Amazon and Home Productivity

Interesting non-typical thoughts on this.  via Walter Riker

Boosting Work from Home Productivity with Amazon Alexa  in AWS Amazon  by Sandeep Rao

How I set-up my home for remote work and used Alexa for Business work-based features on my Echo devices to boost my work-from-home productivity

Last year, when I joined the Alexa for Business team as the East Coast representative based out of New York City, I transitioned to working remotely from home in the mornings. When I started working remotely, my productivity suffered as I had not properly setup my home for work. I didn’t have a designated workspace in the apartment and rarely used tools besides my office laptop and kitchen table to get work done. This contrasted with working from the office where I had a height-adjustable Amazon door desk and other tools such as a second screen (display or monitor), a keyboard, a mouse, an ergonomic chair, and good lighting. I quickly realized that I had to make changes to close the gap between productivity in the home vs office.

To improve my productivity, I re-purposed the unused real estate in front of my fireplace as my workspace. This new setup had multiple advantages: (1) the dedicated area allowed me to physically separate work from home; (2) I moved closer to the living room window and benefitted from increased natural light; (3) the fireplace made a great background for Amazon Chime video calls! Though I kept the kitchen table, I swapped out the plastic table chair for an upholstered arm chair and purchased a keyboard and mouse.

Having closed the immediate gap in productivity, I started exploring ways to gain an even greater edge. I had three Amazon Echo devices at home but used them for non-work tasks such as wake-up alarms, music, personal calling, and web browsing. Recently, I had placed my Echo Show, an Alexa-enabled device with a video screen, near my workspace to quickly pull-up non-work information without needing to task switch on my laptop (e.g., “Alexa, what is the weather outside?”, “Alexa, how is the S&P 500 doing?”). I thought; Could I use my personal Echo devices to further boost my work-from-home productivity? I now had deeper insights into the work-based features that are available to all Amazon Alexa users and decided to put those to use.... "