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A cry for help

Posted on February 5, 2007
Filed Under Productivity |

The world turned to sand very early in my career. Thanks to overwhelming curiosity, the internet and email, I began hoarding data in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

Let me explain, I started computing with a Mac 512K with an 800K external disk drive. Everything I owned fit nicely on a few 3.5” disks. Flash forward 15 years when I recently copied my entire music collection, about 300 CDs, to my 60GB laptop. A few months ago, I would have said “no single person needs 60GB of data storage.” But now, I’m not so sure.

The days when my contribution to a project is simply a spreadsheet or a word document are fading quickly. New applications, capture mechanisms, audio and video files, fifteen years of documents, IP telephony and digital voice recorders and cameras strain my ability to keep things coherent and in context. My natural tendency to save and file documents may be my undoing.

As my data multiplies, my need for contact management, document management, search, disaster recovery become all the more real. Tom Peters talked about managing the brand called “you,” but I think managing the infrastructure called “me” is much more relevant to these days of fractured attention spans and data overload. Frankly, the enterprise called me needs a better way to integrate and preserve all the loosely joined pieces.

The enterprise and the infrastructure called me sits on a loose collection of servers, desktops, laptops, PDAs, file cabinets, bookshelves, interns and random assistants.

My intellectual property, my friends, my documents, my photos, my mom’s obituary, love letters to my wife, my resume, my writing, my client work – all these things have blurred the line between home and work – all these things define the enterprise that is me.

If it is not sand sifting through my fingers, then it is the feeling of a rubber band that has been stretched, and that I wish could be relaxed. Who among us does not wonder if there will ever be a time when there is less velocity to the data of our days, less bulk in the issues demanding attention, more time for some degree of reflection to let the significant sift out from the urgent? More time to pay more attention to things that matter (whatever those things may be).

Who among us has not privately felt “…when all this slows down a little…” and put aside one more thing to be read, thought about, or shared with a comment? Did the previous similar-scale technology introduction also produce this same vertigo? Do we feel the same disruption when the telephone or an email came barging into their ordered lives, not fitting into the sense of appropriate documentation, producing another event to be somehow tracked within the routine that it disrupted?

How to manage it? How to define it so that you can be creative about managing it? Where is the Dewey Decimal System for personal electronic baggage? Where are the instructions for mastering your data instead of serving it?

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