Focus Interruptus: The best protection against distractions from home


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I currently use inexpensive remote control LED puck lights to signal that I shouldn’t be disturbed.

Jason Perlow / ZDNet

I am sure that the following scenario will be familiar to many of you who work from home.

You frequently participate in Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, or other audio / video calls. Or you have to concentrate on your tasks for hours. You can wear headphones for privacy or isolation.

However, doing this makes it hard for someone in another room to know when you are on the phone or when you are concentrating. Many of us work from a home office, which can be in a multipurpose space like a bedroom or living room that others may also use, so you don’t necessarily have exclusive access to that space.

At some point the dreaded happens – a family member walks into the room and interrupts you when you are in focus mode or watching video or audio with other people.

Some remote workers may have a log with their roommates and family, such as asking them not to open a door without knocking. And that may work sometimes, but not all the time. In my case, my wife comes by frequently to check on me for a variety of reasons. Most of the time I wear mine
AirPods Max headphones

and she can’t hear what’s going on, and neither can I hear her coming because of the noise cancellation. Also, she can’t know if I’m in a conference with other people until she goes to my desk.

Existing business presence solutions

blynclight.jpg

The Embrava Blynclight

Amazon

Breaks from work from home are so commonplace – dogs barking, kids screaming and crying, and doorbells on deliveries – that we’ve gotten used to them and accept them as the price of dealing with this pandemic. But we still want to minimize it if possible.

Ideally, it would be good to have some kind of presence indicator or “on the air” light that alerts someone approaching your office that you don’t want to be disturbed.

There are of course different instructions “
To broadcast

“Lights similar to the type that have existed in television and radio studios for the past several decades, but most of them need to be placed in a convenient area near a power source. There are, too
Hangable signs

But that’s not entirely foolproof, because if someone doesn’t look at the doorknob, they can easily bypass it. And even if they can be mounted on the door at eye level, it’s easy to forget to hang or hang one of them
slide it to the “DND” position

.

My solution at the moment is to assemble a cheap one
wirelessly controlled puck light

on my front door with double-sided adhesive. It uses three AAA batteries that last around 50 hours. That’s not ideal – I’ll likely need to replace these batteries once a month, and I’ll also have to remember to turn the lights on and off between calls. They have rechargeable ones, but these products don’t last very long on a charge.

As for technical products, there are “presence indicators” like that
Jabra Evolve

Headphones that glow red when in use (as they support the conferencing software) to alert the person approaching that you should not be disturbed. There are also presence lights like that connected via USB
Kuando

or
Blynclight

However, if you don’t mount these outside of your office with a long USB extension cable, these breakers are already in your room and have probably already bothered you.

These products were originally developed for larger shared workspaces, such as cube farms, and not for home office scenarios. There are some wireless, rechargeable devices on the market, such as:
Luxafor Bluetooth

and
Blynclight Wireless

that can be mounted outside of your office and integrated into conference systems and calendar planners. Still, both of these products are either rated badly or are no longer available.

Home automation solutions manipulated by the jury

huebloom.jpg

Alexa and other home automation systems can control the Philips Hue Bloom multicolored LED lamp.

Philips

There are a few ways you can check this by using a combination of home automation components and smart assistants / loudspeaker devices, e.g. B. with Amazon Echo / Google Home / HomePod Mini and with smart switches and smart bulbs / smart lamps. the
Echo glow

might not be a bad solution if you can put it on a table outside of your office and you are an Alexa household, and Philips Hue has that
bloom

and
Blooming

that could also fit.
Smart Zigbee-based lightbulbs

Not a bad idea either, as long as they’re connected to a compatible smart hub.

Current generation
Amazon echoes

and also
Eero 6 / Eero Pro Mesh WiFi

Units have built-in Zigbee hubs. So you would have to a. to run custom routine like “Alexa, On the Air”, which turns on the lightbulb and sets it to the desired color (red), and a corresponding “Alexa, I’m free”, which sets it to green or turns off the lightbulb. You can also do this with a smart plug
LED stupid lightbulbs

in different colors
Standard floor lamps

. Current Hue devices on the market, including their Smart Bulbs, can also be used directly as Zigbee devices without a Hue hub.

However, this solution is entirely manual; it is not yet integrated into calendar or conference software. I would love to see an Alexa skill that somehow combines this so that when I mark a block of time as a conference call, the status is set to red on the light. Maybe that goes with a service like IFTTT, but I’d rather see an out-of-the-box solution.

My dream job presence device

Here’s what I think many people, including myself, would see built:

  1. A device the size of a large smartphone that can be easily attached to the front of a door or the wall of an adjacent hallway, for example with a magnetic bracket
  2. The device would have a sufficiently large (2 “-3” wide) array of 3-4 colors (red, green, yellow, blue) LED lights that would be visible from 4.5 to 20 feet away behind a larger transparent diffuser. A programmable LED message screen would be nice but not required.
  3. An optional motion sensor would cause the device to light up when someone approaches instead of constantly walking (to save battery power). It would also notify the remote worker that someone is coming via push notification.
  4. It would have at least 100 hours of battery life before charging.
  5. Quickly rechargeable via USB-C / Qi with power adapter for wired use.
  6. Wireless control with Zigbee and Bluetooth Low Energy, so that it can be integrated into home automation systems from several manufacturers and also controlled directly from devices (smartphone, PC / Mac) and with a simple desk remote control.
  7. Open source API development kit.
  8. Instant integration with Zoom / Microsoft Teams / Google Meet and Google Calendar / Apple Calendar / Outlook integration.
  9. Alexa / Google Home / HomePod integration.

This is a new category of products that I would love to create myself by a company like Poly, Jabra, Microsoft, or even Amazon. What are you currently using to prevent work interruptions in your home office? Talk back and let me know.

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