A difficult part of technology instruction is not that things are unknowable, but that no one is ever starting at the beginning, not in 2024.
I was reading this post by my colleague Alex talking about digital decluttering. Like Alex, I can get stuck into a hyperfocus jag where I am doing nothing but cleaning up data and I enjoy it a lot. My email archives go back to… 1996 which was actually further back than I was expecting. I periodically archive my websites. I’ve had the good fortune to have suffered no major data losses other than a few months of pictures between backups once, before I got good at doing those regularly. I like doing digital tidying tasks.
Most people I see at the library for tech help are not like me. They don’t enjoy messing with tech just to mess with it. They’d like to spend less time fussing with technology and more time using it to do the things they want to do. But they feel stuck in a rut. They know they have “deferred maintenance” on their tech lives and are not sure how to start tackling the problem.
When I am helping someone with a computer issue, it often only takes me a few minutes of looking at their device to see if their problem is technological in nature or not. Sometimes people need help doing a thing, learning a task, or understanding a concept. I can help them with that and then they wander off and do okay on their own. Sometimes people have memory issues and we can talk about memory strategies: using password managers, making lists, setting reminders. Other times people are just disorganized, and this both is and is not a tech issue. Continue reading “be organized from the very beginning”