Nick Projects

If you have read many of my posts you may note a certain theme,  I like to digitize things that exist in non-digital forms.  The idea of using my phone to convert websites into audio or speek into a website and having it do my bidding, capturing perfectly good paper notes on a computer even storing reciepts as digital images are all examples of taking the “real world” and interacting with it in a different medium.  Since the real world already exists and more or less does it’s job fairly well,  this post will be to describe the advantages of digitizing things for people (like my wife) who don’t see the point.

For me being digital means one large thing,  escaping the confines of physical and geographical location.  Being digital allows you to easily store data and more importantly easily move data.  By keeping data in a sharable digital format it can be accessed and reproduced from pretty much anywhere.  This portability of information allows me to perform a variety of tasks from anywhere.  In my current career I am tethered to the office only by a phone and the other people that I work with.  I can easily move the phone home when I need to work in my home office and I am able to access my co-workers via email, instant message and chat rooms throughout the day.  The fact that I can keep most information in some digital format allows me to pick up work from home without missing any functionality.  The last corporation I worked for required dozens of pieces of paper.  The result was chaining people into traditional office working environments because there was no way to effectively move resources from work to home or back.

Digital media is also far more simple to organize.  While it is just as simple to have files buried in directories or drives that make them inaccessible,  there are tools that enable far more efficient searching.  Digital stickey notes can be searched for with a few mouse clicks while real sticky notes require tearing desks apart to find missing phone numbers.  Digital notes taken with a live scribe pen can be searched even when they are hand written,  while hunting through old notebooks on paper is a tedious task.  This ability to quickly access required data makes digital information far more efficient to use than “real world” data. For example I can rummage through a badly organized evernote database far more quickly than a filing cabinet to find a document I may have lost.  This quasi-organization is a huge benefit of digital information.

For all of these resons and…. because you can.  I will continue to follow this pursuit.

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