Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [35]
Where there is repetition, Total Recall can spot it and take some of the drudgery away. How many times do we fill in the same form with nearly the same information, or very similar forms? Already most Web browsers have some sort of autofill feature to help us fill in online forms, but this can go much further. I get a lot of e-mails from students applying for internships, and I respond to most of them with one of a handful of stock replies running the gamut from “Unfortunately we have no openings now” to “We would be delighted to consider you.” Software will soon arrive that will detect an e-mail as an application, dig into my e-mail history, and present me with a list of boilerplate options. Then replying to the current applicant is a breeze; it can be as quick as simply typing her name over the original name after the opening “Dear,” or it might involve typing in a de novo paragraph that’s specifically pertinent to her application.
Of course, boilerplate can easily go too far. Lawyers are already well down this road, where cut-and-paste is leading to a bloat in legal writing. I have hundreds of e-mails from attorney friends consisting of six words that were actually typed followed by a page of dire warnings and disclaimers. There will be misuse as with any technology, and that won’t help your reputation, but this branch of workplace technology has only begun to fulfill its enormous timesaving destiny. And to make certain employees look extremely productive.
In general, Total Recall in the workplace means we stop doing so much work for the computer and the computer does more work for us. The software is inexorably moving from simple searches of huge e-memory databases to tools that manage the information coming out of e-memory so that it is especially relevant to the task at hand. Not a filing cabinet, but a sort of personal assistant. For example, Bradley Rhodes of MIT and his colleagues developed the “Remembrance Agent,” an experimental piece of software that monitors your typing and reminds you of relevant e-mails or documents. If you are composing an e-mail and type “Project Anvil,” the agent will bring up e-mails and documents matching those words on the side of your screen, ready for you to click open. In the same vein, Xobni has software to assist you with your e-mail. When you select an e-mail, it shows you contact information about the person the e-mail is from, a list of your recent e-mails, and a list of files you have shared with each other. Software assistants put information at your fingertips before you even ask for it.
Beyond being more efficient at the workplace or worksite—wherever that may be—when you are asked professional questions, you will be able to give an answer based on fact, not blurry bio-memories. You will be more reliable.
I often receive “remember me?” e-mails followed by some set of “action items”—to which I draw a complete blank. There are scores of former colleagues and potential business partners from decades back who try to contact me every month. It’s not unreasonable, from their point of view, to expect me to remember them—many of them I worked with closely. Fortunately, about twenty years after leaving DEC, I was allowed to get my old files. They included eleven years’ worth of correspondence, including hundreds of e-mails (which we had used throughout the 1980s, more than a decade before e-mail went mainstream). Those old communications have proved invaluable for cuing recollection of people from my past. I’m sure these contacts now think of me as someone they can better rely on; first to remember them, and then to actually recall details of connections in our work history.
Sometimes I want to dig up peripheral people rather than someone already designated as a contact in my address book, and having everything saved usually makes this easy. I can search through old e-mails from a friend to find one that includes the name of his son. Or I may just search through everything I have