Working from home will get ugly, but don’t blame the workers

By | June 30, 2020
1 Comment

Working from home has been a relative success story of these Covid-19 times, but from here on in it’s going to get ugly.

Working from home isn’t for everyone, but that’s often because people haven’t tried it. Covid-19 has given a proverbial leg-up to those still wary of the fence. There are technology hurdles to overcome, as well as social ones. People who worked in offices and relied on pinging IT support as soon as a key started sticking, or grabbed a coffee as an excuse to chat with co-workers around the bean-grinder would inevitably face hurdles.

But surprise, surprise, turns out there are advantages of working from home, that those of us who already did it had worked out some time ago. Now the rest of the workforce is catching on. A survey in the UK (by a nursery provider, so you could argue it’s not exactly in their interest to promote this) has found that only 13% of those 1,500 surveyed ” want to go back to pre-pandemic ways of working, with most people saying they would prefer to spend a maximum of three days in the office”, according to the Guardian.

Nearly two thirds of those believe their employers would be up for it. And well over half believe it would increase their loyalty to the company.

Of course the survey shoehorns in some other stuff, which arguably strengthens their business model: parents say they have had trouble coping with younger kids (and presumably could do with a nursery should this work from home lark continue beyond Covid-19. As you can see below, employers don’t like kids.)

But I think it’s good that more people are realising that, the stresses and isolation notwithstanding, working from home has its merits. If nothing else, it wakes people up to how unproductive the workplace can be. Meetings, people dropping by to chat, open plan offices, sick buildings: all are a big distraction, a threat to health and a time-suck.

And the pandemic is bringing home another reality: most of this office stuff can be done from home. A survey by Deakin University in Australia has found that 41% of full-time and 35% of part-time jobs can be done from home. The study uses a similar methodology from a U.S. study, which reaches similar conclusions. My tuppennies’ worth: that number is extraordinarily high, if you think about the different kinds of work people do. But as countries dispense with production and move to services, and the Internet of Things improves the remote (and automated) control and monitoring of physical objects, this proportion will grow further. I’ve rarely come across someone in the services sector who couldn’t do what they do out of a Starbucks. Even, sadly, the Starbucks employees themselves.

It’s not the workers, it’s the managers who are the problem

But this isn’t where the problem lies. The problem is going to lie in managing these people. Managing a remote work force is quite different to managing a physical office. It’s about faith: do you trust the people you hired to do a good job? If so, let them do it. I had a boss at my last employer who was upset if we were in the office, quite rightly saying the way to get stories was to go out and talk to people. His successor was the opposite, what I call “managing by line of sight.” She liked to be able to see everyone at their desk and was suspicious if someone wasn’t.

This is where things are going to get problematical. You need much better bosses with a broader range of EQ to be able to support and get the best out of your crew if they’re all dispersed. If you start at the point of thinking they can’t be trusted to be working, then you’ve already lost. On June 26 Florida State University told employees working remotely that it “will no longer allow employees to care for children while working remotely.” Allowing this was in any case a ‘temporary exception to policy’ and approval for the Temporary Remote Work agreement “may be rescinded at any time if an employee:

– is unable to remotely perform the essential functions of their position; or

– is not adhering to the requirements outlined in the Temporary Remote Work Agreement; or

– remote work no longer meets the business needs of the department.1

It’s not hard to see where this is going. Companies — and particularly places like universities — that are largely agglomerations of buildings and people are going to find it hard to shift permanently to a more virtual arrangement. Universities, of course, are going to find it doubly hard because their hefty fees are largely based on the agglomeration factor. But big companies, too, are obsessed with the bricks and mortar of their self-image, and those managers who have risen through the ranks in such environments are going to be ill-disposed, and ill-equipped, to shift to anything virtual.

So expect to see some ugliness creep in. There will be less talk of ‘keeping our workers safe’ and of workplace flexibility and more like the above, as in “we’ve been extraordinarily kind and generous to our employees, but this nonsense can’t go on forever; if you want to continue play hooky you need to start filling out forms.”

Teleworkers have long been used to that kind of passive aggressive intimidation and discrimination. I would expect to see more. Workplace surveillance, possibly in the form of ensuring social distancing. And tools to monitor the user’s computer — something whose heritage I’ll argue in a future post is closely wedded to the world of spam and hacking.

  1. This announcement was ‘clarified’ on June 29 said that these terms applied only to those “whose job duties require them to be on campus full-time during normal business hours (8:00 am to 5:00 pm) and is intended to create flexible work arrangements that serve both the needs of the employee and their work unit.” It does not apply to those who were already telecommuting. ↩︎

How Covid-19 spreads: simulations and visualisations

By | June 23, 2020
0 Comment

This is a list of visualisations of how aerosols and droplets spread. While not all are related to Covid-19, they are relevant and worth watching. Happy to add more if anyone finds them. 

Covid and the Demise of Distance

By | May 18, 2020
2 Comments
My brother and I, 1967

I lost my brother the other day. Less than a month after losing my aunt, it is starting to feel like carelessness. And to be clear, neither of these deaths were down to Covid-19, at least not directly, and this column isn’t about Covid-19, at least not directly. But as I spent some virtual time alone with my brother’s closed casket, I couldn’t help feeling that this was a future that might seem dystopian, but was instead rather comforting.

My brother was my only sibling, so there’s only me now from that family unit. And he lived on the polar opposite side of the world, in DC, and so hard to reach at the best of times from my perch in Singapore. But Covid-19 had somehow rendered that distance meaningless; he could have just as easily been across the causeway in Malaysia, and quarantines would have made it almost impossible to be grave-side.

For me it was deja-vu backing up down the freeway.

When my aunt died in a British nursing home a few weeks ago, I could do nothing but send a few photos of her to a small mailing list of people unconnected to each other except through my aunt. (She wasn’t a real aunt, but as a childhood friend of my mother I had known her better and longer than most of my other relatives, and she had outlived most of those.) Most on the mailing list were not geeks, it’s safe to say, so those photos that did come back were usually upside down or sideways, which could have appeared disrespectful, but which would have amused my aunt. Her funeral was of course a small one, remote and ring-fenced by Covid-19, and I never got to hear what she had meant to others, or even see a photo of where she was buried. I had to sit alone with my grief, and read a few scraps from others on the adhoc mailing list about how the day went.

My brother’s death was quite different. My tech-savvy nephew had arranged for me to to spend some time alone near my brother’s casket via Facetime, which was oddly peaceful. And then, with the help of his friends, he hosted a memorial on Zoom. As the introductory music played over a tasteful drawing, I watched as a list of people signing on flashed up on the screen — by the time it started more than 200 people were aboard. I made it through my own eulogy and then watched dozens of others talk about my brother. Most of the people were those I had never met, but it was moving to hear them talk about him, revealing angles of my brother that were new to me, and refreshing, like uncovering hidden doors in a familiar house.

My brother and I, 2008

The tools aren’t perfect of course. I forgot to turn my video off after I had talked, and so I dread to think what I was doing for the rest of the gathering. And there were the inevitable glitches. But most important for me was that people were there, wherever they were from. Distance was no obstacle, and neither was familiarity. You never know who will turn up at a funeral: that’s what makes them so fascinating. The former lovers, the unacknowledged offspring, estranged spouses and feuding relatives, all may turn up. The wake is a more selective affair. But here in a virtual room were dozens of people who had heard about my brother’s death, and who could join in to share the memory of someone without fear of somehow not being close enough. It was egalitarian in the way that wakes usually aren’t; no one has to fuss over who to invite, and whether there are enough chairs or canapés to go around. Instead it becomes a festival, where anyone can pay tribute. No one was left out because of distance, either physical or familial, and that seemed to me to be something rather beautiful.

I don’t know what will happen when Covid-19 is tamed. I’m sure a lot more things will go back to normal than people predict. But if we take one lesson from the pandemic I feel it should be this: whether it’s a funeral, wedding, wake, birthday party, bluechip annual general meeting or parish council conclave, offer a virtual version too. Don’t let physical distance decide who has a seat and a voice. And don’t just put a camera in a corner of the room and live stream it. Give it some thought, as my nephew did for my brother. It made a world of a difference.

The Dogs That Haven’t Barked (Or We Just Haven’t Heard Them Yet)

By | May 19, 2020
0 Comment

I’ve been wondering about the countries we haven’t heard from yet on Covid numbers, or which have just flown under the radar. What I call the dogs that haven’t barked. In short, who’s on the other side of the curve, and who isn’t?

The most interesting data I could find was at EndCoronavirus.org, a website put together by Yaneer Bar-Yam from the New England Complex Systems Institute. They have collected together data from 72 countries and plotted graphs of their curve flattening efforts. They’ve categorised the countries into three. Those which

  • have already beaten COVID-19 (where the curve is back to where it started)
  • are nearly there (where it’s half way down the slope)
  • need to take action (where it’s still near the peak
https://www.endcoronavirus.org/countries

That’s interesting enough, but I wanted to get a sense of what that means. First off, I wanted to get a sense of how many people that is — how many people are in countries that have beaten COVID (I actually it’s a little early to say they have, I’m using Bar-Yam’s terminology), and how many people are living in countries which still need to take action?

So I did a bit of downloading and spreadsheeting. This is what we have:

where populations sit on the curve

So according to that data, more than half of the populations of the countries measured haven’t really started to tackle Covid-19. Gulp. There are some big countries in there:

Eight of the 10 most populous countries don’t score well

Now, you could quibble about which countries are at which stage, and some countries have clearly done more than others, but the curve doesn’t really lie. At least, it’s as good a yardstick as any.

So my next question was: how many people are we leaving out? Turns out quite a lot. The countries covered had a population of 5.9 billion, which leaves about 1.9 billion people unaccounted for. The website says that the “set of countries is certainly not an exhaustive list, but we do highlight the countries which we find to be interesting or important in some way.” It doesn’t say why it found them important and interesting. Possibly the data was clearer for those included. Hopefully they’ll add more countries once the data is clearer.

So what does the pie chart of people look like if we account for the missing two billion? We get this:

The missing quarter

The population in countries that haven’t started yet goes down to 42%, which is still a big chunk of humanity, while the ‘good guys’ account for about 23%. A quarter of the world’s population doesn’t appear at all.

So what happens if we put all this onto a map? Where are all these people?

The gray of Africa and Central Asia

It makes for grim viewing. Several things jump out:

  • The countries doing well are flattered by the presence of China. And Vietnam, Thailand and South Korea. In population terms the largest country outside APAC to get a star is Greece, with 10.4 million people. It does not look good.
  • The gray areas are a big concern. Very little data from Africa and Central Asia was ‘interesting or important’ enough to include in the study thus far. As we’ve read in the media, Africa is unprepared for Covid-19, where two countries account for nearly half of all tests carried out in Africa so far, according to data collected by Reuters.
  • The other gray area is Central Asia. A piece in the Atlantic Council’s New Atlanticist this week said that the countries of the region were each ploughing their own furrow, with varied, sometimes suspicious, results: “Tajikistan and Turkmenistan had been clinging to a fantastical claim of zero cases for weeks, despite the recent spike in mysterious deaths attributed to pneumonia. Tajikistan finally reported its first fifteen confirmed cases on April 30, after weeks of speculations and warning from international experts.”

I don’t know what all this says, exactly, but it sheds a little light on the dogs that haven’t barked. Covid-19 is a pandemic, which means it infects people, not countries. Yes, we can seal borders, and keep people from traveling, but at the end of the day the disease will only be conquered when every country has flattened every curve — or, unlikely, never let it rise up in the first place. None of us is going to be able to travel as freely as we once did, or see supply chains and shops creak back into life again, until all the people in these countries are through the same tunnel we’re currently in. That could mean a lot more pain, heartbreak, and death.

So thinking of this by population size, and looking more deeply at the countries that either haven’t seen the curve appear, or aren’t reporting it for one reason or another, is one way of knowing how long we’re all going to be fighting this war.

How A Twitter Scrap, and Covid-19, Reveal a Disruption In Process

By | May 8, 2020
1 Comment
Disruption, by Tim Lewis 2009

When is innovation just another stab at the past, and when is it revolutionary? When it becomes a bit of a Twitter storm in a teacup, is possibly when.

Here’s an interesting case study in the offing: You might need to get your head around some unfamiliar terms, like bi-directional linking, breadcrumb navigation and transclusion. Or not.

My thoughts were nudged by a post at Amplenote, an online note-taking and note-sharing app that is worth a look. Like a lot of these players, they’ve been forced into offering features by the new kid on the block, namely Roam Research, which by taking the genre by the scruff of its neck turned itself into something that knowledge workers are getting excited about.

The post was written by Bill Harding, founder of Alloy, the company behind Amplenote. They’re old style, by internet terms and their own words, not relying on VC funding, freemium models etc. You can tell by the product that it’s neat, robust and reliable.

That’s mostly what people interested in this kind of tool are looking for. I’ve been a note taker and outliner since the early days, and I’ve tried pretty much everyone that’s out there. Folks know that I feel that despite some great stuff, computer software has let us down when it comes to making software that understands us, rather than the other way around. (Why Won’t Computers Do What We Want Them To?)

But it’s taken Covid-19 to make me realise this is changing. And apps like Amplenote — or ones more familiar to you, like Evernote, are getting caught up in it. Roam Research has given us a glimpse of what note-taking — the simple act of reading, hearing, thinking or seeing something, and storing that somewhere — is ripe for disruption, and he’s going for it. It’s early days, but lockdown may be the jolt that propels this genre into the mainstream, something no other note-taking app has managed to do. A day ago Conor White-Sullivan posted to Roam’s Reddit group that 10,000 new users signed up to the app over the weekend, causing upheaval for his servers and users and forcing him to suggest to those ‘super-concerned’ use a rival app “for a week or so”.

He must know that suggestion really isn’t an option for most of his disciples. Roam is attracting a lot of interest — and beyond the usual numbers of people who dabble in this kind of thing. Why? Well, I think there are number of reasons:

  • Roam works right out of the box. It’s all online, the (initial) interface is very simple, even prepopulating the page with blank, but dated entries, prompting you to just start writing.
  • It gets as complex as you want it to get. You could just use it as a journal, if you wanted, but that would be a waste. It goes deep, with features being added with little fanfare, including sliders, nodemaps, and stuff I haven’t gotten around to figuring out.
  • But the key to all the excitement, I believe, is a key formula, which I think is the basic currency of software success: you get more out of it than you put in. Put simply, this means, for example, that if you linked one page to another page, that second page would update itself so you can see that link. This is what they mean by bi-directional links, or backlinks. It might seem to be the most trivial and useless piece of data, but if you don’t know what pages are linking to the page you’re looking at, you simply won’t know what information you have that you’ve already decided is linked to this. Your effort in linking to that page is now automatically creating extra value without you having to do the extra work.
Bi-directional linking, in simple terms

If you’ve read this far you’ll probably get it. But if not, let me just go into more detail. Computers, and the software that run them, are useless tools if they don’t allow us to do more with the stuff we tell them than we are capable of. Enter numbers into a spreadsheet because you know the software can do a load of things with that data than you can. Let your Apple Watch collect data about your body because you know it’s going to do more with it that’s useful than you could with a paper and pen. But for the most part knowledge workers have not really had anything similar for textual data. Yes, AI can help to find patterns in large bundles of it, but the same applied to our knowledge — the stuff we decide is worth keeping from our readings, talks, viewing and thinking in a computer — has not been so useful. Mostly, it’s just about being able to retrieve stuff more easily, so we don’t need to remember it, or remember where we put it.

But this is 2020. And we’re still there?

And this is where we come back to Bill Harding. And his screed. His point is a fair one: that all this talk of bidirectional linking is deja vu for many of us, when in the post-dotcom bubble burst of the early 2000s Wikipedia’s surprising success prompting interest in the underlying technology (here’s a piece I wrote in 2004 (sic) for the Journal about the disruption Wikipedia caused).

In his blog post yesterday Bill writes:

To drink in the enthusiasm we’ve witnessed in some corners of Twitter, bidirectional linking will evolve what’s possible…for those who dedicate themselves to the pursuit of learning this enigmatic craft. As fate & capitalism would have it, an elite cadre has popped up to help enthusiasts learn how to benefit from bidirectional linking. By all accounts, those who successfully assimilate the ideas of these programs transform their lives for the better. It seems reasonable, and I believe these gentlemen are doing great work to which they are wholly devoted.

But how different are today’s opportunities than what came before? To technologists of a certain age, the groundswell for a better connected network of ideas hearkens back to the halcyon days of 2005, when wikis were The Next Big Thing. Back then, companies like Wetpaint raised $40m to help organize the world’s knowledge. “A lot of venture money is flowing into wiki products” said Techcrunch in 2006. Having ubiquitous, bidirectional linking with surrounding context info was creating transformative opportunities in companies where people knew how to build them.

But with a couple major exceptions, wikis fizzled out, never catching on for personal use. Having set up my share of wikis during the early 2000s, I can attest that it was “worse than WordPress”-level bad for Twiki and Mediawiki. Developers might struggle through it to better capture their personal ideas, but the benefits of bidirectional linking were largely relegated to business knowledge software.

These new startups reviving and refreshing the ideas from the wiki craze is a great outcome for productivity enthusiasts. Especially with the expert guidance of smart people like Tiago and Nat, there’s never been a better time to help the humble wiki live up to its nearly-forgotten first round of hype.

If you sniff a little snarkiness in the tone ‘elite cadre’, you might be right. After trying to lure Roam users away with an import tool and a pricing comparison, Amplenote’s twitter account said less than an hour before I wrote this, that it had been blocked by Roam’s:


It’s not really a battle of equals: Amplenote has 24 followers, Roam 16,000. And this is the thing. What we’re really seeing, I believe, is a new player come in and bring the necessary tweaks and rethink to an existing technology — in this case, personal databases — by taking the best bits from each, adding a few new ones, and stealing the show to create a following and a buzz. This is not to say Roam isn’t impressive: it is, and I have not found any other app to match it.

And that’s why Amplenote and others, Bear, TiddlyWiki, WorkFlowy, TheBrain, Dynalist etc, are all struggling to add similar features, thinking about adding them, or defending why they don’t have them. This is good, and classic Christensen disruption. It might not be Roam that ends up winning this, but they’ve shaken up the market.

But what market? Is there really one for this kind of thing? Back in the early 2000s I would have said yes, because the kinds of people interested in this kind of thing were the same kind of people who bothered to read a tech column in The Wall Street Journal. The internet was a means of connectivity, and its potential was seen in those terms — could I store my stuff in more than one place, was the common question. So it wasn’t surprising that, as Bill recounts, everyone thought that wikis (the ‘readwrite web’) were the way to go. But others saw it differently, and all the smart money ended up going to using the internet to create more passive experiences — user generated, yes, but simpler, shorter, and where possible multimedia. It was all about eyeballs, and so content as knowledge slipped into the background as Twitter (status), Facebook (sharing stuff) and Google (search) came to the fore.

I’m not saying that’s necessarily changed. But Covid-19 has helped crystallise something that was already happening, namely that smart people are exploring how to leverage their knowledge and knowledge of software to solve the unsolved problems of the past, or to reconsider tools that had been largely forgotten. Knowledge work was once an obscure term that is now on its way to describing pretty much all of us who are sat at a computer, and it’s this realisation that has made people like Conor, I imagine, realise there’s a market for tools that really address the problem of deriving more value from the cost of user input.

Bill’s error is a generational one: what was once ‘business knowledge’ is now something else entirely. Watch this video of Andy Matuschak, a software engineer who works at the Khan Academy, to see what this looks like (he’s using Bear, by the way, not Roam). It’s strangely captivating viewing, ASMR for the Knowledge Generation:

Andy Matuschak at work

The other mistake is to think of this as ‘productivity’. This is not about that. This is not just a better task manager. I believe we’ve moved on from that — or at least recognised its limits. Now the thinking is, as Tiago Forte, one of Bill’s ‘elite cadre’, has mentioned, about acquiring and processing knowledge in a way that our brain retains it. You can almost hear Andy’s brain whirring as he processes what he’s reading before he expresses it.

So where will all this go? I’m not sure. Roam is talking about charging $15 a month, which is why people like Bill still think they have a chance to grab some of this market. To me it’s a rising tide and I’m pleased to see there are boats paying attention. After 20 years of focus on either ‘Getting Things Done’ or on the cuteness/elegance of interface, we’re entering a much larger ocean, which has the potential to bring these cutters, sloops and yawls into the slipstream of the incumbent tankers. Whether they go under or catch the current is anyone’s guess. Evernote has, largely, failed to find a larger audience (for lots of reasons) but the timing might now be right, especially as knowledge workers find themselves with plenty of time, isolation, an internet connection, and an urge to learn.

Addendum: Conor points out in a tweeted response to this piece that he has “been working on this problem for the better part of a decade. Strong(ly) agree the changes in landscape are great for us, but we wandered the desert for years before this.”