Monday, December 21, 2009

Why Work Is Toast

The barren wasted land is not visited much these days. Blogging itself may be dying, at least blogging by the likes of me, ones who can't write beyond 4 sentences. I've been tweeting a lot of late though, both as mithunk and as ProjectOffguard. It's easier, 140 words, bam, you're done and out of there...no wait, what does that last tweet say? oh, this is so funny, I have to retweet it, bam, done, out...wait I've got another 140 characters to say...and now ProjectOffguard has an update to give...hello little birdy. So, it goes on, killing time, killing productivity, being so wonderfully 1960's. Facebook's pretty much the same the only difference is, on Twitter, more often than not, you end up airing your view or the news or some such thing that's good when aired (old shoes included), whereas on Facebook you let the world know that you just grew virtual soyabean, made a killing selling it and are now the Capo of the dreaded Backstreet Mafia. You also tag photos, stalk old flames, 'like' someone else's soya crop and organise raids on the nearby grocery stores owned by rival mafia gangs. 'Oi, babbo, hand over all the freshly cut lettuce without a word...cosa nostra'.
There are other ways to bleed your work time as well. The usual suspects are chat on Gmail and Facebook. These two more than others because the chat lists will be full of people who are glued to Gmail and Facebook and ergo waiting to kill time. Stumbleupon is another one, click, click, click...oooh this page is so cool, let me tweet and facebook this, done, click, click.
Now, if you start thinking that the web is the devil and must be put behind the thickest firewall possible then slow down a little button, there are productive productivity killers as well, Google Reader for one. I got hooked onto it pretty late, the whole process of searching for feed urls and then subscribing to feeds used to put me off. Google Reader solved that problem, they gave me simple search and then they gave me 'Bundles'. So, now my reader has topics as diverse as 'Culture' and 'Web 2.0' and there are always a 1000+ unread articles. An IBM ad says that we produce as much information in a day as is available in all the libraries of the United States, well, it seems all of that information is also funnelled through to my Google Reader. You still expect me to work?? By the way, now you know why I blogged last sometime in May.

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