Divorced from Technology …& Loving It!

 

This past week has been nothing but technology drama for Moi! My old MAC crashed and I lost a year’s worth of my life. I sat at the Irvine Spectrum Apple Bar and watched as the technician stuffed my old hard drive in a used cardboard box to be shipped back to Apple’s headquarters for recycling. Then the light bulb went off ..didn’t I purchase some black box to save my pictures, writings, etc in the event of another PC failure. That’s right I did! Needless to say, that black box or otherwise known as an external hard drive was stuffed away in my home office. When I arrived home with my fresh MAC in hand, I pulled the hard drive out of hiding and viola I had backed up some items but not nearly enough. I spent the rest of this week finding my past life’s work and adding it to the new MAC and gasp! backing up! I long for the days when I used paper to write everything down and my pictures were stored on a CD when I went to the local Kodak office. Now I want to summarize the main reasons I plan on coming back to paper before I put solely my life’s work back into technology:

• It doesn’t crash. Seems obvious when you see it written out like that, but this is a really big one for me. So, paper wins.

• It’s ‘always on’, and I don’t need to be connected.  The problem with managing your life online comes when you’re offline. I now use my Filofax calendaring and note system to manage my whole life, not just my online life, and being able to have my Filofax with me on holiday, or on a plane, or wherever, is very important.

• It’s instantaneous. I always found scheduling events a complete pain on the Palm or iCal — constantly tapping back and forward between days, and never able to see enough information on the screen at once. Online systems are marginally better, but there’s still too much mucking about required for my liking. With a paper system, you can flip back and forward as much as you like.

• It’s freeform. Even though it’s important to keep your paper-based system structured to a certain extent, I love having the ability to grab my Filofax and scribble a phone number or some notes on whatever page is to hand. No other system I’ve ever used has offered this flexibility, and I couldn’t live without it now that I’ve got it.

   

  Now back to saving this post and backing up before I hear the click ..click …click sound of the MAC again! Hopefully I will never see a file folder with a question mark again!

   

  Moi xoxo