Virtual Work

The Way I Work

I work primarily as a project manager at CivicActions, though I do serve in other roles as well. Being a project manager means that I am managing the schedules, workplan and budget for a number of projects at once, and that I work on one project or another with a large percentage of the whole CA team. My job requires a lot of patience, flexibility, communication, and the ability to keep track of seemingly several million details at once. It also requires a sense of humor, the ability to educate people, and sometimes, an iron will.

Physical Space

As promised last week, here is part two of "The Way We Work" with Chris Fassnacht and Stephanie Pakrul. Gregory: Have you worked remotely before working for CivicActions? Chris: Not really. I was doing some remote contract work for a couple of months before starting to work with CA, but for the most part I've worked in standard office and lab settings in the public and private sector. GH: Do you work from home? or from an office? or a cafe? Do you work around other people? or alone?

In a new twist on our "Way We Work" series, I present this interview with one of our star themers, Steph Pakrul. This is sort of the first in a two-parter--Steph works very closely with her husband, Chris Fassnacht, so close, we sometimes refer to them as "Christeph". Without further ado: Gregory: Have you worked remotely before working for CivicActions? Steph: Yep, I've worked remotely most of my career, at least the parts I've enjoyed the most! I started doing web design contract work in high school and have always kept it up, at least part time.

Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York... And the airports of those cities are just some of the places I've worked from in the last two weeks. I get through security and my eyes shoot furtive glances at the bottom 2 feet of walls searching (sometimes in vain) for a power outlet, preferably one that is next to a seat. Recently I have started seeing Samsung "charging stations" in some airports. A brilliant idea who's time is long over due: multiple outlets on a bistro hight mini table.

At CivicActions we talk a lot about the lifestyle implications of the way we work. Many “remote” or “virtual” workers will rave about the freedom of working from home, or the benefits of not having a commute. But I think we all know that there are challenges that come with the benefits, and each of us who has worked like this has developed strategies, techniques, schedules and other “coping mechanisms” to to address them.

On Tuesday (appropriately) Aaron, Henri, Dan and I met with Oren Jaffe and Nikki Martinez to strategize about the EcoTuesday juggernaut. The one problem with the meeting was that I was a few hundred miles away from the meeting. Thanks to technology were able to video conference. And, because of my amazing mastery of the The Force, I could tell where people in the room were, and in this picture (above), I'm looking right at Aaron, kind of like The Brady Bunch.

How do you productively get work done on the web without getting distracted? Have you identified the distractions? ... email, IM, Twitter, Google Reader or Bloglines ... and if you’re a blogger, your blog stats, Technorati, Digg, delicious, Adsense, etc. "It's useful to identify them on paper — write them down." The trick is to get the productivity without the distractions, says Web Worker Daily.