Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Technology Thursday
I have mixed feelings about New Year's resolutions. On the one hand, it is too easy to announce (even in an internal monologue) vague resolutions which are forgotten by March (or overtaken by events) resulting in a massive crush of guilt and despair around the November timeframe. On the other hand, the turning of the calendar year, arbitrary though our numbering system may be, can be a good impetus to think and plan for the year ahead. Last year, I tried the technique of simply writing down a dozen or so things I wanted to do (or be in the process of) for 2010 and divvied them up by quarter. Thus, instead of feeling like I had to start work on everything at once, I could simply focus on my Q1 projects. It sort of worked. Well enough, at least, that I'll try that again this year.
Another type of activity that the turning of the calendar can be good for is quitting or starting something. I know people who've stopped drinking soda or eliminated some other food by going 'cold turkey' on a January 1st. One year I decided to be much more systematic about taking vitamins (setting aside the argument over the merits of multivitamins and other supplements) by sticking a calendar on my bathroom wall and making a small check each morning as a way to note that I'd taken my vitamins. Habits are built from such little things, after all.
With regard to technology, I have a couple of things in mind for 2011. One is a 'ban' and one is a long project.
The ban.
My son is 30 months old now. And as of January 1st we are going to try, try, try to ban laptops and phones from the dinnertime table. Now, before the shock and horror that we haven't done that already, sets in, well, ... it's complicated. We are still not at the point where we all eat the same dinner. Partially due to my kiddo's food allergies. Partially due to timing (also known as poor/insufficient planning), and partially due to the fact that my husband and are I just not hungry when he eats. Furthermore, in an effort not to let his day at childcare go too long, one of us will often go fetch him before either of us has really completely finished our work day. Meaning even after TheLittleGuy is back home, my husband and I might both still have some end of day work tasks to be finishing up from our laptops. (In the early days when juggling 2 jobs, childcare logistics, an infant, meal prep, and housework, fitting in work wherever and whenever was a necessity - that's still sort of true, but a bit less so as we're past the chronic sleep deprivation of infancy, so we need to try harder to get out of that pattern.) Furthermore, our house is small and the dining table is large - meaning that it serves, at one end, as a dining space, and at the other end as a work or project space. Until recently we'd opted for all 3 of us sitting at the table together while TLG eats, even if we still had laptops open, rather than not having that time together. However, TLG is old enough to have conversations about the events of the day, if not the Events of The Day, and certainly far more than old enough to observe this (admittedly poor and antisocial) behavior we're modeling and wonder why he can't have his Dora video at dinnertime, too. Although he hasn't come right out and said that yet.
So, no more screens at the dinner table, starting January 1, 2011. Maybe next year or the year after we can talk about banning laptop work from the living room. Or even having screen-free weekend days. Baby steps.
The project.
I've written before about data backup procedures. I've had some data losses over the years. But nothing drastic (knock on wood). What that means, though, is that I have a lot of digital detritus and cruft cluttering up my digital environment. And I also have a lot of archival files and information that I'd like to keep but that isn't well organized or integrated into my current system. So this year, I'm hoping to start and complete the process of going through all the old backup files and culling/sorting organizing into a more rationalized digital file system. And I also want to, step-by-step, import my folders full of digital photographs from the last 10 years into my current photograph database, with at least some rudimentary tagging. This will be a long process - definitely not do-able in a weekend. So the Q1 activity is to first do the assessment of what, from a high-level perspective, actually needs to be done, and then.... to begin at the beginning. And to try to do a little bit each week (if not each day) toward making some sense of the many gigabytes of digital files I have sitting around before too much more time passes. If it works, then at the end of 2011, I can start thinking seriously about the great Digitization Project of 2012 (which would allow us to stop keeping most paper - who wants to pay a mortgage to store paper?).
Toward that end, my iMac is in the shop right now, having its hard drive replaced with a much larger one.
Oh, I've got a lot of other projects I hope to make progress on that are not so technology-focused, but this is a big one that's long overdue. I'll try to remember to report back in on how it's going.
Comments