Here I am 10 days after arriving home, with two new computers, all the hardware anyone could need, and I STILL haven't gotten back to full productivity. As I wrote in the previous post, I am indeed mentally ready for full productivity, but my habits and processes have been so totally disrupted that I have not yet succeeded in returning to my former glory or effectiveness.
Good hardware is not enough. I already knew that, and honestly I produced much of my work on an iPad or iPhone, the computers were/are primarily key to finding and organizing my daily research. The computer crash I had (and while I was at it, I decided to replace my limping-along-three-year-old-desktop) led to me losing the software functionality I had with several key programs. It was a combination of things, developers not supporting the software any longer, my not protecting and organizing the application serial numbers, developers not answering my inquiries to regain those, not being able to restore the now-crashed-computer on the new one, etc, etc. Trust me, I am now paying attention to said details much more. Backups of data are NOT enough!
Having said that, the loss of these software programs exposes the weakness of my processes in my workflow. I am now in the middle of replacing/recreating said processes and it is very slow going. For a week I thought I was back in business, but then I discovered I was using bata software, and this discovery happened when the beta expired! Unfortunately I had been rebuilding the key RSS feeds for a whole week and now once again I lost them!
I could go on about the weaknesses of my process-rebuilding, but what I REALLY discovered throughout all of this, is that my daily habits are too dependent on external applications. This is not bad or evil in and of itself, but I need more redundancy. I need to have the same processes and same software on at least two machines at all times. I need to have a much higher level of continuity between devices. I need good habits that insure high levels of productivity even if I lose a peice of hardware (or two!) What changes do you need to make right now to protect your productivity? Trust me, data back up alone is not sufficient!
