This Is This

I spend a lot of time walking between buildings for meetings. In fact, I get a lot of work done moving around and I have discovered how unproductive it is returning straight to my desk after a meeting.

Personally, when I get back to my desk, I’ll check email, make a cup of tea and start working (very hard) on something else. No headspace at all. But after a meeting, in a different building of a different part of a very large, round building, I’ll walk back to my desk and make a call or two along the way, and grab a coffee while I walk.

This, by the way, is bad on my nerves and wallet, because in the office corridors here there are stalls which serve proper cappuccinos and cakes and everything.

Anyway, walking around, getting a coffee on the way back to your desk sounds like not working, but what can I do? I can’t move my desk around with me, and if I were sitting at it, I’d have made myself a cup of tea while working.

My point is, walking is great headspace time, because I’m not distracted, and I’m thinking about work with a clear head, guilt-free and taking in fresh air and/or coffee. And when I get back to my desk, I’m refreshed and in a focused place I wouldn’t normally be in.

And this happens several times a day.

A downside of my rootless peripateticism is that my phone is often going flat, because I’m not at my desk long enough for it to charge and I need it with me because I make a lot of calls. These can get dropped because the broadcast equipment knocks out the signal so it plays billy-o with my battery life.

And then it hit me.

“What if you could have a device that charged your phone while you carried it around?”

Genius! Finally, busy people like me could be truly mobile.

“OK, it would have to be small – possible smaller than the phone itself. Like it, like it.”

I started getting excited by the concept. I was clearly on to something.

“It would have to be charged, obviously, because it would need to contain power, but you could plug that in at your desk and then when it was ready to go – hey presto! – you swoop by and take your portable charger with you and set about refuelling your mobile while you are out.”

Then I realised I was describing a battery.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 9:27 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.