Over at We Live Simply Jonathan is thinking about ‘downtime’.

His thoughts really made me think.

We probably all have a sense that we are more available than we used to be.  The mobile phone sorted that out.  But the smart phone has taken our availability to a whole new level.

Email on your phone so people can contact you anytime, and expect you to answer.

Twitter.  Facebook.  FourSquare.  All designed to keep you ‘in touch’ but as this article on Life Hack suggests there is a huge downside.

…what’s actually happening in the life of many  professionals is not amusing at all.  Their companies  have taken the opportunity given them by technology and the recession to convince employees to spend more  “down time” doing work.  At the same time, they send a subtle message that  “staying in touch” with work also means being available 24 hours  a day for 52 weeks of the year.

Converting “Down Time” Nowadays, it seems, everyone with a smartphone has gotten into the habit of continuously trying to convert “down time” into useful, work time.  Here are some everyday examples of ways in which many professionals are converting their “down time.”

• - a manager driving on the highway at 70 m.p.h. sends a text to his team  (while spilling hot coffee into his lap)
• - an engineer in a meeting that’s going slowly, checks her email and replies (missing two action items assigned to her)
• - an accountant watching his child play baseball on Saturday morning closes a deal in the fourth inning via cellphone (and lies to his  son about seeing him make his first catch ever)
• - a supervisor attending 3 days of personal productivity training is unable to leave her smartphone untouched for more than 15 minutes (and later complains that  the trainer was ineffective)
• - a consultant speaking to a client on the phone remembers that  he should have sent an urgent message to a colleague, and quietly does so (even as the client notes the sudden lapse in attention and interprets it as a lack of interest in continuing the relationship)
• - a hard driving attorney once again takes his smartphone to the  urinal where he can multi-task (… and is noticed by his boss’ husband who happened to borrow his smartphone just five minutes earlier)
• - a family cheers in unison when executive-Mom forgets her  smartphone at home 5 hours into the annual vacation (and falls into  despair when FedEx delivers it the next day)

I recently asked a client: “How did your big presentation to the executive team go?”  She responded: “OK… but the CEO spent the entire hour on his (expletive)  Blackberry.”

This was bad news for my client, whose project was now being viewed by the CEO as another chunk of his “down time.”

Rest is essential.  Spending time with the people you love is too.  These people need you to be available to them too.

For many people reading this your life, like mine, will be complicated by the fact that you work from home.  People call at mealtimes because they know you will be there.  People expect you to reply to email because they know you can pick it up anytime.  And we feed those expectations because we pick up the phone and answer the emails at 2am.  We like the versatility and the chance to arrange our days but we need to switch it off sometimes.

Working from home also brings isolation.  Twitter and Facebook give the feeling of company.  But like at work when you might chat to your colleagues over coffee there comes a time when you just need to get on with work.  That’s why you’re there after all.  The same is true when working at home.

So, I’ll be turning my work email off at 5pm and on at 9am.  It will stay off at the weekend unless I’m working.  When I’m off I won’t be looking and when I’m with my wife or my kids I’m going to try to keep my phone in my pocket unless I’m taking photos or using it to enhance our day.

So, what do you think?

I posted a list of things that I Will… do in 2010.  They are goals, not resolutions.  What about the things I’d like to do longer term?

Well, 43 Things is a pretty simple little online tool with an iPhone app that lets you write, update, track and share your goals as well as encouraging others and sharing tips on how to achieve your goals.  You can have goals for 2010 and life goals.  It’s free and simple.

I’m ‘stewcut‘ if you want to keep tabs on me and I’ve added an RSS feed to the sidebar of this blog to keep you up to date with my progress.

What are your goals beyond 2010?

Old windows laptops suck

I have a very old (8 years) laptop with a massive 500mb RAM and 20GB hard drive which lives under the bed.  It would have been as well staying under the bed!  By the time it had installed its 47 updates and then decided Service Pack 3 was in order I’d wasted a day.  Don’t bother.  A pen and paper work better!

iPhones are great… except…

iPhone

My new iPhone appeared the day after I spilled coffee on my MacBook.  Just as well. The email works great with exchange so all my work email and calender was all there when I needed it and appeared like magic when I started up my laptop.

But there is stuff missing that I had on my Palm m130 years ago that you just expect to be there on what reports to be a ‘business tool’.  

I want to be able to access documents from my server or laptop and edit them.  How hard can that be?  I can get my email from my server, why not my word docs?  I know dataviz is working on documents to go for the iphone but seriously, is there no Word app out there?  I’m sure Micro$soft know there are big buck for the winner of the iPhone mobile office race.  What’s taking so long!!!

What about presentations?  It’s great I can use my phone as a remote… but my Nokia N95 runs powerpoint with a video cable out to a projector.

Come on Apple.  The iPhone is brilliant.  The interface is amazing, the email and web apps for twitter and facebook are all good.  The games are smart and quirky.  But I want business tools too!

Do you ever go on holiday, wander around, take some photos and then forget where you went and how you got there? This could be the tool for you! Sports Tracker records your journey using GPS (kind of the opposite of sat nav… tells you where you have been rather than where you are going!) and you can then upload your journey to the Sports Tracker site where it marries your GPS data with Google Maps. You can add photos of your route using geotags. So Sports Tracker is really a Journey Tracker. Pretty cool.

If you want to you can share routes, post your training information to your blog and add media like photos to your routes. Nice.

RefWorks is genius. It helps you collate all those searches in databases for journal articles and papers and puts them into a bibliography that you can download!!! Why have I just found out about this!!!

I haven’t posted my bag for a while. I’ve got several new things since the last time…

New bag, new laptop, new notebooks, new phone BUT I’ve lost my favourite pen!!!

I had a Parker Urban and I lost it, then found it again last week and now I’ve lost it again! Anyway, I’m sure it will turn up (probably on my desk when I move something).

UPDATE: Found it!!!  It was in my suit pocket… no wonder I couldn’t find it!

So, what’s in your bag?

Well, today was the day.  He’s got some great ideas and it was good to chat with someone who’s looking beyond the here and now.  I think there is much mileage in what we talked about and hope it can become a reality.  Watch this space.

Oh, and I smacked my head off a concrete beam.  It hurt.  A lot.  And it bled.  A bit.

In other news… I got a new bag.  My messenger bag is hurting my shoulder.

I also have sections for ‘Someday’, ‘Blog’, ‘Projects’ and ‘Training’.  I don’t seem to write much in these.  I’ve written 2 things in the ‘blog’ bit, 1 page of stunning ideas in the ‘training’ bit and nothing in the ‘someday’ section.

Is this normal?  Should I have dreams and visions that I record in my nice notebook?  Just wondering…

So far it’s not too bad, although I have a small pile of things that need either sticking back in my bag or in a file but that’s a job for work time.

The one thing I have added to my arsenal of tools is ‘Micro$oft OneNote’.  I’m liking it for some of my projects as it lets me collate different types of files and info on one page.  Handy for planning classes, training and stuff like that but also for bringing together large amounts of web stuff and PDFs gathered while researching.  Worth a look if you haven’t seen it and you can download it as a free trial.

I still haven’t quite got to grips with my paper notebook.  I’m a little scared to write in it I think!  I’ve divided it into sections and put tabs in and it looks great but I’m on page 2!  Maybe that’s the trick, only writing down what you really need to!