Old Dog, New Tricks: the Work Edition

This time, I'm asking all of you in the post-60 club who are still working: How do you keep up with technology in the workplace? Share your secrets, please!

I'll tell you why I ask:

I was identified late in life as being a little ADD. Not bad enough that it was suggested I do anything about it, but just as an "oh, that's how you are" kind of a thing. Maybe that's why I like dogs: we both can....squirrel! Oh, where was I? Oh yeah, my point. My point is that we both can lose focus at the drop of a pin. Or the appearance of a squirrel or a bird, or because the wind shifts direction.

I was never particularly bothered by it. It's rumored that highly successful people often are. Bill Clinton, I've read, is on that spectrum. Aside from some bad personal decisions, being compared to the Clintons never struck me as a bad thing. Back in the Day, we called ourselves Multi-Taskers.

But modern technology is constantly taking that almost asset-like quality and twisting it into a maddening affliction by over-stimulating me. How many ways can someone reach out to me just at work? Let's see, let me count them:

1. Teams Chat
2. Teams Meeting
3. Teams Audio Call
4. GoToMeeting
5. Zoom
6. Slack
7. Our phone system - callers
8. Our phone system - chat
9. Our software's email system
10. My work email
11. Support tickets assigned to me

Some people from work have access to my personal information and will text or call me that way too - about work stuff. All those devices are on one or more laptops, my phone, and my watch. In one sense, it's excellent: people have a LOT of access to us, and if you love what you do, it's good to have a lot of convenient ways to access that work. But for someone like me, and at my age, to monitor and stay on top of all those pathways and not let balls drop is exhausting and pretty stressful. It's stressful because I'm not doing a great job of watching all the balls, and they are dropping. I can juggle a few balls, but eleven?!

One day a couple of weeks ago, it just so happened that so many people were using so many of those options to contact me that, as I described it later to someone as, "my brain broke." Someone without an attention deficit can probably channel the noise and deal with them one at a time in a neat, organized fashion. Still, for me, it's a flood of stimulus, and at some point, I found myself pushing back from my desk and standing up, just physically needing to be away from all of it or lose all sanity. I took the dog for a long walk to reset the senses and calm down. 

That's life in corporate America in this century: we are so wired in, we are literally in the Matrix.

In my twenties, the fact that people wanted a piece of me at all hours would've thrilled me because it would've made me feel important. I would've worked hard to master all the technology that confounds me now. But as I get older, it's harder to keep pace mentally with the fast-changing technology (ask the small group I work with how many times I've declared, "I hate Teams!")(ask the small group I work with how many times I've declared, "I hate Teams!"). The other thing my co-workers hear me say a lot is that the steel trap in my brain is awfully rusty. But, also, technology moves so quickly now that I don't know if it's particularly easy for anyone to keep pace with it.

Ironically, I work supporting my company's software. That's a hoot, right? But I get that package because I live and breathe it, and it fills my brain along with grands, dogs, hockey, and football. There's no room left for Outlook on the web (which I think sucks visually), Teams, Zoom, GotoMeeting, Sharepoint, Egnyte, Slack, Adobe, Canva, Grammarly, and so on. And I don't even use other tools that others on my little team use, such as Camtasia. Apparently, it takes a large village of software packages to raise a career these days.

And workers aren't given a lot of training on any of it. I don't think that's intentionally cruel - it's just that decision-makers are all younger and learned this stuff in college and assume it's all common knowledge. So it's sink or swim for those who've been out of college for a while. I typed my papers on a manual typewriter, so I am definitely in that boat. And since my competition is much younger, there's pressure to keep pace or be left in their dust. Fortunately, the best software packages they provide us are intuitive, but not all are or can be.

It's a long way to say something that is ultimately pretty simple: We're being encouraged to stay in the workforce longer, but the workforce tools we need to master and control to do that are challenging. I, for one, can use less tech in my life.