How much in technology is augmenting me versus being a digital vampire? How much is one tool or another improving my life vs. taking time and control away?

I’m now about 21 months into having short-term memory problems. I had some kind of a memory degradation when I had a long surgery in early 2018. I began to realize that my best ability to multitask was shredded.

I also tend to work alone or in big complex organizations. As a result, I was jumping between tasks and tools. I was jumping between frantically trying manage my own life while working with other organizations’ project and time mamagement systems. Even in the same organization, I was working in many different tool systems. Each tool has a different assumption about how I interface with it, where are you interface with it, and what it does with my time and memory.

My husband of 33 years claims that I dont have memory problems: I am just now like most people.  That is probably true.

As a result of the shift, I’ve been doing a digital clean up and regeneration. I’ve been trying to build, rebuild, and understand tools, not just the ones that are jammed it me or popular in the press. I’m rethinking tools and looking under the hood about how this one may augment myself or how much that one is a drain on myself.

On another level, I’m looking at how I could intentionally augment myself.

This is awkward work, on purpose.  We are in such a world of abstraction that we are exciting onto tools in our lives that may just be kind of sucks that have really great tools just suck our attention.

More fun to follow…

Past Tidbits and Explorations

Listening Harder to Me from 2009 and 2011

Happy New Year! I am filtering and sorting the past 3 years of my life in big piles this am. My family is putting up with piles of folders and papers, along with a big cup of coffee, on a portable desk and around my sofa while I watch the 2nd playing of the Rose...

Visually Mapping Your Social Self

In older days, I would Google myself to see how I surfaced.  That's not just an ego thing -- I found many strange things attributed to me.  I research myself, or at least my professional reach. In current days, there are tools that help me "research myself" using...

Pixelating Reality from SXSW Interactive 2014

We enjoyed sharing insights at SXSW Interactive 2014 on this question -- How is smartphone use pixelating reality, blowing it up and turning it into shiftable bits of data so we are making different decisions with its Time and Place? We are in a massive change in...

Recorded Webinar: Drinking from the Digital Data Fire Hose

[Edited April 27, 2014] We happily shared some of our work at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) OCIO Learning Session on April 17, 2014 both at their Auditorium in Washington DC and via a live Webinar, which you can as a recording below.  It was...