data hoarder

A Data Hoarder vaccination against TED Talks

by Jason on November 28, 2011 · 0 comments

University of Michigan Card Catalog by David Fulmer

TED Talks have been around a while.  The current intro video says there’s something like 900 available online.  I can’t say for certain which one I watched first, but I was an early adopter, subscribing to the podcast feed, and so on.  In recent years, I fell away from them, mostly because (and I realize how much I let others drive my decisions here, but it was expedient) I kept hearing people at work talk about them, but their lives never seemed to change as a result.

Lately we’ve been tuning back into them, having cut cable and needing something to fill some gaps in the day (and the Apple TV makes it easy) and I’ve noticed something interesting about TED talks.  Two things, really.

The first is that some of them contain Really Interesting Information that I can use to shape my future actions.

The second is that the bastards put dates at the beginning of them.

As an admitted data hoarder who also, by his own admission, had a chance to watch all of these much earlier than, say, right now, this is crushing at first.  To watch a video that’s been online for 2, 3, or even 5 years now, and see a nugget of wisdom that could change the next day, week, or even lifetime of my business, well, that hurts a little.

Like I should have stopped goofing off training and implementing to watch one more thing.

And the key, well, one of them, is that the information might not have meant as much as it did right now if I hadn’t watched it with the set of experience and problems that I have facing me right now.

The other key is to remember that the entire extent of human knowledge has been available long before the advent of the modern internet.  If you’re a data hoarder, there’s a good chance you’ve visited a library in the past (insert large number) years, so let me remind you that the sheer physicality of it all reminded you pretty quickly that there’s a ton of knowledge out there that you’ll never ever get to, ready or not, and any pretense of simply trying to keep up with the “new stuff” is a pipe dream and, keeping with key #1, a distraction.

Hey, data hoarder: you’re going to find information that you need that was available well before you found it. That’s OK. You found it, and the real test is what you do with it now.

Photo by dfulmer

Data hoarders: mentally “quirky” or just a different generation?

by Jason on September 2, 2011 · 6 comments

I don’t like the TV show Hoarders, mostly because I don’t find it very uplifting and suspect the appeal is to make the viewers feel better about their own messes, because, you know, they’re not so bad.  But there’s another reason, and I spot it every time I look at my desktop full of files and multiple “toread,” “towatch,” and “review” folders.

My name is Jason, and I’m a data hoarder.

I used to make myself feel better by calling myself a completionist.  I need to collect, and consume the whole set, no matter what the current level of relevance is.  I’m the guy who watched the last season of Prison Break (though I was always hoping the next setup would be to break out of “the prison of credit card debt.”) I relentlessly download instructional videos that I don’t have time to watch right now, even if it takes me almost the running time of the clip to figure out how to grab it. I sign up for membership sites that release regular content, and I download that too, and I remain a member, even though the backlog could keep me busy for at least three years.

And there are gems in there, but a lot of it could have been skipped without adversely impacting my life.  I’ve come to accept it as a part of who I am, but today I had a hint as to the why, and maybe I’m not alone: here’s an excerpt from Seth Godin’s post today:

Back home, missing a TV show was out of the question. If you didn’t see this episode of Mannix or Batman, it was likely you’d never get a chance, ever again. And so we came to treat incoming data as precious. A lost email was a calamity. Reading everything in your RSS feed was essential. What if I miss something? A new generation, one that grew up with a data surplus, is coming along. To this cohort, it’s no big deal to miss a tweet or ten, to delete a blog from your reader or to not return a text or even a voice mail.

So now I feel a little bit better, but there’s still a problem: I need to communicate to this new generation, and there’s going to be a lot more of them as the years go on, so I need to get inside their heads a bit more and a little outside of my comfort zone (while I hold on to most of my core beliefs with the rationalization that lots of my audience is my age or older.)

Baby steps. I’m starting to follow more people on Twitter now in the hopes that the stream will overwhelm me and I’ll have to (gasp!) skip stuff.  And I have a new mentor in the form of my toddler son, who I’m sure will show me a lot of new ways to do things as the years go on (uh, that’s a happy side-benefit, not a driving factor for fatherhood, ha.)

Photo by puuikibeach