It’s hip2b2

I have always been a big fan of telecommuting. This is one of the major benefits of the information age: being able to do more anytime, anywhere. I believe that if a person is responsible enough he or she deserves to be given the option of telecommuting. I began thinking about this topic after reading an editorial in the June-July issue of PC Magazine Philippines about the said topic. However, I am not going to be discussing about telecommuting per se. I would like to talk about productivity.

Productivity is measured in a number of ways. Most of the time, it is just a matter of seeing how often one is busy. In the article, the general conception of being busy while telecommuting with a computer is different vis-a-vis being busy in an office. In my case, whenever I just stare at my computer and work I tend to be interrupted more frequently than when I have a large number of scatter pieces of papers and books. Hence, the piles of loose leaf papers and open books on my office desk today. The concept of busy is very different. Psst. Don’t tell people in my office about this secret.

I find this strange as most of the information that I need to do my work can be accessed from my computer. The computer is such a great information management tool that it can easily contain, organization and find information. With the Internet, everything is just a mouse click away. Dead trees (aka books and papers) tend to be handier than computers. However, they do take up a significant bit of space. Don’t get me wrong. I would rather read a novel off a dead tree than a PDA screen. This is most likely because of my upbringing than anything else.

Maybe the future generations will be more open to the idea of people using computers as a total solution to information management. As we move towards the paperless age, these new generations will probably not have the biases of the old. However, by this time, computers will probably have evolved too. They will probably not be single devices connected to all sorts of networks. It will probably be multiple pervasive devices connected to each other. The computers will probably be integrated to things like appliances, homes and furniture. As the HP advertisement goes, “making the Personal Computer personal again.” So, it can even go the other way. As computers become more pervasive, it will be harder to tell when one is working or not.

So how do we solve this conundrum? It is all in the PC Magazine Philippines article. It is just a matter of changing the way we measure performance. Even if the bundy clock has gone out of fashion these days it is still part of everyday work. Most offices still have time keeping systems, these are the modern bundy clocks. This way of thinking must change. People must be more results-oriented as opposed to schedule-oriented. Companies must make an effort to identify people who are self-driven and motivated. They must strive to build a culture that values performance and can equally quantify it. Now, this is the challenge: How to quantify performance in this new information age? The bundy clock still exists today in an electronic form. What should take its place?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 12:58 am and is filed under Musings and Speculations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.