- Apr 2024
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archive.org archive.org
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[Narrator]: The Cluttered Desk, Index Card,file folders, the in-out basket, the calculator.These are the tools of the office professional's past.Since the dawn of the computer age, better machines have always meant bigger and more powerful.But the software could not accommodate the needs of office professionals who are responsiblefor the look, shape and feel of tomorrow.
In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer age, Apple Inc. in promotional film entitled "Lisa Soul Of A New Machine" touted their new computer, a 16-bit dual disk drive "personal office system", as something that would do away with "the cluttered desk, index cards, file folders, the in-out basket, [and] the calculator." (00:01)
Some of these things moved to the realm of the computer including the messy desk(top) now giving people two messy desks, a real one and a virtual one. The database-like structure of the card index also moved over, but the subjective index and its search power were substituted for a lower level concordance search.
30 years on, for most people, the value of the database idea behind the humble "index card" has long since disappeared and so it seems here as if it's "just" another piece of cluttery paper.
Appreciate the rosy framing of the juxtaposition of "past" and "future" jumping over the idea of the here and now which includes the thing they're selling, the Lisa computer. They're selling the idealized and unclear future even though it's really just today.
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- Jun 2023
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calnewport.com calnewport.com
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Setup a recurring Zoom meeting for set times every week where you guarantee to be present. As much as possible, when people send you an ambiguous request or initiate a conversation that will require a lot of back and forth, point them toward your office hours schedule and tell them to stop by next time they can to discuss. It’s a simple idea, but it can reduce the number of attention-snagging back-and-forth electronic messages in your professional life by an order of magnitude.
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- Mar 2023
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archive.org archive.org
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How to Run a War Chest Campaign. Rochester, N.Y.: Yawman & Erbe Mfg. Co., 1918. http://archive.org/details/howtorunwarchest00yawm.
Broadly a manual on how to do a big community fundraising effort. Emphasis on furniture and filing systems that could be purchased from the publisher of the piece.
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- Feb 2023
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Local file Local file
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Deutsch’s close friendJoseph Stolz, writing of the Chicago rabbi Bernard Felsenthal (1822–1908) who hadpenned a history of that city’s Jews and was instrumental in the 1892 formation of theAmerican Jewish Historical Society, noted that Felsenthal ‘was not the systematic orga-nizer who worked with a stenographer and card-index’ (Stolz, 1922: 259).
Great example of a historian implying the benefit of not only a card index, but of potentially how commonplace it was to not only have one, but to have stenographers or secretaries to help manage them.
Link this to the reference in Heyde about historians and others who were pushed to employ stenographers or copyists to keep their card indexes in order.
Given the cost of employing secretaries to manage our information, one of the affordances that computers might focus on as tools for thought is lowering the barrier for management and maintenance. If they can't make this easier/simpler, then what are they really doing beyond their shininess? Search is obviously important in this context.
What was the reference to employing one person full time to manage every 11 or 12 filing cabinets' worth of documents? Perhaps Duguid in the paper piece?
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- Sep 2020
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Goodley, S., & Halliday, J. (2020, September 18). Troubled test-and-trace system drafts in management consultants. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/18/troubled-covid-test-and-trace-programme-drafts-in-management-consultants
Tags
- turnaround time
- tracking
- strategy
- cost
- challenge
- testing
- management
- consultant
- COVID-19
- UK
- lang:en
- office role
- is:news
- test-and-trace
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