This is to inform you that, for various reasons, I will no longer be writing my monthly-ish blog post here. I haven’t quit writing but I am now doing the writing on Substack as Jack Nilles. You may find that some of my previous blog posts will reappear there, although maybe with some updates and alterations.
It has been a fascinating time for me since I wrote my first post in 2006. I hope I have posted items of interest to you, my readers. If I have, or even if I haven’t, please check out the new venue.
The world increasingly melts in summer heat. The impending future shows more of the same. Every year there will be even more heat than the year before. All of this is because of climate change which, in turn, is mostly the result of our continuous burning of fossil fuels. A substantial fraction of that heat input still comes from traffic involving internal-combustion-(IC)-propelled cars. There are at least two ways of attacking this problem. One is by reducing or eliminating car use by telecommuting. Fifty years ago, we reported the results on our test of telework, entitled The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff[1]. It was successful in reducing car use.
Another approach to the heat problem is by replacing IC cars with electric vehicles, EVs. In the 2020s EVs started to appear in substantial quantities. Now let’s review the energy tradeoffs in terms of heat balances between these two options.
People seem to have a great urge to name everything. When I first began to explore ways of getting people out of their cars to go from home to a downtown workplace. I called the process telecommuting simply because it focused attention on stopping or reducing commuting by car. In 1973, when the grant came in from the National Science Foundation to actually set up and study this possibility, we formalized the term and added teleworking as a synonym. The tele- meaning distant in both cases: the work gets done without moving the workers to the workplace; only the information flows back and forth.
As time went on, and the concept kept evolving, we had a need to further specify what this tele-stuff was all about. Different names for it kept cropping up so I felt the need to define each term more explicitly in order to ensure that, in a conversation or other interchange, all parties were talking about the same thing. So, here’s the 2024.7 attempt, an update from my 2022 version, using my 1998 definitions[1] as the base. [Note: the number of days worked in one of these modes may actually vary from week to week; the numbers quoted are averages over a year.]
Distance working
ANY form of information working whereby the worker may only occasionally have contact with the principle office, communicating via any available technologies. This includes, but is not limited to, all of the forms listed below. Benjamin Franklin was a distance worker when he was negotiating with the French.
Now that warm weather has appeared in the northern hemisphere. It’s time to check on our climate’s progress. How well are we collectively doing to stop, or even diminish, global warming? I thought it might be useful to break the analysis into categories: data; government; business and the rest of us. Here are some, not necessarily comprehensive, results. As expected, they are mixed.
Data
Greenhouse gases
According to Co2.earth, the atmosphere’s level of carbon dioxide is currently (as of June 24, 2024) is 427.33 parts per million (ppm), a new record for the Human Era. In June 24, 2023 it was 423.35 ppm, an increase from June of 00.94%. This is a slight acceleration of the recent years’ trend. This equates to a global temperature change of +1.60C above the pre-industrial comparison period of 1880-1920. In short, no abatement is in sight.
Weather
The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) has released the final update to its 2023 Billion-dollar disaster report, confirming a historic year in the number of costly disasters and extremes throughout much of the country. There were 28 weather and climate disasters in 2023, surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2020, tallying a price tag of at least $92.9 billion. This total annual cost may rise by several billion when we’ve fully accounted for the costs of the December 16-18 East Coast storm and flooding event that impacted states from Florida to Maine.
Don’t forget, this is just for the United States. Here’s a map for the world, courtesy of NOAA. The intensity of the red patches shows the above -normal temperatures. Seriously red patches tend to be heatwaves.
I haven’t been officially soothsaying for a decade or three so I thought I would limber up my skills by indulging in some summer musings about the relatively near future. That’s always a little dangerous because reality usually bounces quite a bit around the epidemic curve trend lines. Given that this is an election year in many parts of the globe, the bounce might be more than I expect.
So hold on and try your own versions of these three that assume nothing changes quickly. Keep in mind that climate change is the elephant in the corner.
What got me started in research on telecommuting in the first place was this: In 1970 an urban planner said to me: “If you can put man on the moon, why can’t you do something about traffic?” At the time I was concentrating on ways to adapt my “rocket science” expertise from outer space to earth. The question struck home.
I started with first principles: why do we have so much traffic? The answer was that much of it, roughly half of the time, was from people driving between their homes and work in an office at some distance away.
Next question: what do they do when they get to the office?
Answer: much of the time they’re interacting with someone else, usually over the phone, or doing solo thinking.
My reaction: that’s dumb, why don’t they just do that at home and skip getting involved in traffic, wasting energy and creating air pollution?
In 1970 I was working with Rancho los Amigos Hospital in Downey, California, to develop its Rehabilitation Engineering Center. The purpose of the center was to develop assistive technologies for people with a motion disability (problems with moving around). At the time, organizations promoting care for the disabled were concentrating on ways of getting the disabled to the physical workplace rather than finding ways for allowing them to work from anywhere. This was a period when I was developing my ideas about teleworking but before I actually tried implementing it.
Now, a half century later, comes this article by LucyReedwith a 21st Century approach to the same problem. Teleworking with a motion disability, whether you’re a gig worker or a traditional employee. Enjoy!
In my last blog I wrote about the basic analysis steps needed for determining how telecommutable a job is. The objective was to show how you might lump your tasks together in ways that maximize your work-from-home time and effectiveness. But we may need to more closely define the edges of telework; where it’s feasible and where it isn’t.
So, let’s concentrate on identifying those conditions that are more conducive to working at the office.
Last April I wrote an overview of the design principles for hybrid teleworking (or WFH, if you insist). Here’s a more detailed set of how-to’s for designing hybrid teleworking, for both telemanagers and teleworkers. They are adapted from my 1998 book, Managing Telework and my years of training teleworkers and telemanagers.
Step 1. Rethinking work.
Think about your job; the collection of tasks you need to complete in order to meet the objectives of your work. Concentrate on the little tasks, rather than the SAVE The WORLD — by FRIDAY ones, the tasks that take only a portion of the day. These are scattered almost randomly throughout the week, right? In fact, to check this, try keeping a log of the tasks you perform over a period of a week or two. Make a list of them.
Now, examine each task and decide whether you can complete it by your self, possibly with some technological aids, or need to communicate with someone in order to fulfill the requirements. Do this for each of the tasks in your log. Also note how long each task takes to complete. Divide your task list into two parts: those you can do by yourself and those where you need to communicate with other people, or distant resources in specific locations. Add the task completion times for each of the two lists: solo and others.
You now have the basis for the work from home (or somewhere nearby) decision. Note that I haven’t mentioned timing yet. The big question is: can you lump all the solo tasks together so that they can be grouped into one or more 8-hour blocks (assuming a 40-hour work week)?
COP28, the 28th Conference Of the Parties has begun this week with representatives from 200 countries. The main theme of the conference is fast tracking the transition to zero net emissions of greenhouse gases and, specifically, to get half the way to zero by 2030. Further, the goal is to limit global warming to 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial levels. What are the chances of success?
First, note that the world exceeded 1.5C for a day or more just recently. Global average temperature continues to increase monthly. Most of the increase is due to China, the United States, the European Union and India. Most of the ill effects of that increase fall on other countries, particularly those that have low emissions. So what should happen during COP28?
