Category: Services & Products

So in this part of the world, many of us need to work from home (WFH) because of the Coronavirus disease. Naturally, work from home / remote is very different from working in the office.

There are many online information about working from home but mainly focuses on the best conference tools in the market. From my point of view however, other than good conference tools, one actually needs a few other techniques and habits to make the whole WFH exercise effective, and ultimately less “conference call fatigue”.

Here are the 7 habits that can make your work more effective:

1. Have a Working Mood and Setting Up a Proper Workplace

Highly effective people will not work from home in pajama. Instead, they will change to casual wear (formal attire is a bit strange …) before they start working. The working mindset and mood is important.

In addition, find a place or corner at home to make it your workplace. Understand it is not easy if your home is not very spacious and you have your partner, parents, kids and pets around while you’re working. Therefore if needed, find a coffee shop nearby to setup your proper workplace.

In my case, I also set up my workplace with a stand-up desk, some background music (through a Spotify playlist) as well as a cup of hot black coffee.

2. Equip Yourself with Good Tools

There are many tools in the market good for conference meetings – e.g. conference tools like Zoom.us, Microsoft Teams, WebEx and collaboration tools for whiteboarding, mind-mapping, drawing, remote desktop, document sharing etc.

Select only a limited set of tools, within your company budget and don’t over-complicate the technology.

3. Preparation of Conference Calls

Send out invitation email to all attendants with meeting agenda, joining methods – conference call tool and dial up number etc. Also note the meeting time if your attendants were from different time zones, therefore a link to timezone website will be useful.

Send an reminder email to ask the attendants to install the conference software and mobile app beforehand.

More importantly, ask the attendants to test the video, microphone, share screen function to see how it works before joining the meeting.

4. Running a Good Conference Calls

Greet the attendants one by one, so they know they joined the call successfully and aware of other attendants.

Ask the attendants to find the mute button of the tool and mute it for the moment.

When it’s time to start the meeting, inform the attendants how you’re going to run the meeting, when will be the right time to ask question and the order to ask questions – e.g. one by one, or team by team.

Then run your meeting, according to the agenda. If you need to ask your attendant questions, make sure you start with the name of the attendant and remind him or her to unmute before answering the questions.

Wrap up your meeting with a verbal summary, follow-up actions and a thank-you to all attendants.

5. Post Conference Call Actions

After the conference meeting, send out an email with the summary, and follow-up actions, to all attendants.

Collect the feedback of the conference / collaboration tools.

Help the attendants to fix any connection and tools installation issues.

6. Tracking Tasks Status

Your usual way to track task status may not work anymore (e.g. Kanban board in the office), again some file sharing and online project monitoring tools will make the team’s life a lot easier.

7. Lastly, Keep Yourself Fit

Work from home also means you no longer need to walk to public transport, or carpark; you won’t walk around in the company; and you won’t walk to lunch. In essence, you exercise less if you work from home.

Therefore, instead of walking around, you shall find time throughout the day to walk, jog, or exercise in gym.

With the same token, you shall also spare some time to read, to join some online courses … as I believe you won’t want to join hours of conference meetings every single day.

In Summary

Hope these 7 habits help you a bit to make the WFH exercise more effective. If you know other good habits and tools, let me know.

… and Blogger, Plog / Lifetype, PostNuke, DocuWiki, WordPress in between.

It’s been 24 years since I hosted my own website (you can find the history here), and one lesson I learnt is there are always better tools out there to develop your own website. Even though professionally I use other enterprise software to build websites and applications, I reckon you can always learn more by using other tools or platforms to build your own website.

While I use WordPress to build / host my personal website (yes, you’re reading this – michaelyung.com), I moved my photo website, 80days.com, from WordPress to Wix. I don’t exactly know why I made the move as WordPress served me pretty well to host my photos. However, the idea of trying something new pushed me to evaluate other options and eventually I settled with Wix.

The first thing I learnt from Wix was the tool is beautifully implemented, and the next was there were too many options, settings that it would take anyone a long time to complete a site. You will also need to understand a whole different set of vocabulary, before you know what you’re doing. You can control the locations of the elements on the page, pixel by pixel … and therefore you will likely spend many long hours to make your website looks perfect, pixel by pixel.

In summary, Wix is great for design focus websites, but shall you do it to move websites to the Wix ? Not likely, if the WordPress site is already serving you well.

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” – Steve Jobs

Back in 1994, I joined a company who was developing a document service for the trading companies in Hong Kong. The service facilitated the trading companies to send various trading documents to the Hong Kong Government securely and with authenticity.

The technology behind all these was Public Key Infrastructure, or asymmetric cryptography. Even though back then I was the System Architect of such system, the technology was totally new to me – Hashing, Asymmetric Encryption, Digital Signing etc. For some reasons however, I was intrigued by all these fancy technologies.

Fast forward to year 2000, Hong Kong rolled out the Smart IDs for Hong Kong citizens and each of these Smart IDs had a chip embedded that in theory you could store the Private Key inside it and did your own digital signing. And of course, with the receiving party’s Public Key, we could do secure encryption as well.

Eight years later, in October 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper on The Cryptography Mailing list at metzdowd.com, described the digital currency – BitCoin. And the infrastructure that BitCoin worked above was what we call now – Blockchain (this term is not used at all in the original white-paper).

By now, you all know Blockchain is again based on hashing, cryptography and time-stamping. Did I know what I learnt back in 1994 would become the foundation of the digital currency or even future computing infrastructure ?

No of course, because as Steve Jobs said … we can only connect the dots looking backwards.

I don’t know ten, twenty years later, what dots we all can connect and find something new. However, you may be able to get some insights on the following excellent documentary on Blockchain –