

2. How can I make my website easier for users to find their way around, more intuitive?

3. What are the key elements any website should have?

4. How can I ensure visitors don’t get “lost” on my site? What should I leave out?

5. What’s the best way to manage links? Any tips on making online forms?

Read more…