The holiday period was a productive time for me. In the days right before Christmas, I cleaned my office and pitched so many old things that some of it pre-dated my arrival at Stone Belt by about a decade – and I am approaching 10 years there. The purge was complete enough that I was able to reclaim a bookshelf that I had in my office for use at home. That led to my holiday break activity of cleaning out and rearranging my “home office” so as to appear more organized than I really am. Having my books from the MBA program, the myriad of HR books, and other business titles I’ve acquired over the years makes for an impressive display and I hope that the knowledge contained within the tomes can be put to good use.
So, having accomplished the cleaning and organizing of the office and the home, I am now setting aside time to clean the mind. Now, it’s not necessarily my dirty mind (well, ok…) that needs work, but as I approach a milestone birthday, the memory banks are filling up and I want to find ways to better use the mind power I have left for purposes that are good and noble (or at least fulfilling). Since I love technology, I’m using tools like Evernote and Google Drive to record things that I might otherwise lose in a purge of the mental databank! I remember well the days when I would have numerous phone numbers memorized so that I could call my friends. Sadly, I know very few of my friend’s phone numbers anymore. Now, it’s as easy as pulling the number up on a cell phone and hitting the green button. While that’s good and quite convenient, part of me wonders if we are losing something valuable by cleaning out our minds of such information. What say you, is this a positive trend or should we grasp onto keeping as much in our mind as possible?
Hey, Brad! Slow getting back around to this, but I do something similar every year between Christmas/New Year’s when nobody else is really working. It’s my time to rejuvenate my work space and refresh for the year ahead.
As far as remembering things, I’ve learned that Googling is a learned skill (especially when it comes to Boolean), so I can usually find things others could not. However, when you’re sitting in front of the executive team and they need an answer, there’s no time for research or searching. In my experience I’ve steadily come to rely less on searching for answers over time.
As I learn more about our industry, my profession, and the work that I do, I’ve steadily weaned myself from research (though not entirely) and started leaning more on my own knowledge. It’s neat to see the transition over time, but I don’t know that we will ever truly go to either extreme again (all searching, no internal knowledge or internal knowledge, no searching).