Digital Housework

"No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. Sometimes I just want it to stay saved, y'know, for a little bit. I fee like the maid: 'I just cleaned up this mess! Can we keep it clean for ten minutes? Please?' " - Mr. Incredible starting at 0:55 in this clip from The Incredibles

I can't keep entropy at bay. The tendency toward randomness and disorder keeps creeping back in. Today I'm dealing with the equivalent of that mountain of laundry that needs to be done. Or more aptly, the garage you need to clean that holds all the boxes you've moved from place to place without ever opening and sorting them. Today, I'm cleaning up digital files.

In How to Do Nothing Jenny O'Dell wrote about the attention economy's logic "that 'disruption' is more productive than the work of maintenance--of keeping ourselves and others alive and well." She wasn't referring to digital maintenance--if I really do what she calls for I'd have a lot less to maintain--but her point still applies.

It's so much more exciting to start something new than to clean up something old, right? To heck with Marie Kondo; in a consumer economy the thrill of buying a new set of shelves far outweighs the tedium of sorting the things we'll set on them and making a run to donate the items we no longer need or want, let alone dusting those shelves in a couple of weeks after they're no longer new and exciting. In the digital context it's more fun to take today's pictures than to review yesterday's pictures, delete the ones we don't want, and organize them in some useful way.

I appreciate and am inspired by O'Dell's deep thinking about the ways in which we have given away our ability to pay attention, to concentrate, to notice what really matters. We are creating enormous economic value for nothing, doing unpaid digital labor that Facebook or Twitter or Google Ad Services monetizes and sells to shareholders. If we are to extract any true value for ourselves, we're going to have to give some thought to maintenance, not just creation.

I have the digital footprint (and attention span) of an early adopter of some, but not all, of the many shiny-object services of the digital age. I've been on Twitter for over a decade, Facebook about that long. I got interviewed as an early user of LinkedIn in my former hometown because I had so many connections before others were using it regularly. I let a TV station follow me around when I was checking in on Foursquare when that was still a thing. I have an Instagram account I never post to and no doubt dozens of dusty spaces on the web with my name on them created for some forgotten reason. When I changed jobs I had to do at least 59 things to deal with my online presence.

There's no way I can track down and delete all these things I'm not maintaining. I do wonder at times about the amount of server space being held for neglected accounts. How long do you suppose my old "burner" email accounts will be available?

I'm not even going to try to find and delete everything I don't use. I'm going to start by cleaning up what I do use. I'll try to define some rules for what I do and don't save that may make maintenance easier going forward.

Take Dropbox, for example. Handy utility. I have that and Google Drive and wherever the images go that are all automatically saved by my cellular service. How much cloud storage does one person need? Not as much as I have access to. Yet I managed to fill the free Dropbox space and start paying for more a few years ago when I was taking lots of pictures in my work as executive director of Washington Bikes. Every bike ride, ribbon-cutting, Bike to Work Day Energizer Station got captured with multiple images.

And they're all still sitting there.

I keep meaning to go in and clean up. Every time I start, I get a few images deleted, then get side-tracked into thinking about whether I want to save some, renaming a few so they have a more meaningful filename than the date they were taken, opening several to determine which one is the best in a series (and I'm no photographer so none of these are very good to begin with), thinking about whether someday I may want to be able to illustrate this particular historic moment for some reason and no one else has any pictures of this, and and and.... You can understand why my Dropbox is so full it will no longer sync across devices and they want me to pay more to get more storage space.

No. It's maintenance time. By which I primarily mean, be bold and hit DELETE, at least on some of those folders.

Like housework in the real world AFK (Away From Keyboard), this may not stay done. The dust bunnies will creep back in. I'll lose track of my good intentions about not saving everything as files when I could simply bookmark a report I want to refer to.

(Oh no, my bookmarks--those need organizing and clean-up too. Or maybe not. My maintenance energy only extends so far and I need to prioritize. Focus, Chamberlain, focus.)

A while back thanks to Twitter, which I do find valuable as a place to give and receive information from people who are still better value filters than a Google search, I encountered The Maintainers, "a global research network interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world."

Working in transportation as I do, I know our maintenance backlog is enormous and still growing. The belief that something new is more important than taking care of what we have is evident there as in other sectors of public policy and our economic structures. Lack of maintenance carries a hidden cost to all of us, from repairs to personal vehicles shaken by rough roads and potholes to the broken elbow I received crashing on a trail thanks to a broken surface I tried to avoid on my bike.

One of the costs of failure to maintain my digital space is direct: I'll be charged another year's storage on Dropbox if I don't get my usage down. Another is indirect; if I try to find something in those files I'm digging through all the clutter, just like going through boxes in my garage in search of a specific item time after time.

Maintenance protects, sustains and adds real value in the real world. We need more of it. It may not be shiny, but it's essential.

And here I sit, writing a shiny new blog post instead of digging into those dusty old cloud files.

Tab Set: A Round-up of Current Miscellany

The title of this post refers to a habit of mine: Click on lots of links from Twitter, email newsletters, Google Reader, and Facebook, opening them all with every intention of reading them later, and eventually lose them because I decide I can't stand the number of tabs open in my browser and I don't have time to do the reading right at that moment. Multiply this by the fact that I have a work computer, a laptop, a tablet, and a smartphone, and that's a lot of tabs.

I'm choosing to do this sharing in a medium other than Twitter, where to tweet is to cast a twig into the floodwaters, or Facebook, where the rate at which I read things I want to share is a bit overwhelming for my friends. (I realized this after having Twitter tied to Facebook for a brief while--something I now consider a social media faux pas--and having a friend dub me "Queen of the Status Updates.")

This choice to create a post is thanks in part to the first entry on the list (a link I did manage to follow and finish reading because he writes really short posts):

What are you leaving behind? By Seth Godin: A blog post that asks why we don't collect our various musings and sources of inspiration in a more permanent form than social media postings.

Neil Gaiman commencement address on Brain Pickings, one of my very favorite websites for wonderful writing and unusual discoveries. While I click regularly on links from the @BrainPickings Twitter account, this particular post was recommended to me by Kent Peterson, who writes the charming Kent's Bike Blog (which isn't in the tab set because when I go into Google Reader I read the posts).

Where are the Women Bike Commuters? on Sightline, another site I read regularly via Twitter and email links. As someone who writes a lot about biking, aiming particularly at women, I'm sorry that the data from Spokane in this piece on riding in Northwest cities represent too small a sample to draw any conclusions, although I know empirically that I see more people--and more women--riding than I saw when we started Bike to Work Week celebrations five years ago. This tab is still open because I'm not done reading the comments and I know I'll want to add to them.

Why Bicyclists are Better Customers for Local Business than Drivers: It's on DC Streetsblog, which I follow on Twitter, but I found it by way of someone's tweet about a Planetizen bit that linked to this (another demonstration that the good stuff gets passed around and eventually I'll see it so it's okay if I close a tab after a while). I'm saving this and similar resources as inspiration for a future post on Bike Style Spokane and my occasional (okay, frequent) discussions with businesspeople about why biking is good for their bottom line.

What does your bicycle mean to you? A question on Quora I've been meaning to answer.

Nine-year-old's lunch blog shames school into making changes on Grist: I cheated on this one--I had actually read it, commented, and closed the tab, but just had to share it here. I serve on the board of the Empire Health Foundation, where we are working on childhood health by, among other things, supporting schools in making the switch to scratch cooking. I got to see the results a few weeks ago at the Cheney School District and in July will get to meet Cook for America founder Kate Ademick at a Culinary Bootcamp for school nutrition folks.

Statistical Abstract for My Home of Spokane, Washington, by Jess Walter. OK, see, I'm cheating again a little bit because I followed this link from inside Facebook and was so sucked in by Jess's wonderful writing that I devoured the whole thing. But by putting it on this list I make a record to remind myself to read it again, and I get to share it with others. I also signed up to follow Jess on Byliner, where this was posted and which looks like a fantastic resource for finding new authors and following favorites. This same piece was later highlighted on The Spovangelist, another on my regular reading list.

Lowest Difficult Setting Follow-up--Whatever: I read the original piece (nice gaming metaphor explaining straight white male privilege without using the word privilege, except I just did here), loved it, and shared it on Facebook. Now I want to read the follow-up so it's waiting for me.

pbump.net: Site of Philip Bump, who's going to work for Grist and who was part of a Twitter exchange I was in that somehow involved sprinkles and whipped cream. Twitter is so random and his site appears to be the same so it would be dangerous to start reading it and following links. Squirrel!

How to Fix Shockwave Flash Crashes in Google Chrome: Yeah, really tired of this problem. Love Chrome--hate the washed-out white screen and twirly circle and "Kill this page or wait?" messages.

From the sublime to the ridiculous or thereabouts, part of my current tab set. What are you reading? Post a link so I can pop it open and have it sit there staring at me, waiting to be read.

Frittering Away My Mental Energies, Thanks—How About You?

I wrote a lengthy and boring piece quite a while ago about the ramblings and byways I get sucked into working on the computer. That still happens.

It happens even more now that I’ve started a second blog with a bike focus and am seeking to build its traffic. I’ve been pouring energies into promotional efforts for the new blog that result in a lot of Web time that doesn’t ever seem to end.

How could it end? The Web doesn’t--and now I carry it around in the palm of my hand so I don't even have to sit down to click.

There’s always one more blog post I could read and comment on, one more Twitter account I could follow and interact with, one more Facebook page I could give a thumbs-up to and then tag in an update, another question I can answer on Quora to establish my expertise and credentials.

Then I read this piece by Suze Muse, whom I follow on Twitter: Are you using time or wasting it? The answer to that is yes.

By which I mean some of that online time is well-spent—some of it is wasted.

I've found myself thinking of this piece several times since reading it, telling people about it, and applying the principles she outlines (so you need to go read it).

In particular, the social media tab dance (round and round and round between Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Quora, and other “important spaces”) sucks time like a black hole sucks gravity.

I can always "justify" it as professional development, engagement with friends, and promotion of my blog.

Or, as Suze suggests, I can give myself a certain number of minutes in pursuit of those particular outcomes, then close the tabs and go do something else with purpose. 

Powerful stuff.

I just read this older piece by Conversation Agent (another thinker I wouldn’t know if it weren’t for that Twitter time) with some complementary thoughts about cutting down on distractions in order to focus on the destination.

This same theme abounds in blog posts around the globe. You’d think with the number of times I read it and say, “Yes! I agree!” that by now I would have achieved the calm focus of a Zen master. Heh.

One of the things that helps my mental discipline--when I make time for it!--is a regular yoga practice. That serves as moving meditation and makes me much more mindful of all kinds of choices, from how I spend my time to what foods I consume. But I don't have (make!) time for it right now.

Biking, which I do daily for transportation, gives me another tech-free space in which to change up my mental habits and it’s easier to work that into my schedule than a class that has to happen at a specific time.

I also love to cook. Last year I created a lot of non-tech time by preserving up a storm: canning, freezing, drying, making jams and jellies.

This year the new blog launch, putting on Bike Style Spokane shopping events, and other commitments ate up the time I could have put into putting up food and I haven’t been cooking as often (good thing Sweet Hubs loves my Crockpot soups). One priority crowds out another.

So much of our time is spent in technology spaces. Time away from the screen, using our bodies and our hands, can make our mental work better, fresher, and more enjoyable. But none of these really change my habits.

What do you do to stay focused on priorities? (If you manage to pull this off, that is.)

Five Ways Microsoft Word Teaches Buddhist Principles and Practice

Start by opening.

Sit with the possibilities of the blank page. This meditation will help you attain Samadhi, or the mental discipline required to achieve mastery over one’s mind.

All is impermanence. Things change. You have to accept and move on.

When you change words in something with a hanging indent, bullets or other formatting, it looks wrong until you accept that change. Then it falls into line.

You have made a change and the effects will be felt but this does not show immediately.

Let go of attachment(s).

The Buddha taught us that attachment causes suffering. This is certainly true at work, where an email with an attachment almost always brings more work (i.e. suffering) than one without attachment.

Let go of the need to control outcomes. Suffering ends when craving ends.

You can delude yourself into thinking that you have control and drive yourself into negative feelings of anger, even rage. Or you can accept that sometimes things just don’t work the way you expect them to, let go of your attachment (perhaps delete it), and free your mind.

Thus will you attain nirvana and enlightenment.

ADD on the Interwebz: Where my blog posts come from

Characters:

• Sweetest Husband in the World
• Easily Distracted Wife-Mom
• Eldest Daughter
• Second Daughter

Note: Entire scene must be played out at high speed. Actress cast for Easily Distracted must be able to type at 110 WPM.

Scene: Dining room table. Sweetest Husband is seated at the table, laptop open, cup of coffee on a coaster. Eldest Daughter and Second Daughter lounge on a red sofa against a nearby wall, texting rapidly and giggling occasionally or saying something to each other, sotto voce.

EDWM strides into the room. She pulls her laptop out of a large duffel bag and sets it on the table, then pulls two USB flash drives out of a smaller purse hidden in the large one. SHW watches as she plugs the laptop in, notices the flash drives.

SHW: Have you backed up your drives yet?

EDWM (sheepishly, spoken in the tone of someone who received one particular flash drive in her Christmas stocking two weeks ago, one who has been asked this question before and who really, really meant to get to the task before this):

I knew you were going to ask, and I was just about to!

SHW: Ri-i-i-ght…

EDWM: Seriously, that’s the first thing I’m doing. I won’t even open the Twitter tab.

She begins working at the computer.

EDWM (to no one in particular): I need to back up the old flash drive and My Documents. I’d better do some clean-up first.

At back of stage, large screen shows projection of the tasks she is performing on the computer.

1. Select My Computer.

2. Select old flash drive, check properties. It’s nearly full.

3. Open flash drive. There are 11 folders on the screen, and another dozen or so individual files.

4. Open first folder on list: Accounting.

5. Open subfolder KidAccounting.

6. Open each of the 3 spreadsheets there. Scroll down, lingering a while in two with similar time frames in the file names to see if they’re actually the same document renamed back in 2006 for some long forgotten reason. Decide they need to be kept, close each.

7. Back up a level to Accounting.

8. Open subfolder QuickenData.

9. Change view from Thumbnail to List. Spend time figuring out Quicken’s strange way of naming backup files. Delete all but the most recent, realizing just in time that there are several different file extensions and you should probably keep all with the same dates in the name, just in case.

10. Back up a level to Accounting.

11. Open subfolder Taxes.

12. All files in this folder have a date in the filename that is more recent than 7 years ago, so don’t delete any.

13. Back up a level to Accounting.

14. Open file named for house address. On screen is a calculation of the ownership shares of two unmarried individuals buying a house together, showing the expenses of the purchase and an estimated household budget. Delete this, because these two individuals are now married, community property law applies, and SHW is the love of EDW’s life (third time IS the charm).

15. Open a file named Account Summaries because you can’t remember what’s in there. It’s a list of financial accounts—surprise!—last updated over 18 months ago. Close file, but don’t delete—you never know when you might actually update it.

16. Back up another level to the flash drive directory.

17. Open next file in alphabetical list: Blog.

18. Long list of obscure and cryptic file names appears on screen.

19. Scroll somewhat aimlessly up and down. Create a subfolder named Posted.

20. Move several files quickly into this folder. Open a few more to be reminded which ones they were; move some into the folder, leave some in the main folder.

21. Two have similar names: Everyday Heroes, and Useful Super Hero Traits. Open each one to see what it’s about.

22. Close Everyday Heroes, move it into the Posted subfolder.

23. Realize that it has been a few days since you put up a blog post, and Useful Super Hero Traits is just about good to go.

24. Go to Internet browser tab at bottom of screen and click to maximize.

25. The browser has several tabs already open: Gmail, Facebook, Google Reader, Twitter, Twurl, Hotmail, ESD101.

26. Open a new tab, begin typing in blog URL, select Google’s autocomplete suggestion. It shows the account is already signed in.

27. Click on New Post at upper right.

Eldest Daughter and Second Daughter are talking, loudly enough for EDW to hear:

ED: Is school closed again tomorrow?

SD (looking down at cell phone screen): Karl says so. He goes to Rogers and that’s District 81.

ED: They wouldn’t close just one school in the district.

Screen projection:

28. Open another tab in the browser.

29. Type esd101.net.

30. Click on red-letter bold-type Snow Closures at top of lefthand nav bar.

31. Scroll down on resulting page to reach a text box.

32. Scroll down inside the textbox, reach the bottom, start back up again reading slowly because these alerts are posted as they come in, and the most recent is on the bottom. Shake head sadly at the poor user interface design this reflects.

33. Spot School District 81, stop scrolling.

EDW reads aloud: Spokane Public Schools will be closed on Thursday January 8, 2009 due to dangerous residential road conditions and rapidly melting snow.

ED and SD (more or less simultaneously): Yay! No school!

EDW: Oh! I already had ESD open. I just automatically started typing.

Screen projection:

34. Closes righthand tab, revealing that the next tab to the left is the same page.

SHW, to EDW (taking advantage of the opening): You know my incomplete? I talked to my prof and he said the paper has to be 10 pages long. I’m supposed to collect real customer data and analyze that. That’s where I ran into the problem because I can’t get a list of the dealers to survey.

EDW: I asked a question about this on Twitter today. I got those responses I already sent you but I didn’t ask the question the right way, so I sent another tweet. Let me see what they said.

Screen projection:

35. Click on Twitter tab.

36. Go to DMs. Scroll down, pause on one.

EDW (reading aloud): Can you tell me which product or products he is interested in manufacturing? That may help me help you.

EDW (turns from screen to face SHW): Is it okay to tell him what you’re making? This is in a DM so nobody else will see it.

SHW: Sure, I don’t see why not. Accessories for the Hobie Mirage Adventure Island.

EDW (repeating, stumbling slightly): The Adventure Mirage Island?

SHW (patiently): The Hobie Mirage Adventure Island.

Screen projection:

37. Click on DM reply button next to the message she read aloud.

ESDW says (typing simultaneously): That's what's so cool about Twitter! I don't know this guy--I think it's a guy. I just put out a question and I got answers.

Screen projection:

38. Type: We need to know how many Hobie dealers there are & how many Adventure Mirage Islands they sell ea yr (for 1 product); making an accessory.

39. Hit Enter. DM appears on screen.

EDW: Adventure Mirage Islands, right?

SHW (enunciating clearly and slowly): Mirage. Adventure. Island. M-A-I.

EDW: I got it wrong!

Screen projection:

40. Click on DM reply next to the same message.

41. Type: I got the name wrong! Hobie Mirage Adventure Island (MAI) is the product for which we need annual sales figures & dealer #s/contact info

Voiceover narration of EDW’s thoughts: Hey, this would make a great blog post! I'm supposed to be backing up my files.

Screen projection continues:

42. Maximize Word tab at bottom of screen.

43. In Word, click on New Document shortcut at top of screen. That annoying screen that requires you to acknowledge that yes, when you say New Document, you mean Blank Document--not a Calendar or anything else involving a Wizard or other magical creature--appears.

44. Click on Blank Document. Remember that it requires a double click. Sigh impatiently. Click twice. Firmly.

45. Begin typing: ADD.

46. Hit Ctrl-S.

47. When file name entry box appears, type ADD on the interwebz and click Save.

48. Back in new document, begin typing: Characters: Sweetest Husband in the World....

Technorati, but why?

So I'm trying to learn which social media spaces I want to hang out in, what I want to use regularly, what might be helpful for work--new media stuff. Lord. I think TV was still in black and white when I was a kid. I know we had a dial phone.

Technorati is on my list to check out, so I'm there claiming my blog spaces. Not that I'm marketing this or trying to draw traffic or expecting revenue from Google AdWords any time soon.