Archaic Office Tools: The Rolodex & Business Cards

My company is in the process of moving offices, so I am in the process of cleaning up and packing my space.  Today, I am considering the Rolodex that has been sitting in a dusty corner of my office for the past few years.  It's full of business cards from former and current associates, as well as the business cards that the person that had this office before me had collected.  It's a veritable museum of people in my industry from the last ten years. 

As much as I like the idea of keeping these cards neatly filed in the Rolodex, it's an archaic way to keep up with contacts.  I have my Outlook contact list, and several spreadsheets full of contact information along with multiple contact lists saved on company shared space on the internet and on network drives.

So, do I need my Rolodex?  No, of course not.  But...I want it.  It's like the office equivalent of a photo album.  Most of us still have business cards, and I feel like I need a place to put the ones I collect.  I don't know what to do with them other than put them in the Rolodex.  On the one hand, the Rolodex is completely outdated, but on the other, it has a function as long was we have business cards.  Which begs the question of why, exactly, we all still have business cards.

I have no doubt that the business card is quickly becoming a thing of the past.  Nothing so far, however, seems to have presented itself as the "killer app" for this particular business prop.  Sure, we can trade contact information and record it in our smartphones, but nothing is quite the same as a physical record of your presence, complete with a logo, your title, and all of your contact information.  It's quite low-tech, but it's convenient for the giver and the recipient...until the recipient gets home and has no way of filing the information.

I'm curious as to what other people do with the business cards they collect.  Does anyone have a good filing system?  Does anyone manage to go completely business card free?  If you have a great idea for this, please let me know - I don't want to cart the Rolodex with me to the new office!

Hitting the Reset Button

Since I've started on this part time school endeavor, I have realized that I have a lot more time than I thought. I spend a lot of it watching television and sleeping, but I also spend a lot of time at work and at school. Somewhere in there I also study, clean house, commute, socialize, and brush my teeth.

I have had the last three weeks off of school, and I've taken some vacation time from work.  In true blogger fashion, I am still in my pajamas as I type this.  In a couple of hours I will go to the gym, and then I will probably start on a way too involved dinner to take up the rest of the afternoon.  School starts back up on Monday, and so does work.  The goal is to be bored enough by Sunday night that I will return to both of those endeavors with zeal.

Of course, I am thinking about work.  Not really enough that I'm going to check my emails quite yet, but enough that I'm already trying to plan out the most effective use of my time on Monday.  I will also have to get started on my homework before then, but school almost seems like a pleasure when compared to playing catch up on all of the email that has inevitably clogged my inbox. 

I keep reminding myself it will be there when I get back.  Work is always there.  The only way to stay sane is to step away for awhile, and maybe sleep till noon.

What, Exactly, Are You Trying To Do?

I work with many different types of clients (my clients are television stations, but these ideas apply everywhere).  The most illuminating realization I've had in the past six years is that many of my clients don't have end goals.  They have no idea what the big picture, long term goal is.  They may have little goals here and there or numbers to meet, but they've never thought about where they want their business to be in a year, five years or ten years.  They've not thought about what they want next month.  How, then, am I supposed to be successful for them?  If my clients do not have an end goal in mind, what am I suppose to help them acheive?

It is way too easy to get bogged down in the day to day and lose track of what's important if you haven't set your sights somewhere out of the trenches. 

It seems to me that if you're trying to grow your business (and who isn't?  This is capitalism afterall.), you have to have benchmarks.  The benchmarks act as a roadmap to your end goal.  It is imperative that everyone in the organization needs to be informed of these end goals.  Then, with the sights clearly set, everyone involved can help the corporation move in the right direction.  The mini-goals can come from the inside, but the big idea has to come from the top down. 

I am starting to wonder how rampant this lack of vision is.  What other industries are plagued with a lack of clear goals?  How many other people are out there, just like me, working their butts off to meet moving targets...or no targets? 

Dream Studying

When I was first learning how to touch type, I used to fall asleep, imagining typing out words.  In my dreams at that time, I was almost always using a typewriter (image link for those of you who have never used one).  And yes, I learned how to type on a typewriter even though it was the late 90s.  It was still Kentucky, afterall. 

The same thing happened when I was learning Spanish.  I would fall asleep conjugating verbs and parts of my dreams would be in Spanish.  In fact, many of my dreams were in Spanish that was more fluent than what I was capable of in my waking hours.  (I guess in some dreams I can fly, too.  Being fluent in Spanish is sort of lame by comparison.)  When I was taking computer science, I used to dream about binary code and programming language, kind of like I was living in the Matrix.

I don't know why it came as a surprise last night that I was dreaming about accounting.  I was dreaming in T-accounts and debits and credits.  If only this dream was an indicator of how I was going to do on the final exam, I would feel good.  Instead, I just feel kind of annoyed.  I spent the entire weekend studying and now the subject is horning in on my sleep time.

At least I know my brain is working.  So often when I'm learning a new subject, I have to learn by brute force for a few weeks before I actually start absorbing and synthesizing the information.  I can't really be alone in that, but the first few classes are always tough because it's all just words or equations until the light bulb blinks on. 

Am I the only person that dreams in Spanish, T-accounts, programming languages and typing?  Surely not.  Does your mind let you know it's working while you sleep with weird dreams? 

What's Next?

I am almost finished with my first quarter of school.  I have had the pleasure of meeting quite a few very interesting people in the last few months.  Over the course of that time, I have spoken to most of them about what they do for work at the present time, but I have had very few conversations about what my peers are going to be doing once they are finished with school.

I've been thinking about why that is, and I realized that most of the time I ask "what do you do," or "where do you work," and the conversation goes in that direction.  I think I should be asking "what do you WANT to do," or "where do you WANT to work" to have better conversations with my classmates.  The times I have remembered to ask those questions, I have had much better dialogues.  After all, a person's dreams are much more revealing than their current situation.  The janitor that dreams of being a pilot is going to have more to say than the janitor that dreams of his next coffee break, just like the student that has dreams of being a CEO is going to be more interesting than the student who dreams of taking a nap.


What's next, then?  What do you want to be doing?