Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

In some way, RescueTime can be seen as the graphical variant of this meme.

 $ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
   93	cd 
   80	sudo 
   71	ls 
   29	rm 
   17	ssh 
   16	less 
   14	export 
   11	mvn 
   10	./autogen.sh 
    9	tar 

[via Bill]

As you might know, I am mildly obsessed about statistics, visualization and productivity. And this is exactly the mix that makes RescueTime so fascinating for me, RescueTime, marketed as "Time Management for Geeks" will analyze how much time you spend on your computer with what desktop or web applications and what websites. You can get a graph of the ten most used applications based on daily, weekly or monthly view. Additionally you are able to tag all applications and web sites in order to organize them into categories like work, personal, procrastination or according to activities like reading, writing, planning, etc. All in all a very helpful tool that tells me how I spend my time - and a website that has changed the way I work, even if I spend less then 7 minutes on most days on this website.

Yesterday I finished my latest article "Elements of Collaboration" that is a collection of 74 patterns for collaboration of knowledge workers. I've gathered tools, methods, social software and social behavior patterns related to creative collaboration and presented them as an periodic table of elements.

I hope this collection of tools and methods is a help for orientation in the vast area of collaboration and productivity for information workers.

The term "free-form collaboration" is heard quite often these days, but still there it is not made clear what free-form collaboration is and why it is more important today than ever.

Free-form collaboration means that team members are not bound to typical transactional workflow process like managing a customer's request, but instead that they are seen as rational and responsible adults who need freedom to work creatively, to innovate, to design and to invent that can find their own workflow of dealing with tasks, in which order, in which way, with which priority.

Being a creative knowledge worker means that the same path can hardly be gone twice because every creative challenge is a new one. As a result, no strict and fixed workflow processes should be enforced, because they are not able to deal with the exceptions as intelligent humans are (and these exceptions happen all the time).

But free-form collaboration means more: It means freedom to work with the best team members for a job, regardless of department or company affiliations, regardless of city or country of origin. It means freedom in place of collaboration, some knowledge workers prefer to work from home or a café instead of their office. Do not force them into places where they are unproductive.

For more information, see the entry "What is free form collaboration" in my collection of "elements of collaboration".

Via Lifehacker: Spanning Sync is a small Mac OX X application that allows you to synchronize your iCal calendards to Google Calendar bidirectionally. Before Spanning Sync, Google Calendar offered iCalendar export which could be subscribed in iCal and iCal offered iCalendar publishing to a FTP or WebDAV folder, which in turn can be subscribed from Google. However you turn it - there was no bidirectional synchronization until now.

The Beta version of Spanning Sync available from today works for me, but if you try it you have to expect to pay for this useful service in the future.

Jakob Nielsen in Screen Resolution and Page Layout

Big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity, and anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600x1200 screen resolution. A flat-panel display with this resolution currently costs less than $500. So, as long as the bigger display increases productivity by at least 0.5%, you'll recover the investment in less than a year.

Screen resolution increases productivity. Says Apple, says Microsoft, says Jakob Nielsen.