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Lifehacker’s Essentials for the “placeless office” … I can do a few better

by Tris Hussey on November 13th, 2006

I’ve been a teleworker for almost seven years now, so I know the placeless office.  Heck I am the placeless office.  Lifehacker got some serious Blogosphere love last week for their "Essential tools for the placeless office" post.  Their recommendations are good, but they’ve left out some of my favs and some serious tricks of the trade, IMNSHO.

Here are their picks:

• Group chat: Campfire
• Internal knowledge sharing: Mediawiki (it’s what powers wikipedia)
• Email: Gmail
• Social bookmarking: Wists / del.icio.us
• Group scheduling: Google Calendar
• Document collaboration: Google Docs (aka Writely)

Yeah these are good, and I use a few of them as well (Gmail specifically), but the list can go much farther.  Not in terms of adding too much extra stuff, more like a couple tweaks.

First is Skype.  Jim Turner, Scott Goldblatt and I work together in One By One Media.  We’re in three different timezones and nowhere close to each other (Colorado, Kansas, and B.C.).  Every morning one of us (this morning it was me) starts a Skype group chat for the day.  We chat all day, take lunch, catch up when we get back, send files, even start a call now and then.  Very, very powerful and very, very easy.

Next, I suggest going beyond just Campfire to using the full-fledged Basecamp product (which includes Campfire).  I’ve used Basecamp for a number of projects in the past, and I know b5 uses it as well.  It has to-dos, message board, file sharing, Writeboard (like Google Docs, but less powerful) and chat.  This has made OBO’s process a lot smoother as we’ve been cranking out proposals and other work recently (OBO has been involved in rolling out the new b5 templates, including this one).

Really if I had to choose, I could live with Gmail, Skype, and Basecamp.  Covers a lot of the above and in smaller chunks at that.

I also suggest that if you are on the road a lot, adding Gmail for your mobile device and Gtalk for your device.  I’ve been using Gmail mobile for a couple weeks now and it is truly awesome.  One thing I learn, however, is that if you tell it to keep you logged in, your battery life will suffer.  I turned this off and life was good.  All this means is that you need to sign in every time.

So all you telework pimps and road warriors, what keeps you working efficiently?

Tags: telework, telecommuting, placeless office

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