The Productivity Guru

The concept of remote work actually began in the early 1970’s and was termed “telecommuting.”  It was a 1973 invention apparently credited to NASA physicist Jack Niles who initiated the first experiments with remote work to reduce traffic congestion and energy consumption.  It was expanded in the 1980’s with the development of the first laptops (like the Osborne 1) and personal computers, allowing professionals like programmers to occasionally work from home.  From the 1990’s to the late 2010’s, the growth of email, the internet, cell phones and fax machines which then allowed remote work to become more viable.  Then in the 2020’s, the Covid pandemic caused a massive, permanent shift toward remote work, fast forwarding its adoption from a perk to a man stream model.     INC., Com., reports through author Jessica Stillman that via the end of the pandemic there have been so many stories about companies demanding employees  r...

  After a short break, The Productivity Blog has now returned. 

  I have been in the Productivity consulting business for close to 50 years.  During that time, I spent a considerable amount of time doing training of our company’s internal employees.  This meant that they were extraordinarily well-prepared to work with and to insure that they could train not only first-line supervisors but also all levels of management in an organization that we were doing a project with.  When I first started doing this type of training we were just opening up to the use of personal computers.  We were just learning about Emails, Power Point Presentations and Spreadsheets.  Yes, I am that old., and thank you Microsoft what you did to bring us into the future.  But over the 25 years in which I was doing internal training, we expanded into such things as video training, macros, and on and on.  We were one of the first consulting companies to use video-taped role playing with facilities that inc...