My company is currently in the midst of moving to the office of the future, which essentially means all employees having the flexibility and tools to work from anywhere at anytime. As a creature of habit, I've struggled with the concept of not having my own personal space in an office building. After three weeks of living with my HP Elite X2, I'm beginning to realise that it is possible to be productive without sitting in the same spot on a daily basis.
This was truly put to the test over the past week. As we said goodbye to the old office for the last time, all employees were asked to work remotely as the finishing touches were put to the new place ahead of the official move in date.
I organised a day of hot desking between the offices of two of my clients, and the day got off to a frustrating start as I arrived at the first location only to realise I had forgotten the power supply - this would be a true assessment of the X2's battery life, which thankfully had not failed me hitherto.
The first task of the day was to tackle a client brief. Typically, before I had the X2, this task would consist of printing the brief and using a variety of highlighters on the printed copy to identify key points and make notes. I decided to use the accompanying bluetooth paired stylus pen in this instance. If I'm being perfectly honest, on first glance I disregarded the stylus as a novelty, struggling to envisage how I would use it in a practical sense. This notion was in fact unfair, and the pen allowed me to annotate and highlight at an impressive speed, and is a tool I will certainly reach for again.
Next up, I had a meeting with a client to run through a presentation. I was able to close the X2 and carry it to the meeting room without having to unplug multiple wires and shut the device down to avoid it from crashing en route, unlike the big and heavy laptop I was using before. The meeting set up was intimate and would entail a significant amount of collaboration as we went through the presentation and made comments and amendments. Therefore, I decided to detach the keyboard and use the device in tablet mode, allowing us to pass it between us with ease throughout the conversation.
The versatility of this device is something I have been consistently impressed with - even in just one morning I have used the Elite X2 to respond to emails, annotate a document, show a presentation and work collaboratively with a client, and all in an environment that I have never previously worked in before.
After a successful morning and with my battery still going strong, I packed up and headed to the next office for an afternoon of further hot desking. During the afternoon, I had a presentation of a bigger scale to a room of ten people - an activity which usually comes with a minefield of potential technological failures. I'll be detailing that series of events in my next blog post.
