Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [54]
Induction: organizing the file system for the first time
Some users may find it difficult to set up the parent, project, and category folders described above, since their files are already disorganized. This calls for induction—organizing the file system for the first time—using a process similar to the inbox-induction method described in the “managing incoming e-mail” chapter.
These are the steps for file system induction:
Identify or create a parent folder, if one isn’t present already.
Create an “old” folder inside the parent folder. Include the current date, including the year, in the name. For example, if induction takes place on December 1, 2007, name the folder “old-120107”.
Find all project-related files and folders, wherever they sit in the file system, and drag them into the “old” folder. The parent folder should still be empty except for the “old” folder, which should contain all project-related files and folders in the file system. Thus the desktop should be empty, too. (If the e-mail program contains project-related e-mails, it’s the user’s choice whether to save them into the file system, too.) The “old” folder may be a real mess at this point, but that’s OK.
In the parent folder, create (empty) folders for all appropriate projects and categories. Create sub-folders inside those folders only if they’re necessary.
Open the “old” folder and drag any vitally important files into the project and category folders where they belong. Immediately rename those files with bit-literate file names. The majority of files may stay in the “old” folder, though. (It’s no worse than having them scattered across the file system, and it might take too much time to organize each and every file.) Later on you can always move more files from “old” into the right project folder, as you encounter them.
Once induction is complete, the file system is organized and ready to accept new files. The parent folder contains the right project and category folders, which in turn hold properly named files. The “old” folder guarantees that nothing was lost in the process, and the date in the folder name marks when the user took control of the file system and began working more productively.
Chapter 12: Other Essentials
The following are some other tools, skills, and guidelines that the bit-literate practitioner must know.
Touch typing
It’s easy to get excited about technology—the tools, the features, and all the possibilities they offer—and forget about the simplest, most basic things that help us the most. Typing is perhaps the best example of this. There are no celebrity typists, no magazine cover stories on typing, and no talks on typing at high-tech conferences. Yet many occupations today require typing—a lot of typing—all the time, all day, in nearly all applications. Typing speed can be one of the best predictors of a user’s overall productivity. For this reason my company gives a typing test to every potential hire, and we take it seriously if a candidate can’t touch type.
The keyboard is supremely important to bit-literate users because it’s their primary input device. The mouse, and everything it clicks, like hyperlinks and application icons, are all secondary; users must primarily know how to use the keyboard. And that means touch typing. It’s unacceptable for someone to have to look at the keyboard to remember where the keys are, or to use only 20% of one’s fingers—the “hunt and peck” method with two forefingers—when eight other perfectly healthy fingers are available. You might as well drive a sports car only in first gear because you’ve never bothered to learn how to change gears correctly. For physically able users, there is absolutely no excuse for not knowing how to touch type.
Sixty words per minute