TAO Podcast (Mobile Work Tip) – Communication Guidelines

Here’s a new installment of The Anywhere Office podcast: Mobile Work Tips. Phil offers up some best practices for remote work and virtual teams in 2 minute, digestible tips. This first one deals with setting communication guidelines. You can find a collection of tips like these relating to virtual teams, home offices, laptops, email, and palm pilots in our free Mobile Work Tipbook and we’ll be posting more to the podcast moving forward. Let us know what you think, or if there are any topics that you’d like to hear more about.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:11 — 2.0MB)

Virtual Collaboration and Brainstorming – Use the right tools

I recently stumbled on a great article on Read-Write-Web about the “Work From Home” Generation.

They give a good overview of the pros and cons. While I agree with almost all of it, the first issue they raise as a negative is “Brainstorming is difficult”. While I agree initially it can be more challenging while you adapt to collaborating with others virtually, like anything it becomes much easier with practice. A large part of successfully brainstorming and collaboration with others across distance is choosing and “thoughtfully applying” the right technology. This is something we often talk about and stress in our workshops and books. Read more

Free Business Continuity Teleseminar for National Preparedness Month

This September marks National Preparedness Month 2007, a nationwide coordinated effort encouraging families to take simple steps to prepare for emergencies in their homes, businesses, and schools. During National Preparedness Month, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is working with a wide variety of organizations to highlight the importance of emergency preparedness and promote community involvement across the nation through various events and activities.

This year each week of National Preparedness Month has a different focus. The second week of National Preparedness Month (September 9 – 15) focuses on business preparedness.

During this week ourselves and several other National Preparedness Month Coalition Members are hosting events and activities to help businesses get prepared. We invite you to take this opportunity to listen to a FREE hour long Audio Seminar we are offering called Riding the Storm Out: don’t wait until it’s too late to form a business continuity plan. We hosted this teleseminar and recorded it live during National Preparedness Month 2006 and features a panel of 4 small business experts discussing tools, strategies, and best practices relating to Business Continuity and Disaster Preparedness.

Beginning with National Preparedness Month and continuing until the end of this year, this hour-long seminar can be listened to on-line, on demand – or downloaded; there are also downloadable handouts and resources provided by each panelist.

For more information about National Preparedness Month visit http://www.ready.gov/america/npm07/

Small Adjustments = Big Changes

Most of life’s plainer truths are universal. But plain is not always simple, and simple is not always easy. One of these truths, and a mantra here in The Anywhere Office, is that small adjustments can produce big changes. You hear this professed repeatedly in talk about weight loss and fitness, and in professional sports. You know, ’20 minutes twice a week’ and you can lose 10 lbs. in a month, or the interview with the ball player who just changed the way he gripped the bat and doubled his batting average.

Read more

The Virtues of Going Virtual

Many people consider the pros and cons of moving to a completely virtual office setup but aren’t sure whether it is right for them. I recently came across a blog post from Don Loper who manages a web design firm. At the end of May he made the jump from a physical office to a full virtual office. Read more about his thoughts and experience in this post – The Virtues of Going Virtual.

He also posted some thoughts about the experience a few months later in his post The Virtual Office is Complete (love the photo Don!)

Now while many of you may be thinking it’s easy for him to go with a virtual office setup because he runs a web design firm, I think you will find most of the points he makes to be true of many businesses in varied industries.

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