Magnificent Wastes of Time
Originally posted at Dean’s World:
I am not a Luddite – quite the opposite really. In my house I have no less than two modern wirelessly networked computers, one of which I built myself. I also have two ancient but working ones, plus an original 1977 Atari 2600 “Heavy Sixer” manufactured in Sunnyvale CA. a couple of PDAs and a PS2. I received my first computer in 1982 – a TI99-4A that taught me Basic, my first computer language. Since then I have taught myself a few more and finally made computers a full-time profession in 1997. I am old school. I have never forgotten DOS and trust it more than Windows, jumping to the command line to do things more often than the younger generation does, if they do such a thing at all (psst! Under XP it’s Run->CMD).
Hopefully this will reassure you when I say that I for the most part computers are a wonderful and expensive waste of time. If you want to boost your productivity by purchasing a computer for anything other than using a database (the best reason to use a computer IMO), then you might want to consider doing something else with your money – like buying a good day planner.
I posit this based on the following:
First, I work mostly with Microsoft products. Some will inevitably say that’s the problem, but in the private sector one doesn’t have much choice. I have used MS Word and Excel for over 12 years and am continually amazed at how much time I have to spend getting my spreadsheets and documents to look right. I spend more time formatting my documents than actually writing them – which defeats the purpose of using these programs. As a result I often find myself composing in Dreamweaver – a web publishing program – because the simple choices afforded by HTML keep me focused on what I’m writing, not how it looks. In fact, that’s where this article originated. Formatting does not make better writing or more accurate spreadsheets – so the output remains the same while the time spent on that output increases.
Second, I spend more time maintaining the programs on my PC than ever. Because of the increasing security threats on the web posed by viruses, spyware, DNS poisoning, and other malware I have to keep not only my OS up to date (XP – which updates itself automatically) but also my anti-spyware and anti-virus programs. PC Magazine recently dedicated a cover story to security, and according to that I’m not even doing enough. New Scientist has an article this week that discusses the threat posed by DNS cache poisoning, so even when I’m doing everything to protect my PC at work, I could still be at risk. If I add this time to that spent on my writing, I’m increasingly less productive. That’s not including the trouble I have with existing programs failing to work after upgrading another program or adding another piece of hardware. I tried to burn the Kid a CD of his favorite songs last night, and I found that I had to send the disk image across the LAN and burn it on the other PC because Nero couldn’t recognize my CD burner anymore. Add yet another thing to my “to-do” list that doesn’t produce essays, business process documentation or The Kid’s music CDs.
Third, I like to think I know a thing or two about computers, but I often run into problems that simply baffle me and resist all attempts at resolution without burning up serious amounts of time. If I can blow three hours on a problem, just imagine how long it would take the average person who doesn’t devote his career to them.
For the past two decades government statisticians have been looking for the productivity boost brought about through technology, but so far they haven’ t found it. When you have bosses spending hours deciding between Arial and Verdana in a Powerpoint presentation (as one of my friends recently mentioned to me) it’s obvious where that productivity has gone: out the Windows.
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