Final Day in the Virtual Office!

Today marks the end of the VR Office Experiment. Well, at least the end of the period of data gathering. I have been sharing daily stats for the past 40 working days (plus some additional weekend content). Those stats are just the basic numbers. There is more data to be mined out of the tools I have been using to track my productivity in VR. But not till next year. For today I will wrap up with the final Week Stats, and share one last chart as a teaser to the next phase.

For me, this a huge day. Writing posts almost every day for two months was daunting at times. But I made it through without a miss, and made some fun videos along the way! So I am very happy to cross this milestone from data gathering to data analysis. And I’m glad to be done with daily posts for at least a few weeks, as I take some time off for the holidays.

Here are the stats for Week 8 in the VR Office:

Total Time in VR: 11 hours and 30 minutes (across 22 sessions)

Focus Work: 52% – 5 hours and 58 minutes (across 10 sessions)

Community Time: 17% – 1 hour and 59 minutes (across 2 sessions)

MiniMindfulness: 13% – 1 hour and 30 minutes (across 4 sessions)

1:1 Meetings: 13% – 1 hour and 29 minutes (across 3 sessions)

Team Meetings: 5% – 32 minutes (across 3 sessions)

Summing it all up (too long for #TLDR)

I saw a dip in the number this final week mainly due to this being a short week with lots of Zoom calls to wrap up the year. But like I’ve said so many times over the past month, that is OKAY. The number are what they are.

I started this effort as a personal exercise, because I wasn’t finding enough data from people who didn’t enter the VR Office with a bias (both for and against it). My work tracking my usage in VR quickly turned into something that had value for my company, OssoVR. As a remote company, these VR Office tools could be very valuable. But they could also be a distraction, and a waste of time and money. We need to understand how these tools work in order to know where they add value. I’ve done my best to to honest all along the way. I chose to share the journey online through this blog and LinkedIn posts, and the response has been pretty cool. Over 400 people have followed these posts across 20 countries! Thank you to everyone who has chosen to read these daily journal entries. I’ll be back in January 2023 to share more about my findings. My end game is a detailed report articulating “The Value of VR for Workplace Productivity“. But more on that to come. I’ll leave you with a final pie chart. This represents my 40 day VR Office Experiment. I’ll talk numbers in January, but just know that I spent over half of my working hours in VR during this experiment, and Focus Work, Team Meetings, and 1:1 Meetings were the biggest slices. And that gives us a clear path forward.

See you in 2023!

Day 39 in the Virtual Office!

Total Time in VR: 2 hours and 33 minutes (across 5 VR sessions)

Use Cases: Community Time (39% – 59 min), Focus Work (32% – 49 min), 1:1 Meetings (19% – 29 min), MiniMindfulness (10% – 15 min)

This is the last working day of the year, and to some degree that last day of the VR Office Experiment. I am going to write up the Week 8 Wrap Up tomorrow before the Holiday Break truly begins, but my professional work is done for 2022! What a wild ride these past two months have been in the VR Office. And today ended on a solid footing, being that the typical “downshift” before break was in full effect.

A nice mixture of focus, 1:1, and community time today is a perfect end to my week and the experiment. I am so excited to see what the data says about the viability of VR for Productivity. I am confident it is viable. But for what? How much time? These questions will find answers in 2023.

Cup Half Empty: Nothing empty to report today. I did try and join my manager in Eleven Table Tennis but the collab was not working (which is par for the course with that game. A game I’ve loved since playing on tethered Rift and Vive Pro). We ended up in his “Horizon Home” which was my first time seeing the meta avatar in the Home, and that was pretty cool.

Cup Half Full: Hosted Community time with my department and we had a blast. Such hijinks with a bunch of people who are all over the country (and Canada). We’ve all been together in the real world a couple times, but you’d think it was much more when you experience the team having fun together.

Also wrapped the year for MiniMindfulness and had one of my favorite new memories. We climbed the big tree in Original Gothic Hard, and one of the meditators didn’t like the stability offered by the branch they were on. So I moved locations and offered my branch. What a weird experience. A cool experience. I hope to have many more with MiniMindfulness 2.0 in 2023!

#TLDR

A good final working day. VR makes my work better. VR makes my life better. But I’m an early adopter. I’m a beta tester. Let’s just say it, I drank the VR kool-aid a long time ago. But I’ve done a good job (I think) of keeping my focus on proving out the use case here. I’ve had bad days. I’ve had “let’s just do zoom” days. I’ve been honest when things fail. And I have never fudged the numbers just to make VR for Productivity look viable. The data is just waiting to be un-wrapped. But I’ll wait a bit and let it settle before digging in. One last post for the VR Office Experiment to come. So for the last time for a bit I say,

Till Tomorrow…

Day 38 in the Virtual Office!

Total Time in VR: 4 hours and 40 minutes (across 7 VR sessions)

Use Cases: Focus Work (60% – 2 hour 49 min), Community Time (21% – 59 min), MiniMindfulness (11% – 30 min), Team Meetings (8% – 21 min)

A solid day today. Lots of focus work, as I keep tying out my projects before breaking for the holiday. I hosted a holiday community time (cover photo today), and that was a lot of fun. New update today there, so we had some glitches that were pretty annoying, but we also had some fun with it. Nothing funnier than acting like the person who keeps vanishing has vanished, even when he hasn’t!!! “Oh no, looks like he vanished again…” (hehehe)

Cup Half Empty: We had a more successful stand up today, but still one person was having issues. Could only see our names, not our avatars. And though we could see her, the avatar mouth was not moving, so that was a little odd. Step in the right direction, but still a “half empty” moment.

Cup Half Full: The Mindfulness crew sailed off over the Quixote Valley Sea to a new location this morning. I really like the idea of “traveling” to our meditation spot. That means the people joining must have good “VR Legs” to handle the flying part, but the action of flying off as a “fellowship” of sorts to our remote location is kind of amazing. Thank you to the devs at Mighty Coconut, for leaving the courses truly “open world”. Don’t put up walls!! And we excited to start meditating in Atlantis in 2023!

#TLDR

While a 40 day Experiment, tomorrow is my last working day of 2022. So tomorrow is the last day of tracked data. I have a bunch of things already on the VR calendar, so it should be a good day. I keep poking at the data analytics tools and I’m thrilled with the amount of information at my fingertips. Just need to be patient, cuz the data crunching is a 2023 thing (I am taking some welcome vacation, and showing NYC to my kiddo!)

Till Tomorrow…

Day 37 in the Virtual Office!

Total Time in VR: 2 hours and 26 minutes (across 5 VR sessions)

Use Cases: Focus Work (66% – 1 hour 36 min), 1:1 Meetings (20% – 30 min), MiniMindfulness (10% – 15 min), Team Meetings (3% – 5 min)

Another slower day, but again life keeps getting in the way. Pre-blizzard prep today pulled me away a bit, and a field trip to “field test” a VR functionality. So again most of my time was Focus Work, as I wrap up things for the year.

Cup Half Empty: My first VR meeting was Stand Up and the avatar issues persisted again (thus 5 minutes and we gave up). I had a 1:1 later in the day and we didn’t have any issues with avatars, so I’m becoming suspicious it might be headset related (read WIFI related) not a systemic problem. This goes to the point that any issue that comes up in VR could be one of a bunch of root causes, and it is important to keep the options open as you move to discover the true root cause of a failure. Gotta have that engineering hat on!

Cup Half Full: I did have a great 1:1 meeting with a co-worker. We got to chat about our upcoming visit to New York City and then get into some work I’ve been doing with my team. Good balance between our social and working relationship. This is so important at a remote company. It can’t just be about the work. There are just so many things we take for granted when we work in a physical office. So many little gestures, blink and you’ll miss it interactions that are harder to simulate in the remote setting. Zoom can’t cut it. VR might have answers. I strongly suspect it does, but that’s getting ahead of the data.

#TLDR

Still a shaky last week, but life will always be a factor in how the day rolls out. And the crush of the end of the year, prep for a long holiday, and a family trip are the perfect storm for the experiment not being as active as previous weeks. The Christmas Blizzard hits tomorrow, so should give me good reasons to stay inside and in VR as much as possible. Plus I’m hosting a Holiday Gathering on the Walkabout Minigolf Course in the morning for Community Time!

Till Tomorrow…

Day 36 in the Virtual Office – the final week begins

Total Time in VR: 1 hours and 49 minutes (across 5 VR sessions)

Use Cases: Focus Work (40% – 43 min), MiniMindfulness (28% – 30 min), 1:1 Meetings (27% – 29 min), Team Meetings (6% – 6 min)

It is becoming a theme with Mondays… Another slow start to the week. I won’t blame the VR experience for most of it though I have one item for “cup half empty” to discuss. Life just got in the way today. This Monday in particular was challenging as I had lots of stuff on my list, including a mid-day trip outside the house (in a snowstorm), and it’s the beginning of a 4 day week leading to holiday break. So not the start I wanted for the beginning of the final week of the VR Office Experiment.

Cup Half Empty: The most interesting stat today is 6 minutes of Team Meetings. That was an attempt to have a Project Meeting (standard Monday meeting) in Workrooms. Today the avatars were not working right. At one point we couldn’t see each other. The person joining on WebPortal could only see the “shadow avatar” that appears when someone is offline. There was even a latency issue, which I haven’t experienced since the earlier days of this platform. Just seems like the 1.9 update has some bugs. It was a “major” update, so bugs are to be expected. Hopefully they are squashed soon.

Cup Half Full: The full crew of three returned to the mindful minigolf courses today. One of our crew was on vacation last week. I shot this short video of our space this morning, which will be a part of an upcoming review of “Walkabout Minigolf for Team Building”.

#TLDR

Another rough beginning. That doesn’t always mean a bad week. I want to end strong, so hopefully tomorrow will be a return to form. I am starting to see the trends, the solid use cases, the bad use cases, and what expectations we might place on workers in the VR Campus. Time to prove this space works, even after a tough Monday.

Till Tomorrow…

Week 7 – December 12th – December 16th

Total Time: 17 hours and 25 minutes across 25 sessions in 4 categories.

Focus Time-46% (8 hrs 2 min – 10 sessions) slight drop from 50% last week

Team Meetings-25% (4 hrs 25 min – 5 sessions) roughly the same from 21% last week

1:1 Meetings-22% (3 hrs 52 min – 6 sessions) big increase from 9% last week

MiniMindfulness-6% (1 hrs and 5 min – 4 sessions) big drop from 11% last week

Observations of Week 7 – This was a roller coaster of a week. I started with really low numbers, partly because of my schedule and partly because of illness. But then I worried that I would get stuck down there. I didn’t need to worry because I came roaring back for the last half of the week! Workrooms received an update this week that added more stable monitors, fist bumps, and floor passthrough! At work it also added the need to update which can be challenging with large groups who don’t use the platform nearly as often as I do. But we are working through those challenges.

I’m excited to draw the VR Office Experiment to a close next week. Not because I don’t want to keep using VR for Productivity (far from it!!), but because I am itching to start looking at the data. I even looked a little this week and stopped myself. I don’t want any numbers introducing bias, because I want my conclusions to be as balanced as possible. One more week of daily posts and then a break for a while, as I crunch all the numbers. More on the plan just before the holiday break. Time to finish strong!

Till Tomorrow…

Day 35 in the Virtual Office!

Total Time in VR: 3 hours and 8 minutes (across 4 VR sessions)

Use Cases: Team Meetings (64% – 2 hours), Focus Work (28% – 53min), MiniMindfulness (8% – 15min)

A solid finish to a week that started out so shaky! I started the day with a co-worker in MiniMindfulness (sitting on top of the Caddyshack watching the sun rise/set). After a few Zoom calls I helped with a new hire onboarding (see today’s title pic) and finished the day in Focus. Friday’s are often wild cards with my schedule, but today brought my overall weekly number a little higher than last week, so that’s a good trend going into the eighth and final week next Monday.

Cup Half Empty: I noticed the return of the phantom mouse cursor again today. But my laptop was being very weird in general, so I did a restart (good idea to restart your computer every once in a while anyway), and after that the cursor was back to normal. Just reminds me that laptops have strange issues all the time. Just because the virtual monitors are being weird, doesn’t mean it’s the VR program at the root cause, as it might just be the ole laptop itself.

Cup Half Full: I haven’t done an onboarding for a while, and so that was a great end to my week. I also noticed that the update earlier this week DID add something new. FLOOR PASSTHROUGH! I only noticed when I went up to the whiteboard (I’m generally a desktop whiteboard guy). Once standing at the whiteboard I noticed when I looked down I could see my actual floor. And I glanced at the corner of my desk through the passthrough and said “I’m never slamming my leg into you again!!” A very smart improvement to Horizon Workrooms.

#TLDR

This was a roller coaster of a week. Started so bad. I started questioning the validity of the whole thing. But then I bounced back. I think it is a very good thing that I hit that wall, even if only briefly. That’s a real wall that many will encounter as this technology finds an audience and the scaling begins. How to bounce back as quickly as I did is the puzzle that needs to be solved on a large scale. I’m working on a new video, and I hope to post it before I break for the holiday next Friday, December 23rd, which is also when this VR Office Experiment comes to a close. But the experiment was only the beginning because the next phase is DATA ANALYSIS, which geeks like me enjoy a little too much. But one more week of data to gather. Hoping to end with the same strength I started with way back in October.

Till Next Week…

Day 34 in the Virtual Office

Total Time in VR: 4 hours and 59 minutes (across 7 VR sessions)

Use Cases: Focus Work (54% – 2 hours 41 min), 1:1 Meetings (31% – 1 hour 34 min), Team Meetings (8% – 24 min), MiniMindfulness (7% – 20 min)

Take a look at that mountain in the distance of my cover photo today. I look at that mountain all day long. I actually arrange my screens so that I have an unobstructed view out that window. Today I really noticed how working in the Lakes Office gives me the illusion of working in a much larger room (with some nice views, albeit cartoon-y). That’s one of the things I think I’ve been taking for granted. I have been so focused on how going to the Lakes Office makes it feel like I’m “leaving my house”, but it also makes it feel like I’m in a different sized space. Here is my home office setup. You can see I’m very much backed into a corner (mainly because I don’t like facing the wall when I’m not in VR). But in VR I have space all around me. It’s good for my head, and I look forward to more virtual worlds to set my virtual desk inside and work.

Cup Half Empty: Workrooms access continues to be a challenge. I’ve had a few folks find success by un-installing and re-installing. Another was having issues, then did the update successfully and issues went away. It’s just been inconsistent, which is challenging with new tech and a semi-skeptical audience. The people at my company, OssoVR, deeply believe in the value of Virtual Reality, but the scope is tied to Medical Education and Surgical Training. Even for these true believers, the idea of working all day long (or 50%) in VR seems un-realistic. That’s one of the goals of this experiment, to understand what is realistic. And fighting with Workrooms access and updates is only making my job more challenging this week.

Cup Half Full: After the last update the screens seem more stable. They also pop up much quicker. I was hoping the update would finally bring virtual monitors to PC users, as that is a huge area of interest, and I’m one of the few Mac users at my company. Fingers crossed that feature comes soon.

It was another super productive day in VR. Met with my boss in Workrooms to go over some documents. Hosted several other meetings in VR and it is always better than Zoom (of which I did a bunch of today as well, as always). I started in MiniMindfulness alone today, and took the opportunity to find a new spot that fit one person. Here’s a shot from my hidden location on the El Dorado course.

#TLDR

The numbers stay strong on Day 34, and not because I’m trying to fudge the numbers up; I’m actually just having more time to spend in VR and I have lots of focus work to do before the end of the year. We wrap up Week 7 (of 8) tomorrow. I always think Friday’s will be slow, but last week was a full rich VR day, so….

Till Tomorrow…

Day 33 in the Virtual Office!

Total Time in VR: 5 hours and 23 minutes (across 7 VR sessions)

Use Cases: Focus Work (63% – 3 hours 23 min), 1:1 Meetings (19% – 59 min), Team Meetings (13% – 43 min), MiniMindfulness (5% – 15 min)

And just like that, the wind is back in the sails!!! Today was a good day in VR. My best day since returning to the Experiment after Thanksgiving. I spent a lot of time in Focus working on some stuff that I really needed to pay close attention to. The Lakes Office really did serve as the isolation chamber that I needed to, you know, FOCUS. I also had a few meetings 1:1 and teams. I got to spend 30 minutes with someone from the People Ops team today, and it was just great to have a conversation sitting at a table together, versus staring at our monitors.

Cup Half Empty: There is some negative stuff today. Specifically around the Workrooms update that was available this morning. I mentioned earlier that I felt like an update was coming, and I was right. But I wasn’t able to update the app when I clicked the button. I ended up un-installing Workrooms and then re-installing it. That is not a good process by any stretch. My guess is that the Workrooms team was made aware of the issue and a new update will be coming out tomorrow. That’s my hope, as I’d rather not have to tell all of the Workrooms users at my company that they need to uninstall and reinstall. Fingers crossed for that update.

Cup Half Full: I switched from my Quest 2 to Quest Pro this afternoon cuz my battery for the face fan was dead. I was planning to switch back to the Quest 2 (the scalable solution for this experiment), but I forgot. I only realized I hadn’t switched it when my Quest Pro battery got low. My Quest 2 battery never goes that low because I have an extended battery on the head strap. I’m like “why would my battery be low?” and that’s when I realized I was still in the Quest Pro (because there’s nothing blocking the bottom of the headset). I say all this to make the point that the quality of screens between Pro and Quest 2 was negligible for me today. I’m sure the Pro is better. But I didn’t notice, and that’s interesting to me.

#TLDR

A return to my old form, clocking in over 5 hours of time in the VR Office today. I got a ton of work done that I’m certain would have taken longer without the isolation chamber that is the VR headset. Still got to meet up with a bunch of people in VR today, so even all that solo time didn’t make me feel as alone as it has in the past. Just a good all around Wednesday!

Till Tomorrow…

Day 32 in the Virtual Office

Total Time in VR: 1 hours and 23 minutes (across 3 VR sessions)

Use Cases: Team Meetings (36% – 30 min), 1:1 Meetings (35% – 29 min), Focus Work (29% – 23 min)

Today was not the upswing I wanted to see, but sometimes that’s how it goes. Three sessions, three categories. Didn’t even get to meditation to start it off. Maybe there’s a connection… 😉

I’m glad that I decided to do an extra 4 weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s been hard to get back into the groove that I was in before the week off. I need to understand why. I’m giving it a lot of thought. Enthusiasm only gets you so far. What are the right use cases? I haven’t crunched my numbers so I’m not certain. I will know more when this is done. But for now I want to try and harness some of that early energy and end strong. I have had some health issues that make VR harder for me to do for longer sessions. Again, that’s a reality that this technology will always be limited by, in my opinion.

Cup Half Empty: Workrooms was not working well today. People had trouble getting into the app. The avatars were freezing. The desktop passthrough was not tracking properly. The mouse was moving on it’s own. And the keyboards were bouncing around. Basically a total flop for my morning “Team Stand Up” today. Feels like a bug fix might be needed. Or an update is on the horizon (pardon the pun). Hopefully one of those is true, because if all my team meetings were like the one this morning, we would be back on Zoom.

Cup Half Full: Not much to sing about today. The couple meetings I had were shaky. My 1:1 was a little better, after my co-worker managed to get in. We had a nice convo about the value he sees in the platform, which isn’t in total alignment with my thinking, and that is GREAT! I want to talk to people with a different vision, or healthy skepticism. That’s who we find a viable path forward, or determine a path forward isn’t an option yet.

#TLDR

Another disappointing day. Using VR has several limitations. Being healthy is one. A stable platform is another. Neither of those were boxes I could check off today. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Till Tomorrow…