Guest blog article by Rick Colosimo
Besides profiling a few prolific users and an “Odd Couple” married couple, complete with female Oscar, with photos, emails, audio, and video adding up to vast amounts of digital storage space, there is a list of a handful of “tell-tale” signs. Signs of digital hoarding include: using all your free space on gmail; a desktop cluttered with icons; digital photos that are mostly bad; and TV shows you don’t plan to watch. Suggested “treatments” include: Inbox Zero (made famous by Merlin Mann of 43folders); declaring email bankruptcy; and reducing inflow to your email inbox.
The real kernel of where this article meant to go is one of the signs that is ignored in the text: “Deleting anything makes you anxious — even things you can’t remember why you saved.” Digital storage, by itself, is in a different category than physical hoarding because of the inherent cost-benefit analysis. With no physical outcomes, other than costs for a 2TB hard drive (<$200) every so often, it’s hard to compare keeping emails with a pile of old unread newspapers. Certainly, the filing vs piling debate makes the “cost” of storing more even lower — the generally accepted answer these days is that it’s faster to search than maintain a detailed filing system. The search costs go down more than expected because you don’t have to search for everything you store, but you have to file everything to have a filing system.
I think the critical distinction is one of attitude and anxiety: if you are anxious, you have a problem regardless of whether you have 100 photos or 100,000. If you search and can’t find things, that’s a different problem with a specific solution for your situation to create total organization. I find that Quicksilver and Spotlight do quite well at finding things quickly for me with little worries on my part.
Take a quick look at your primary machine (OmniDiskSweeper is a free lightweight simple sizing tool): how much do you have in various folders? After doing some cleaning myself, it reports:
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iTunes (Includes Stanford IOS course in HD and music videos): 50gb
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Documents (includes archived client files and backups as well as my second copy of most mail since I have Outlook for Mac installed too): 26.6 gb
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Pictures: 16.9 gb
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Library (a Mac folder that stores mail, working folders for DevonThink, and IOS backups): 14.3 gb
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Downloads (all my “temp” storage plus working files for learning how to program): 4.2 gb
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All that plus the miscellaneous leaves me with plenty of space on a 256gb solid-state macbook air.
NB: To be fair, I’ve offloaded 10gb of old Windows PST files to my time capsule, and about 6gb of tutorial videos for Rails/IOS as well. Much of my old music (about 60gb) resides on my still-running Windows Vista desktop on a 500gb hard drive.
What’s your digital storage profile look like? What tools do you use to find things easily?
Closing Time
Closing time – a phrase immortalized by Semisonic in their 2008 pop hit. The song focuses on that moment late in the evening when the lights of the bar come up signaling that it’s time for the patrons to leave. But for those working in those environments – bars, restaurants, retail stores – closing time is just the beginning of the end.
After Hours Effort
What I’m talking about is the closing routine that starts after the last customer leaves. Much of the really hard work begins here – the cleaning, scrubbing, tossing and organizing. It all needs to be done before the day is really over. The closing routine is a fundamental part of preparing for the next day, so it’s a process worth perfecting to maximize it’s effectiveness.
The restaurant kitchen is a great analogy for this analysis, primarily because “Dishwasher” was the first title your humble author held in his working career. The cycle of productivity in a restaurant kitchen can be easily described as (a) prepare to cook, (b) cook, (c) clean up from cooking. Interestingly, (a) and (c) are interrelated.
Virtual Team Challenges & Solutions from career experts at the Kenan-Flagler business school
A recent report by RW3 LLC, a cultural training service, found that 46 percent of employees who work on virtual teams said they had never met their virtual team cohorts and 30 percent said they only met them once a year. The report, The Challenges of Working in Virtual Teams, was based on a survey of nearly 30,000 employees from multinational companies. The survey also found that:
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The top challenge for virtual team members was the inability to read nonverbal cues (94%).
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There is an absence of collegiality among virtual team members (85%).
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It is difficult to establish rapport and trust in virtual teams (81%).
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Most virtual team members (90%) said they don’t have enough time during virtual meetings to build relationships.
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Managing conflict is more challenging on virtual teams than on conventional teams (73%).
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Decision making is more difficult on virtual teams than on conventional teams (69%).
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It is more challenging to express opinions on virtual teams than on conventional teams (64%) (Hastings, 2010).
If you have been part of a virtual team, you’ve probably dealt with your share of these challenges and you are wondering about where to do from here.
Career experts at the Kenan-Flagler business school have produced a comprehensive white paper exploring virtual teams, their benefits and challenges to organizations, and outlined the three key steps that HR and talent management professionals can follow to ensure that virtual team members and leaders in their organizations have the skills, competencies and tools needed to succeed inspite of these challenges. These important steps are:
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Participate in the selection process of virtual team members and leaders.
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Ensure for the appropriate selection, training and use of virtual team technologies.
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Provide training for virtual team members.
Refer to the white paper online or the PDF version for the in-depth review and recommendations.
And how about your experience and recomendation on how you have addressed the virtual team challenges in your environment?
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Leadership as Transparent as (Ira) Glass
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