Results-Only Work Environment
Hennepin County, Minnesota, has taken the idea of a flexible work schedule to its logical extreme: the county is practicing what is called a results-only work environment, or ROWE, which gives everyone in a company the freedom to do their job when and where they want, as long as the work gets done. This is clearly a good idea. After all, what could an employer possibly care about beyond results? And in Hennepin County, there is some initial evidence that ROWE has made things much more efficient. They used to have a two-week backlog of public support cases to process. Now that is down to five days. A ROWE program would save employers money on everything from printing paper to electricity. If this seems risky, it is probably because employers think they need visual reassurance that people are actually doing work. Their real problem is, however, that they have failed to clearly define the "results" they care about.
http://www.good.is/post/minnesota-s-result-only-work-environment
It is now twelve o'clock Swahili time
Tanzania and Kenya being located close to the equator, there are few variations during the year in the hours of sunrise and sunset. The sun rises around six o'clock in the morning and sets around six o'clock in the evening. Therefore seven o'clock in the morning is the first hour of the day, and seven o'clock in the evening is the first hour of the night. We may thus consider that there is a six hour shift between Western time and "Swahili" time. However, while time is read and even written according to the Swahili system, the clocks are always set Western fashion. Therefore, one always has to add or substract mentally six hours to read time correctly.
Time shifting is about control
Skype requires me to look at you while you are talking, which is totally ridiculous. Sherry Turkle, MIT professor of the social studies of science and technology, said people are not only uninterested in Skype, we are also not interested in talking on the regular phone. We want to TiVo our lives, avoiding real time by texting or e-mailing people when we feel like it. "Skype, which was the fantasy of our childhood, gets you back to sitting there and being available in that old-fashioned way. Our model of what it was to be present to each other, we thought we liked that," she said. "But it turns out that time shifting is our most valued product. This new technology is about control. Emotional control and time control." As far as the full-contact listening that Skype requires, I do not think we want that all that often from people who are not already in our house. The fact is, we do not really want to see other people that badly. Far better is to have control over our most valuable commodity: time. Sure, we complain about being busy, but that is great as long as we get to choose when we do things.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1952314,00.html
