Stop Wasting Your Time Making Filing and Deleting Decisions!
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.
Not so when I get a new laptop. I just hook 'em up and copy the files over.
Some day, of course, there will be incompatibilities that will mean I no longer
have the software to read some files, but I truly expect some genius to work
on that problem, too. I haven't the slightest doubt that whatever computer I
am using at the end of my life, I will still be able to display my jpg images.
But will I be able to find the images I want? I think so, and certainly the
image files are the toughest to locate on a hard drive where things stand now
in early 2005.
Not Filing Things Away
The first time I ever made a live presentation about the Internet, it was to
a standing-room-only crowd of about 150 members of the Society for College and
University Planning. I had reserved an Internet connection for the room as well
as a data projector. I was nervous and, of course, neither the data projector
nor the Internet connection was there when I began speaking. Imagine giving
a voice-only presentation about the Internet to a room full of people, many
of whom had never used it, in 1996. Not fun.
Anyway, about 25 minutes into the session the hard-working techies arrived
and got it all working. When it went on I, looking out at the audience and speaking,
heard and saw a huge collective gasp--all eyes were fixed on the projector screen.
Here's sort of what they saw:
*Gasp!*
Actually, it would take a screen larger than the wall of my office to display
all of the icons on my desktop. That's where I work: my desktop. When that term
came out for what we see in the window, I took it literally. That's where I
put everything I am working on until it's done. And when it's done I file it
away mostly in "monthly" folders rather in topically labeled folders.
Or, I simply create a folder called "Terry's desktop 110404" and put
everything in it and stick it on the C drive.
Now, before you think I have always been this way ... it's not so. I used to
be so "retentive" about hard copy files and prevision filing and indexing
that the books I used in law school would have, by the end of the semester,
hundreds of little glue-on tabbies so that I could find things quickly--and
I had boxes full of detailed files.
But then something magical happened. Someone invented the "find"
command! How wonderful! Why would I spend tens of minutes each day moving files
up and down through hierarchical file structures when I can find things at the
push of a button? My time is too valuable. So I basically do not file things
away.
There are some problems with this, of course. One being that few people other
than myself can actually find things on my laptop right now. (But that's a bonus
sometimes, too.)
And now the latest from Google (and others) shows that, just like I was ahead
of my time by never deleting digital files (because I would always have enough
cheap storage space to keep them all) I was ahead of my time by not putting
everything neatly away. The latest "desktop search" software is a
predictor of much better tools coming in just a few years.
My bet: Five years from now more users will be like me, and refrain from wasting
hours each work week laboriously dragging things "where they ought to be"
and will just let them go where they will. And, the desktop search software
will be ubiquitous, unobtrusive, and may well file things where they should
be anyway, without anyone having to think about it.
As for the current hardest-to-find things--images--when cameras have GPS built
in and also RFID sensors and people are all wearing RFID tags, then every image
will have oodles of metadata to be included in those desktop search engines,
even if we never rename our files! (Which then would also be a waste of time.)
Just as spell checkers mean that everything's spelled right (or should be),
though no one has to know how to spell; everything will be placed where it should
be (or at least easily findable) without any person having to spend time putting
things away or digging down through multiple levels of folders to find them.