Alarm Clocks And Online Collaboration

Have you ever bought a piece of equipment that you thought would come in very handy only to leave it lying around for months because you could not figure out how to set it up? Or not set all the functions up, because it would have cost hours to read through the handbook, which looked as if it had been translated by a computer anyway?

Most people have experienced the state of affairs at some time or another. I had an alarm clock some time ago that had dozens of functions like waking me up at diverse times on the weekend to during the week and arbitrarily choosing a radio channel every day to wake me up. It also had a feature with which I could train it to recognize some voice commands, but I could not be bothered with all that.

I just wanted it to wake me up whenever I set it. Video recorders are similar devices. How many times do you hear of people setting their video recorder to record a movie only to get a documentary on another channel? It used to occur a lot, didn’t it?

The aspect that I am getting at here is that the designers of these instruments have been told to put as many functions as possible into them up to a price in order to be all things to all people. However, in making their machines so convoluted, a great deal of people decide not to bother using them at all and will avoid that make in the future, which is the exact opposite of what the manufacturers intended.

The next time you go out looking for some electrical implement, you will say to yourself: “Oh, So-And-So, you need a diploma to use one by So-And-So. I’m not getting one of theirs”.

So how can this affect you? Well, if you have to coordinate anything that you expect others to take part in or be enthusiastic about, try not to make it overly complex. I am not saying ‘dumb-down’, just don’t show off by putting all the bells and whistles on it simply to show that you can do that. People will not be grateful to you for it, they will take no notice of your undertaking.

This has a great deal of implications for on line projects where individuals can be hundreds of miles apart but still be collaborating on a joint development from home. Open source programming is a good example of this type of work. The team leaders should keep everything as simple as possible if they want the utmost co-operation.

One way that you can use to check to see if your venture is being understood is to inquire. It sounds obvious and it should be, but a lot of team leaders will not ask because they think that it makes them look weak and unknowledgeable. Again, in fact, the opposite is the case. A good team leader is not a despot; a good team leader is a good organizer and is considerate.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a range of subjects, but is now involved with Bose alarm clocks. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Bose Digital Radio.

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.