Welcome to the Telelympics! Telecommuting For The 2010 Winter Games

The 2010 Winter Olympic Games are looming large for all of us now. It's nearly 2010 and February is going to be here before you know it. The question that a lot of us have been asking ourselves, and you should ask yourself, is "What am I going to do about work during the Games?" Some folks are lucky enough to be given the time off. UBC, BCIT, and many other educational institutions have chosen to close during the Games, but what if you're not one of those lucky folks? How are you going to get to work? What's your Vancouver Winter Olympic work plan? In this first column of a series I'm going to layout one option that might appeal to many folks: working from home.

Update: Per the comment below, it's only the classes that are cancelled at UBC. Everyone else will be working ... hopefully tele-working!

Since I moved to BC in 2000, I've primarily worked from home. Only for a "brief" period in the last year have I gone into an "office" on a daily basis. One year out of nine isn't bad is it? Because I've spent so much time working from home, I have more than a few tips and tricks up my sleeve that I'm going to share with you on how to work from home successfully. The first hurdle is talking to your boss, unless of course your boss has already told you to work from home in which case it might be your family that needs to be convinced! It should be obvious, but working from home is predicated on you having both a computer and high-speed internet access at home. If you don't have these, you might be stuck going into the office.

Working it out with work

If you haven't broached the subject with your boss yet, you need to very soon. The City of Vancouver and VANOC wants to reduce our regular traffic load by 30% during Games time, just to allow for the extra traffic (and associated craziness) that will come part and parcel with the Games being in town. I can't think of a better way to reduce traffic than not having to jump into whatever mode of transportation you choose and just stay at home for work. Here's how to approach the topic of working from home with your boss: Just lay it out straight. There is going to be traffic from the seventh level of Hell during the Games so being able to plan for you to be at work at a predictable time isn't going to happen. Sure, you can time shift, but at some point you're going to have to venture out into the throng of the city and that will just not be fun. So if your boss would like you to be available to him or her and your clients/customers with as little disturbance as possible, just take travel out of the equation. Sure you can play the "it's easy being green" card or "I know I'll be more productive at home" spin (both of which are true and fantastic reasons themselves), but for your boss it's minimizing the disruption to day-to-day business that will probably win the day.

Paint a plausible scenario: You're heading to work. You've left home at the recommended "really darn early" time (let's say adding an extra 1-2 hours to your commute), but there's a security incident or accident close to town. Even if a few roads are blocked off or a bridge closed for only a short time, that could create chaos lasting much, much longer. This puts you coming into work late for an important conference call. Since the cell phone driving ban will be in place and a ticketable offence, you calling in from the car isn't going to be an option. When you finally get to work, "grumpy" probably would only scratch the surface of your mood. The day might not be shot, but it hasn't started off well and that will certainly effect your productivity. Compare this to if you are working from home. A few minutes extra sleep or time to prepare and your favourite coffee in your favourite mug. You sit down in your office area and dial into the call on time and chipper. The rest of the day goes just as well. If a client wants to meet, and they are close by, walking over to a local coffee place could make for a nice relaxed atmosphere for a productive meeting.

I don't know about your boss, but given the circumstances, I think the working from home options sounds a lot better to me. Just because you're planning on working from home, doesn't preclude you going into the office from time to time. You just get to plan it better and maybe not stay all day. The keys to working from home are flexibility, continuity, and reliability. Sounds like a plan.

Tools you'll need

The boss has signed off on this plan, now what? Let's get that home computer infrastructure up to snuff. Make sure that computer of yours is running in good shape. Do that virus and spyware check. Backup your machine, do some of that regular maintenance that us computer people are always telling you to do (like update your software and such), and vacuum out the dust bunnies from the vents. Again, you need high-speed Internet access to make this plan work. Really. No, really, I've telecommuted over dialup and it was awful and this was when applications and everything was much, much smaller. If you have a laptop purchased within the last three years, it will have wifi built in (I'd venture as much as five years ago, but that might be pushing it), so take advantage of this can get a wireless router if you don't already have one. Boxing Day sales are absolutely awesome times to pick up great deals on wireless routers. Why WiFi? I'm going to bet that unless you work from home a lot (like I do), you might not have an "office" per se set up and your whole "work space" might be a bit sub par. Having WiFi lets you set up shop wherever you'd like (pretty much) in the house. When I've working from home I often mix it up by working in my office, or on the couch, or even up in the kitchen. A change of scene really helps me keep my gears moving.

Okay, computer (personally I think laptops are best for telecommuting because of the flexibility) check. High-speed Internet and WiFi, check. Next? Software.

Here in part one, I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty of how to get all pieces and parts running like a well-oiled machine, here I'm going to give you the laundry list and get things moving into place. The biggest barriers you will run into working from home are usually connecting with your work email and connecting to systems behind your company firewall. If you can check your email from home already, you're ahead of the game. If you don't have any specific systems you need to work with at work, then you're looking good to go, but if you don't what are the options?

Get connected to work--from home!

The easiest and least painless option is to use software like GoToMyPC (which is the industry leader) to connect to your work computer from home over the Internet. Once GoToMyPC (and similar open-source products like VNC) are set up you'll use and control your work machine just like you're sitting at it…but there is a catch that work machine must be left on 24/7. If the work computer is turned off, you can't connect to it. GoToMyPC is a for-pay service (with a handy 30 day trial) and while the free options (like VNC) are fantastic you also need to do a little more geeking around to get it working. No, it's not hard and certainly doable, just it isn't as easy peasy as GoToMyPC.

Even if you don't need GoToMyPC to connect to your computer, you might want a few other bits of tech to help collaborate with your colleagues and boss. Here are my top hits:

• IM software (MSN, Gtalk, Yahoo IM, AIM, Skype). When you can't call or just have a quick question or just want to chat nothing beats IM (especially if you can't phone).
• Office apps. The reigning king is Microsoft Office, but if you don't have that at home you can download and install OpenOffice for free or use Google's Google Docs to work on documents.
• DropBox for file sharing. DropBox is a masterfully simple program for Macs, PC, even Linux that lets you store and share files securely over the Internet. I use DropBox

If you want to kick the IM up a level you can use the audio/video chat features in Gtalk or Skype to really keep the team in touch. Heard of Twitter? How about Yammer? No? Yammer is like a private Twitter for just you and your colleagues. There is a bit of a catch—you all have to have the same email address and gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc don't cut it. Something like everyone here at the paper with a @vancouverobserver.com email. Yammer brings the immediacy of Twitter and IM but with the ability to "catch up" later like email. Believe me there are a ton of cool tools, apps, and services that I can (and will) talk about, but I have a couple more things for you to think about.

First is your phone. A lot of use don't have home phones anymore and just use our cell phones for all our calling. If you fall into this group, make sure your plan has enough minutes so that you don't go over minutes during your time away from the office (yet another reason to off load some voice communications to IM or voice chat). If you do have a home phone, you are going to develop a whole new phone etiquette. Remember your boss or client might be calling so answering (as a joke) "Tony's pizza" might not be a great idea. If you have kids, you are going to have to remind them of phone manners and how to take good messages. Yes your boss, clients, and customers should also be understanding, but understanding only goes so far. Speaking of family, one of the hardest parts of working at home is making the break between "home" and "work". You can't work all the time (glances sheepishly at myself), but when you are working your family needs to understand that while you might be at home you are at work and can't be disturbed unless it's urgent. I used to challenge my kids when I was interrupted with "Are you, or anyone else, bleeding or on fire?" If the answer was "no" then it had to wait until I took a break. By the way you do have to take breaks (another sheepish glance towards myself) and stick to them.

This should be enough to get yourself going towards working at home for now. In part 2 I'm going to talk about setting up your space, getting that WiFi router setup, and talk about software in some more detail. If you have any questions, leave them below and I'll do my best to answer them.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to take a break to make some more coffee.