Life Management Explained

I predict that in twenty years life management will be one of the top five priorities of every adult and teenager in Australia. I also predict that almost every one of those people will carry a smartphone with them everywhere.

So what is life management? Why will it be so important? And what does the growing popularity of smartphones have to do with this?

Life Management

At DreamSpring, we define life management as the process of managing your personal relationships and activities; maintaining the balance between the various areas of your life according to your values and as is best for your physical, mental, and spiritual health.

The closest popular idea is that of "work-life balance". This seems to imply that work isn't actually part of your life, which would ring true for some of us, but fortunately false for many. When the terminology is that clumsy, you know we've got a way to go in solving the problem.

Just how you manage this balance is hotly debated. Carl Honore has written a book called, "In Praise of Slow", where he describes a "Slow movement" in which "people around the world [are] finding ways to put on the brakes." Part of this is disengaging from the press of ubiquitous electronic communications such as email and the mobile phone.

At the other extreme, we have organisations like Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry mobile email solution, who claimed in court that the Blackberry was part of the USA's "critical infrastructure" and is essential to the USA's "economic security". The main feature of the Blackberry is it's "push email" capability, which allows you to receive emails immediately, wherever you are.

Somewhere in the middle are normal people, trying to run their lives in an increasingly demanding world.

The Mobile Workplace

And it is increasingly demanding. Let's first look at how work is becoming more demanding.

Business needs are driving more and more people into taking their work out of the office. This trend is so important that the Australian government created a committee, the Australian Telework Advisory Committee (ATAC) to investigate it. Last year, ATAC commissioned a survey of telework, which they define as working out of the office using some form of enabling technology. Let's look at some of the things they found .

Almost a third of Australian workers do some form of teleworking, with an amazing 42% of business owners using teleworking.

Figure 1: Proportion of teleworkers in Australia

Figure 2: Employment status of teleworkers

Why so many? Almost half of businesses telework because of the job nature. (Tradespeople are a great example of this, since telework allows them to act as their own receptionist even from the top of a roof. Insurance brokers, home bankers, and so on gain the same benefits.) But for other businesses, the most popular reason for encouraging telework is to boost productivity.

Figure 3: Business reasons for teleworking

The difference between employer's desires and employee's expectations is a concern. While businesses are interested in productivity, workers benefit from increased flexibility and the convenience of working at home, with productivity only a secondary advantage. It's interesting that most teleworkers have a positive experience, but of those that don't, most complain that their productivity has not improved.

Figure 4: Personal benefits in teleworking

Clearly, teleworking is generally a positive experience, but it can be counter-productive if not managed properly. It will then fail to meet both the employer's and employee's requirements.

When you realise that less than one in ten businesses have formal teleworking agreements, you can see that we're steaming into dangerous waters.

Figure 5: Teleworking agreements

How do we manage teleworking? Is it different in character to normal office work?

Unfortunately, teleworking is very different from traditional office work. It provides access to information anywhere, giving improved flexibility, which results in increased productivity and the knock-on time and cost savings. It does this via its heavy reliance on technology.

According to ATAC, the number one teleworking tool for businesses is the mobile phone, trailed by the notebook and desktop PC. The mobile phone is even more important to teleworkers. The defining characteristic of the mobile phone is its extreme mobility - it can even be used while walking or standing on a roof. Compare that to a notebook, and you can see why teleworkers value this humble tool so highly.

Figure 6: Tools for Teleworking

Given these radically mobile tools, how can we manage telework? I've been surprised to discover that this is not a great concern for many types of business. Trades and salespeople are used to being teleworkers, and work simply starts and stops based on the time of day and the particulars of the current customer's job. However other professions, where jobs are not as clearly broken down, have a much harder problem.

As a software engineer, I deal with this problem every day. The ATAC research showed that teleworkers that did work overtime, did so mostly at the office, with the remainder doing overtime at home. Overtime done outside the office or home was a negligible 5%.

So it seems that, once the bulk of current office workers - people like me, or my staff: in administration, marketing, phone support, accounting, management, etc. - once we are freed to be able to telework, over-working will most likely be a struggle.

Actually, in a sense I already telework, working out of home, using the Internet extensively, and I can tell you that it is a struggle. So we need new, better tools to manage our time and work, while still gaining the flexibility and productivity benefits of mobile working.

Future uptake of teleworking

Of course, the question is: do those who currently can't telework want to do so, and will they be able to do so?

There are two barriers to this happening: people's desires, and the practical requirements of the work.

According to ATAC, a quarter of the non-teleworking population do desire to telework, and that is without much promotion of the concept. So I think people's preferences will lean towards mobile working.

In practical terms, though, access to the information and people required to do your work is only available at a certain location. However, as telepresence technology improves, this barrier will slowly break down.

Telepresence is the technology of presenting a remote environment to a person's senses. It includes technologies like video and audio transmission (already available on 3G mobiles), and may even include remote touch and control. For most business purposes there are two requirements to all teleworking: full access to electronic data; and video and audio access to all and any team members that is as immersive and reliable as physical presence.

Once this level of telepresence becomes ubiquitous, reliable, and mobile, there will be no barriers to teleworking for the majority of office workers.

Workplaces of the Future

Given the freedom to work anywhere, any time, how will people use this? This is difficult to measure, since most people are not very good at imagining beyond the world they live in. As an aid, let's look back twenty years to the mid-eighties, to see what work was like then, compared to now.

In the mid-eighties, computers were almost completely isolated chunks of processing hardware. Data only left a computer on a tape, disk, or paper. The internet was little more than a research project, and modems were expensive toys. So work was a very manual, paper based thing. Access to your data from anywhere simply couldn't happen - even faxes were an expensive business tool. Mobile phones were introduced in 1987, so they weren't available yet.

What's different now? Well, PC's are ubiquitous in business and homes, and more importantly, an un-networked PC is almost unheard of. Mobiles are everywhere, and have transformed the way we work - cafes become offices, trade and sales people become their own receptionists. Voice and video is digital, and can be treated like any other data: stored, sent, edited. In something unthinkable even ten years ago, even grandparents have adopted computers in order to communicate with their grandchildren. Given those changes, what can we see in another twenty years?

As ATAC says in its report, telework yields benefits both to individuals and to the broader society, and government should "support and accelerate the growing telework trend." (Telework for Australian Employees and Businesses, 2005, DCITA, ATAC, p55). So with both government and business support, it is likely that teleworking will be one of the most dominant trends over the next twenty years.

When this is combined with the growth of mobile communications and IT capabilities, we can expect to see a decoupling of work with a given location - a coupling that has been present since early in the Industrial Revolution.

It is quite possible that we'll see a movement to local, suburban work centres, where people can use telepresence technology to work with a geographically dispersed team. These work centres would play host to whoever wants to work there on that day, regardless of the organisation they're working for. Work centres would provide a range of services beyond access to high-end telepresence technology, including office services (printing, etc.), quality food, childcare, shopping, security, human interaction, and so on.

These centres could even exist in places like island resorts, so that people could work half a day and holiday the other half. And as technology improves, cars, and even smartphones will become more able to provide these facilities, making telework completely mobile.

With mobile telework, people will be able juggle their time in jobs that do not involve constant interaction with people or products (in other words, the typical office job). And people will do so, making powerful life management tools crucial. After all, life is more than just work, and if work is transformed by telecommunications, why shouldn't the rest of our life be?

We can be sure of this, because it's happening already.

The Present Mobile Lifestyle and Smartphones

Smartphones and ordinary mobile phones are driving a wholesale adoption of the mobile lifestyle. The mobile lifestyle is more than just telework. Families are never out of touch, "tribes" of youth can gather from across a city on a whim and an SMS, breakdowns are no longer a fearsome threat, questions can't wait, delays can be instantly apologised for, and relationships are more far-flung than ever.

This thirst for connectivity drives Australians to lug their mobile everywhere. Unlike any other device of that size or price, people tolerate its bulk and cost for the immense benefits it brings. With operator subsidies lowering the handset cost, it is not surprising that the most popular piece of complex electronics is not an MP3 player, or a PDA, but rather a mobile phone.

The key difference between a smartphone and a normal mobile phone, even a feature rich one (often called a "feature phone"), is very simple: a smartphone has an open programming interface. The benefit is that this allows the user to install extra applications which have the same access to the phone's capabilities as the built-in software. So you can add seamless enhancements to your phone's functionality, and fully exploit the phone's capabilities.

Smartphones already offer powerful telephony (including speakerphone), SMS, MMS, email on the go, the mobile web, photography and video on demand, personal music, office applications, ebook reader, and contacts and calendar management all in one device! That's hard to pass up. And as the smartphone moves down into the mid-tier market, more and more people are starting to exploit this incredibly rich functionality. In fact, these devices are rapidly becoming the core device used to manipulate, not only work information, but personal information. They exist at the centre of people's personal and work lives.

So, given that smartphones are devices which people carry with them everywhere, and that have access to all of a person's personal information (chiefly contacts and calendar), both work and personal, these devices are ideally placed to use as a platform for some form of life management tool. Add the fact that smartphones can access Internet services whenever needed and have some notion of present location, and they are clearly ideal tools for life management.

Life Management on Smartphones

So, the need for some form of life management tool is very rapidly entering the mainstream. And yet there is no such tool available. Even if there were suitable desktop or notebook software available, the mobile lifestyle enthusiastically adopted by Australians would render it almost entirely useless (how often do you use a calendar application on your home PC?).

Clearly, smartphones, unlike PCs, are a great platform for life management, since they are always with the user, always connected, and already a repository of the type of information that life management needs. But writing software for smartphones is not easy: the reliability required, combined with the memory, CPU, and user interface (screen and keyboard) constraints makes it very difficult to write effective smartphone software.

What is required is an innovative focus on leveraging the information present in the phone, creating and exploiting relationships within that data - between contacts, between activities, and between contacts and activities. And then linking that data to the context of the phone, the location, time, current activity, surrounding Bluetooth environment, etc., and using that to intelligently manage those activities, and then communicating changes to stakeholders via their already present contact details and the phone's rich set of communication interfaces.

And that is what DreamSpring, and DreamSpring alone is doing. We are providing a tool to help people around the world manage the increasing demands of a mobile lifestyle - a tool to help exploit the benefits of flexibility and freedom while maintaining a healthy balance in all areas of their lives. A true personal digital assistant.<.p>

Life Managenent is part of DreamSpring's long term applications strategy. Currently DreamSpring offers DreamConnect (an advanaced contacts manager) for UIQ2 and UIQ3 devices, and DreamScribe (a tools for accelerated PIM data entry) and DreamSend (a tool for sending PIM data) for S60 devices.

For more information see www.dreamspring.com.