Getting and keeping my Palm Pilot working has probably cost me more time than it has ever saved. This week I’ve spent about 4 hours tracking down a hotsync timeout problem (at least that’s what I think the latest cause is). Hotsync would bail out somewhere in the middle for no apparent reason. It’s working now but that may be simply because a cloud has covered the sun.
Technology does allow us to do many things we couldn’t have dreamed of. It doesn’t always save time though. We get deceived because setup/config is a block whereas all the savings are very small increments.
Last week I played with a group of people who were using a deck of cards to understand the benefits of sorting. Searching for a card randomly inserted in the pack took 5-18 seconds. Once sorted this was brought down to less than 5 seconds every time across 3 teams. But it took the teams 4 minutes to sort the cards. I asked if the benefit was there and the instant answer was ‘Yes, because we’ll do this over and over again’. Maybe not. What happens when somebody drops the pack of cards?