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General discussion

Productive work environments...

Feb 25, 2006 1:31AM PST

Discussion is locked

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changes in expectations
Feb 25, 2006 2:55AM PST

I hope it's okay to post this here. I wanted to comment on what Tom said about how email and IMs interrupt work, etc., and it seemed to fit here better than starting a new thread.

I'm a stay at home mom and have been since before email became a common form of communication, but I did observe something interesting in the time that I was working. When I started (I worked in a publishing firm with lots of deadlines) most people didn't have fax machines. So, we'd complete a job (meaning we'd have a set of pages for the customer to look at -- they'd generally make changes, send them back, we'd fix them, they'd finally approve it and then we'd print it) and we'd have to overnight it to the customer to get their approval. Each set of changes required another overnight unless the changes were minimal and could be dictated over the phone. But often the customer wanted to see the change before signing off, so it would still mean we'd have to overnight the page to them one last time. Then, fax machines became available and suddenly we had the ability to send the changes within minutes.

So, follow me here. Before fax machines, a job could take a couple of weeks, depending on how many times the customer made changes, how long it took going back and forth. After fax machines, though, they suddenly wanted everything right away. It was like, overnight almost, they forgot that we'd previously had to wait for an overnight parcel to be sent to them, and now they couldn't wait half an hour, let alone half a day or two weeks! We could get changes approved so much more quickly, but instead of relaxing and enjoying that extra time, we forced ourselves to hurry up more and made ourselves even more stressed.

There's my observation. Can anyone else relate?

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A great example
Feb 25, 2006 3:13PM PST

Technology does speed things up, like your turnaround time, but then humans mess it up.

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another example
Feb 27, 2006 12:10AM PST

Maybe this is different in a big office with lots of computers, but sometimes I think I spend all the time my computer saves me, maintaining and fixing it. Is it just because I have kids? My oldest can now help fix, though his solution usually makes his brother, and sometimes even his father, very angry (they don't like it that he knows more than them so they assume he somehow caused the problem).