Does it ever seem like you spend too much of your life inputting data? It does to me.
When you could be sleeping, eating, writing emails, daydreaming, working out, saying your prayers or walking the dog, inputting data into a machine seems like a waste of time. But we have to do it.
Because there are so many things today that require downloading information, it feels like there’s a never-ending series of questions being asked of us. We give away credit card information. We feed the machine with our address and give away our phone numbers so companies can mail us products. We spend time selecting times, dates and seats so we can fly somewhere to get away from it all.
All the clicking and writing and repeating of these actions to plan a vacation, order tickets, or go to a business conference add up to wasted time. The electronic universe pulls us in again and again. We have no choice. If you don’t add the info to the forms, you don’t get what you want.
This was driven home most recently when I tried to call a friend and realized I didn’t have her number or email address in my smart phone. In this day and age, how could that happen? Easy. Unless you remembered when you first met the person to input the data in your phone, you probably never got around to updating it. This caused a scramble.
You’d think you’d have that contact information easily accessible in 2015. You certainly know where to look, or who to ask: Go to LinkedIn; text a friend; email a note to a mutual acquaintance. You won’t always find this works.
In my case, the individual I wanted to contact did not include contact information on her LinkedIn profile. Okay, so I texted someone I knew would have her number. No response. I dug into email, and sent a note to another person, asking for the information. As often happens with email, that transmission was ignored.
All the up-to-date methods to stay in touch with another human being, and they all failed to yield connectivity or the necessary information. No traction.
At some point, I guess I was able to get in touch with my friend. I don’t remember.
The takeaway is how often we must input data so it’s available for future use. You shouldn’t wait. If you meet someone new, chances are you will forgot about the connection the next day. If you are at a conference, when your return to your room at night, pull out all those names and put them into your phone. If you don’t do it then, there’s a 90% chance it will never happen. That’s a statistical truth.
To capture the data, you have to internalize it. And we don’t keep it in our heads or on paper any more. It’s all electronic. So we spend far too much productive time tapping away on tiny keys, squinting, going back to make sure we didn’t incorrectly type something in, then looking back on all this as wasted time, even though it isn’t.
It’s actually productive because you eventually scroll through your smart phone to find someone’s data, and it’s actually there. You had the prescience to add it in a timely fashion to your transportable device. That’s progress.
Someday we’re probably going to tap foreheads and data will transfer from the other person’s implanted device to yours, and when you need to access it, you will just need to think the name for it to appear magically in front of your eyeballs. Until then, if you can’t find your friend’s information electronically, go back to your old hand written address book. You might be surprised, it’s probably still relevant.
When you could be sleeping, eating, writing emails, daydreaming, working out, saying your prayers or walking the dog, inputting data into a machine seems like a waste of time. But we have to do it.
Because there are so many things today that require downloading information, it feels like there’s a never-ending series of questions being asked of us. We give away credit card information. We feed the machine with our address and give away our phone numbers so companies can mail us products. We spend time selecting times, dates and seats so we can fly somewhere to get away from it all.
All the clicking and writing and repeating of these actions to plan a vacation, order tickets, or go to a business conference add up to wasted time. The electronic universe pulls us in again and again. We have no choice. If you don’t add the info to the forms, you don’t get what you want.
This was driven home most recently when I tried to call a friend and realized I didn’t have her number or email address in my smart phone. In this day and age, how could that happen? Easy. Unless you remembered when you first met the person to input the data in your phone, you probably never got around to updating it. This caused a scramble.
You’d think you’d have that contact information easily accessible in 2015. You certainly know where to look, or who to ask: Go to LinkedIn; text a friend; email a note to a mutual acquaintance. You won’t always find this works.
In my case, the individual I wanted to contact did not include contact information on her LinkedIn profile. Okay, so I texted someone I knew would have her number. No response. I dug into email, and sent a note to another person, asking for the information. As often happens with email, that transmission was ignored.
All the up-to-date methods to stay in touch with another human being, and they all failed to yield connectivity or the necessary information. No traction.
At some point, I guess I was able to get in touch with my friend. I don’t remember.
The takeaway is how often we must input data so it’s available for future use. You shouldn’t wait. If you meet someone new, chances are you will forgot about the connection the next day. If you are at a conference, when your return to your room at night, pull out all those names and put them into your phone. If you don’t do it then, there’s a 90% chance it will never happen. That’s a statistical truth.
To capture the data, you have to internalize it. And we don’t keep it in our heads or on paper any more. It’s all electronic. So we spend far too much productive time tapping away on tiny keys, squinting, going back to make sure we didn’t incorrectly type something in, then looking back on all this as wasted time, even though it isn’t.
It’s actually productive because you eventually scroll through your smart phone to find someone’s data, and it’s actually there. You had the prescience to add it in a timely fashion to your transportable device. That’s progress.
Someday we’re probably going to tap foreheads and data will transfer from the other person’s implanted device to yours, and when you need to access it, you will just need to think the name for it to appear magically in front of your eyeballs. Until then, if you can’t find your friend’s information electronically, go back to your old hand written address book. You might be surprised, it’s probably still relevant.