Stop Wasting Your Time Making Filing and Deleting Decisions!

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Stop Wasting Your Time Making Filing and Deleting Decisions!

1/5/2005

By Terry Calhoun

It's been five years and, boy has a lot changed! Remember the Y2K scare, when thousands of people spent millions of hours feverishly working to stave off informational and economic disaster? Old guys who hadn't coded in decades were paid huge sums to code once again in arcane languages, in order to upgrade software that was set to fail when the 1900s turned into the 2000s.

I thought at the time that the problem illustrated a certain, sometimes misguided, parsimony among techie geeks; one that in the 1970s and 1980s was surely justified but lost some steam in the 1990s and at the time of the Y2K scare had actually become a problem. By "problem" I mean that for me, it's been years now that so many other people think it's okay to look at my desktop and scream, or to criticize my "filing" behaviors, even though they work.

The problem: Some of us like everything nice and neat and in its place and just big enough but not too big and if it's not needed it should be thrown away. To me, that's mostly baloney. I want everything available all of the time and I don't want to waste time deciding what to put where or what to throw away.

I am not criticizing the early code writers who saved two digits by using only the tertiary and quaternary digits to represent "years" in software code. Sure, someone might have looked a little bit ahead and foreseen the problem when it turned out that the long range assumption that all years would begin with "19" was erroneous. But those folks were working in parsimonious times when resources were slim, computers and networks were slow, and pipelines and storage space were expensive and limited.

We're past that now, d'oh! And two of my "worst" habits are proving to be pre-adaptations to new, knowledge-age working situations:

· I don't throw anything away, ever; and
· I don't waste much time putting files away neatly in deep, rigidly structured hierarchies.

Not Throwing Things Away

I remember my first hard drive. It was a 20-megabyte Macintosh external drive and it was the size of several large, hardbound books in a stack. Now, each time I get a new laptop, it has a hard drive so much bigger than the previous one that the first thing I do is copy over everything from the old machine. My current laptop has folders on the "C" drive that are labeled "Terry's old hard drive," "Terry's older hard drive," and "Terry's oldest hard drive." I have more than half a million e-mail messages stored away and more than 25,000 jpg images.

Digital is different that way from physical. We all have stories about our mothers throwing away our amazing collections of now-would-be-valuable science fiction books when we were away at college or in the military, don't we? Here at SCUP I still deeply regret our physical move from the School of Education Building on the university campus to new offices in about 1995 and how we (against my strong arguments) "threw away" pounds and pounds of what I still think would have been valuable old books, campus maps and plans, and the like. But there was at least a legitimate concern about keeping all that old stuff--we didn't have space for it, and we would have had to pay to move it and rent space to keep it.