west uptowner

church tower reflection, originally uploaded by plastictaxi.

I just did a little time check on my last week and realized that I spend an average of about 30 minutes a day re-learning to do things.

Things like how to make and keep a schedule, to communicate, to pay bills. Some of it is unavoidable -- the phone bill was getting silly so after some research I think we have found a way to cut it almost in half. But even that involved learning a new way to make phone calls. And that's the thing about this kind of re-learning: it's not recovering from having forgotten something, it's having to cope with the yearly reinvention of how people do business these days.

So if I spend half an hour today learning a bit about online document sharing, or some new feature on google, that's half an hour I could have been working or reading or writing or doing whatever it is people with free time do. And tomorrow it will be some bookeeping tips, and next week it will be spreadsheets, and after that some other computer-generated whizthing that replaces the old pen-and-paper ways.

I feel like an old man everytime I rant about the techno-treadmill -- but did people a century ago lose as much of their lives to keeping up with all these little techniques for minor increases to efficiency? If I wasn't having so much fun I'd go back to an analog life in a minute. If I can remember how.

# posted by trev @ 4:33 p.m.