Working "out of the office" has taken on new meaning as technology has evolved.  Understanding the progression allows us to leverage opportunities to work outside the confines of the traditional office space.

For white-collar workers, the office of  150 years ago was "their place," a factory floor, a shop, a room in a building in which goods were manufactured.  When you were working, you took your materials with you, whether you were heading across the country (slowly) or to a courthouse down the street.  Back-straining sample cases and briefcases were the order of the day; if you thought you might need it, you had to take it with you.  A secretary drafted your documents.  Meetings required significant advance coordination.  And business people had a lot of leisure time, or at least non-business time.

For a similar white-collar worker, the office of 80 years ago was "a separate place," an office tower or a campus in the suburbs.  You were surrounded largely by other office workers rather than line or production workers.  Secretaries still drafted your documents, you still toted your work to meetings, although those meetings were coordinated (or supplanted) by phone calls, and business people worked long hours but still generally made it home before the kids went to bed. 

Today we're on the cusp of the "my place/anyplace" office.  Technology is the change agent, and it is highly disruptive.  We work in the office, at home, on vacation, in an airport lounge and on the plane.  Meetings can be initiated quickly, often virtually by videoconference or in slow motion via e-mail; secretaries are now aided by technology, allowing them to provide support to a larger pool of knowledge workers than in the past.  Technology has allowed many white-collar workers to create work product from start to finish without need of administrative assistance; and we hear the constant complaint, "I never get enough time with the family."

Without recognizing that we're at a discontinuity, a point of radical change in the way we approach business, we engage in a 21st century work style using 20th century thinking.  It's an inefficient and very stressful approach.

We're just scratching the surface of technologies that enable the anyplace office.  If we control them, they empower us; otherwise they enslave us.

Technology and the Office Experience
What is the key point of the "office experience?"  Presence - seeing someone's expression, reading their body language, looking into their eyes, hearing their voice, reviewing shared visuals (e.g., looking over a brief or drawing on a white board), dropping by, and engaging in hallway conversations.  You can do the "paper" work anywhere; people define the office.

Offices also have doors.  Closing them affords time to retreat and think rather than interact.

All these key points have technology analogs, and some make the experiences richer rather than detracting from them.

Presence and Expression
Not long ago, videoconferencing was an exotic tool found largely in expensive conference rooms.  Today, it's available on your desktop for less than the cost of an upscale dinner on the road.

Today's desktop video cameras have excellent fidelity.  The frame rates - the "jerkiness" of the image - approach that of a movie, and the picture quality, while certainly not movie-like in its beauty, is enough to reveal even subtle expressions.  The software with some cameras can even follow you as you shift in your desk chair, so that you're always the stage-center star of your videoconference.

It no longer takes a techical magician to deploy these; they're plug-and-play.  Instant messaging software can set up a videoconference with little effort.

There are now portable cameras that slip right into your laptop case.  With most business (and even vacation) hotels now supplying a broadband connection to the Internet, you can be anywhere in the world and still be face-to-face with your business connection.

In Microsoft's legal group, we make these cameras available for anyone who has a need for one.  We publicize them through a no-travel contest - save a trip and win a camera.  Plus, you get a free meal to make up for that business dinner you didn't get, and your own beach to make up for the 30 minutes of free time to do something exciting in whatever exotic city you didn't go to.  (Okay, the free meal is at an internal cafeteria, and the beach comes in a four-inch box complete with a three-inch beach chair and half-inch beach ball!  But it gets people's attention.)

Voice
Voice is of course carried by videoconference, but more common are teleconferences, VoIP and VoIM (voice over instant messaging), and the ubiquitous cell phone.

Instant teleconferencing is a tool that all business users should have at their disposal.  In these systems, each user always has a teleconference available without needing to schedule the system in advance.  You can schedule time with other parties, but you can also do it on the spur of the moment.

If a meeting is taking place at another site, it's a great idea to allow people to call in by attaching a teleconference number.  There are positive and negative aspects to teleconferencing.  The positive is that many meeting attendees are only needed for part of the meeting; the negative is the lack of focus; folks on a teleconference will probably be "multitasking," a polite way of saying they're also reading e-mail or engaging in other activities that distract them from the meeting agenda.  You can minimize focus issues by agreeing in advance that the meeting owner will get the attention of non-core attendees directly when they're needed ("Steve, we're going to talk about agenda item 3 now.").  This approach, by the way, also works well for in-person meetings.

Tools such as Live Meeting and WebEx supplement (or include) teleconferencing by letting remote participants see a common screen - and even share control of that screen.

These tools are terrific for working remotely on a document together.  Instead of saying "okay, in paragraph 3 on page 4 - no, wait, that's now page 5 . . . ," simply ask for control of the cursor and make your change directly to the document for all to see.  You can share any application or your desktop.

Live Meeting also has a white board feature where all parties can draw on a shared screen, just like a white board in an office of a conference room.  This is particularly valuable when you're using a tablet PC.  It lacks the kinesthetic feel of standing up at a real white board (and thus taking over control of a meeting - quite a phenomenon!), but on the other hand, it makes it extremely easy to record what's on the white board, including intermediate versions.

Voice over IP (digitized voice) and VoIM are coming into their own.  VoIP is an alternative to POTS (plain old telephone service), and is currently more about cost savings than new capability, but that will change in the next few years.  VoIM is a way to turn IM conversations from a bunch of time-consuming typed messages to real discussions.

These systems all work whether you're in the office or not, as long as you have a broadband connection.

Dropping By
Hallway or water cooler conversations are a powerful tool in any office - whether it's bonding over a TV episode or working out an idea on the spur of the moment.  There is no great "virtual" analog to these experiences, but IM offers at least some of the free-flowing, transient nature of these conversations.  In addition, new versions of IM software, such as Microsoft Office Communicator (the business version of IM), show "presence" - whether someone is available for a discussion.  The software is getting better at discerning presence from the environment - are you on the phone, in a meeting, not at the computer, etc.

Even if you can't drop in on your coworkers while you're telecommuting, you can easily see if they're around - and strike up a quick conversation with them.

Closing the Door
The best feature of an office may be the door.  An open door says, "I'm available," while a closed door suggests "e-mail only."  Close the door to get uninterrupted work time.

Interruptions are costly.  People don't multitask any more than computers truly do; what a computer calls multitasking is really "context switching," giving each application a few milliseconds to do some work and then moving on to the next application.  They all appear to be working simultaneously, but the operating system overhead to accomplish this is significant (albeit masked by today's better operating systems and faster computers).

Likewise, "liveware" really context-switches rather than multitasks.  There are certain background tasks we can perform with low awareness, from autonomic nervous system activities such as breathing to, say, driving home from work while thinking of your work day or your kids or an NPR story.  For the most part, we cannot do two "thinking" tasks simultaneously.

There are studies that suggest that a programmer can take up to an hour to recover from an interruption; it takes a long time to build up the complex mental models and images from which a good developer works.  I haven't seen similar studies on attorneys or other knowledge workers, but I believe there's a similar cost to interruptions, given how similar the mental processes can be.  (Ask a trial lawyer about an objection whose purpose is to interrupt the flow of testimony!)

Yet we suffer interruptions all through our work day.  These interruptions - multitasking - do not increase productivity; they decrease it and worse, leave us feeling stressed out at the end of the day.

Close Your Virtual Door; Turn Them Off
So close the door.  When you're at work, whether in the office or telecommuting, schedule your tasks.  Turn off the incoming e-mail notification, the cursor change, and the chime of new e-mail.  Turn off instant message alerts.

And when the work day is over - or even during it - don't be afraid to reach for the most important feature of anyplace-office technology - whether your cell phone, your BlackBerry or your Treo.  These devices have "off" switches.  Use them freely.

Turn them off in meetings, too.  You can say you'll ignore them, but be honest - few people really do.  They're like call-waiting, whose hidden message is that your current caller is so unimportant you'll sidetrack him or her to take a call from anyone else!  Using a BlackBerry or similar device in a meeting sends the message that the folks you're meeting with are second-class citizens.  To be painfully blunt, it does not say that you're so important that your office can't live without you; rather, it says you're self-important.  (If it's an emergency, they'll call your cell phone, which is, I trust, on vibrate.)  Step out after an hour if you really need to check your e-mail.  Not only will your meetings go smoother, your stress level will go down.

Does This Work Today?
Yes.  I wrote the bulk of this article while working from home.  That same day I participated in three conference calls via instant conferencing, numerous brief IM conversations, one brief desktop videoconference, a Live Meeting session and some cell phone calls.  In addition, Office Communicator is hooked up to our phone system; when my phone rang in my office, I got a popup (it's the only one I have enabled) that told me who was calling and allowed me with a single click to transfer the call to my home phone, where I answered it just as if I were in my office.

My home office has a docking station for my laptop, with keyboard, mouse and flat-panel monitor already plugged in.  It takes less than 15 seconds to drop my tablet PC into the docking station and be working on the "big rig."

I can take most of this on the road, too.  My desktop video camera travels with my laptop, as does a small wireless mouse.  The only downside is that my tablet PC keyboard isn't as nice as a standalone keyboard - but I have to believe that hotels will figure this out shortly, and provide (okay, rent) you a good keyboard during your stay.

What Else Is Coming?
The 21st century office will take into account our extremely mobile workforce.  The consolidation of physcial space will become more common.  Some of the folks on my team, who do considerable work outside the office, officially share office space.  We continue to standardize our hardware - all of our tablet PCs and laptops use a common docking station; soon we'll be able to enter any office "room," drop in a PC and be working in seconds.

Ubiquitous broadband - wired and wireless - also plays a role.  I can work from home, a hotel, another corporate building and an airport lounge in a relatively interchangeable way.  It's not obvious to my business partners where I'm working, or even that I'm not in my physical office - and there's no reason it should make a difference for most business activities.

I'm not suggesting it's possible - or even good - to do away with personal, in-office contact.  Such contact has enormous value, as do old-fashioned drop-in office visits.  I prefer to conduct one-on-one meetings with my team in person.  But much of the work I do - that many of us do - is work that can be accomplished equally well in the office, at home or on my sailboat (even my marina has wireless!).

Practicing Law
What do these new capabilities offer for the practice of law?  I don't think anyone fully knows yet.  Right now, we're using these tools to extend the office, with occasional forays into new possibilities, such as joint contract editing with Live Meeting.

But some attorneys, some firms, some law departments are going to find new possibilities here, possibilities for growth, for expanding the market.  There are exciting opportunities for the early adopters.

OOF
Now it's time to turn on your OOF message and go home.

No, OOF wasn't coined by some programmer who couldn't abbreviate "out of office" properly.  It originated back in the days of pink "While You Were Out" pads and means "out of facility."

Maybe it's time for it to take on a new meaning.  Today's tools allow you to be truly out of facility without being out of touch; you may be technically "out of the office," but you can take your office with you.  Your office is now you - your office is wherever you are.

Last one out, turn off the lights.

About our author . . .

Steven Levy is Senior Director, Information Systems for Microsoft Legal and Corporate Affairs.  He has served as architect, designer and developer on numerous business software products and projects over the past two decades.  Steven can be reached at Steven.Levy@microsoft.com.