Worklife

Ramblings about workplace culture, life in Japan, and then some.

Fascination with progress

Jan 15, 2007 15:56 pm / Add a comment

My job required that I find peo­ple at wide range of pro­fes­sion to inter­view very quickly, so I con­tacted my new and old friends. My high pro­file con­sul­tant and sci­en­tist friends in San Fran­cisco obliged to my request, even though one of them was back from Lon­don just for one night stop over before she had to go to Hawaii for a con­fer­ence. My Geor­gia Tech grad­u­ate school pro­fes­sor friend obliged for an inter­view at her home, and found me a few other pro­fes­sional peo­ple to talk to.

And then north of Florida friends. I haven’t seen them in … 22 years! And the won­der­ful sur­prise was that they hadn’t changed at all as far as being bright eyed and bushy tailed were con­cerned. Yes, we all gained a few mid­dle age pounds here and there, but they had beau­ti­ful faces. Same clear eyes, warm smiles. Only changes I saw were their 22 year-old son and the busi­ness they grew.

So what was the fas­ci­na­tion? Two years ago in US, I was work­ing with one of the top class Amer­i­can con­sult­ing firm. The work­place direc­tor at that time bemoaned that he was not able to get any sat­is­fac­tory wire­less sys­tem intact for their new office. Hotels, homes, noth­ing was really wire­less except mobile phones. Then on this trip, all the places I vis­ited had wire­less. Just over a short two years, wire­less has become an ordi­nary thing.

I def­i­nitely felt nor­mal with my lap­top, 3G mobile, iPod, using Skype. Progress!

But I also saw that how I changed the way I work around my lap­top affected my think­ing and work in bad way too. My focus level has gone down con­sid­er­ably. The minute I close my lap­top, I can for­get what I wrote in there. My jour­nal has all been writ­ten in my lap­top for the past 6 years, and I know for the past 3, 4 years, writ­ing jour­nal was no longer reflec­tive or thought pro­vok­ing. It was just a way to release tension.

Maybe I’ll go back to writ­ing long­hand, take my notes long­hand. My friend in San Fran­cisco told me about how he does it. Writ­ing long­hand is so lib­er­at­ing, because he can write any­thing. Then any­thing he wants to develop fur­ther, he would type into lap­top. That would be my next progress.

 

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