Cynosura

I thought computers were going to make things easier

Or the meanderings of an overworked manager in the pub after work

I was reminded the other day of the bad old days – or were they the good old days.

When I first started work back then, the workplace had wonderful things called secretaries – mine was called Eileen. You could give her several scrappy pieces of paper or ‘dictate’ a letter and lo and behold a short time later back would come a neatly typed letter or memo ready for posting.

When it came to writing a report the opportunities for lots of drafting and redrafting were limited. So I would think about what I intended to put in to the report, put together a checklist and an outline, get clearance (‘buy-in’ in today’s language) and then write the report. Every item was carefully thought through and its relevance to the report assessed. Because it was going to be typed on a typewriter (by Eileen who could get into a right old strop if she had to retype it too many times!) I was sparing with the language I used.

Not so today. No longer do I have the benefit of someone who could understand what I wanted and put it into coherent words. There was, of course, a time when I had a secretary called Sharon as well as my own computer. That was a tricky time because when I asked her to type something she would ask me why I couldn’t do it myself!

But today I do have the benefit of being able to draft and redraft, sending multiple drafts to everyone involved, getting feedback, making amendments, adding words, taking words out, adding tables, graphics, statistics and pictures galore.

I even get the opportunity to reconcile the demands of my work colleagues when one makes one suggestion and another makes a completely different suggestion. Then I can spend lots of time in diplomatic discussions about what to put in and what to leave out.

In short, reports are longer, take longer to complete, take up a lot more time of a lot more people, contain huge amounts of irrelevant material (because it was there and it made the report look bigger and therefore more important and authoritative) and often remain unread.

Now, I can’t guarantee that every one of my pre-computer age reports were read, but I know a large number were because I used to get a lot of feedback. Today, just as often as not, they are sent off and disappear into a black hole.

I am just as guilty. With my very smart computer I can open the email, download the report, glance over it and save it in a file ready to read later when I have more time.

The trouble is that I am so busy reading the drafts of reports of other people and finding impressive graphics and statistics to pack into my reports, as well as having to type them myself, that I have no time to read the reports I am sent. And even when I do get around to reading those reports, more often than not I can’t the folder in which they were so carefully saved.

So I don’t bother, and nobody ever seems to come back to me to ask why I haven’t commented on their report. It seems that sending the report was enough in itself.

The moral of this story is that we may have more tools with which to communicate, but are we communicating any better, or are we just generating more work for little return.