The 21 worst tech habits [PCWORLD]

[Cloq]

The 21 worst tech habits ...

My Favorite:

10. One account, multiple users

[mouser]

Good list 

[TaoPhoenix]

I dunno, I kinda disagree with the Printing thing. I print a series of the most important emails with detailed info going on especially to use as checklists and bringing with me to meetings. (See the GTD thread - the unmentioned half of my Notebook of Doom) is email threads which quite often end up stapled into a series with other items such as matching return receipt green postal slips etc.

So that one is more of a "cut down" thing for me, rather than "why on earth would you ever" from the article.

[Edvard]

Tao, I'm in full agreement.  Physical copies have a number of advantages that have already been re-hashed elsewhere.  Otherwise, I'm clear by the list. 

[40hz]

17.  Texting at the table

Yes. Yes. A thousand times YES!.

In my little circle of tech support people, there's one person who no longer gets invited out for dinner/discussions because of her incessant texting.

Few things are more annoying than to be discussing something only to see someone's eyes constantly flicking to their Blackberry. It's almost as annoying as when this person reads a message and giggles right before saying, "I'm sorry. What were you just saying?" Something which happens about every third message.

She insists she's no longer invited because she's a woman. We know she's no longer invited because we're all fed up with her and her Blackberry. (BTW: there are two other women in our regular group, so I don't think gender has anything to do with who still gets invited.)

[Stoic Joker]

I dunno, I kinda disagree with the Printing thing. I print a series of the most important emails with detailed info going on especially to use as checklists and bringing with me to meetings. (See the GTD thread - the unmentioned half of my Notebook of Doom) is email threads which quite often end up stapled into a series with other items such as matching return receipt green postal slips etc.

So that one is more of a "cut down" thing for me, rather than "why on earth would you ever" from the article.

There used to be a problem here with people romping into my office with a printed Email and a question. The problem went away awhile back when I got feed up with it and decided to react "honestly" to this behavior a few times... ...Now they get forwarded with a question attached (which is typically "is this spam"..). That (I believe) is the problem group to which the article refers.

Your situation is different. But I've run across that type of need before. However to mitigate my general distain for hard copy I'll usually either paste together multiple key point emails into a single sheet. Or if the context is critical hit reply to an Email so it can be edited and add notes in a different font color so it's easy to see who said what, and then print it to a PDF and/or save the email as file in the project/client folder. The last bit is particularly handy for documenting license keys since nobody ever seems to be able to find "the box" 4 years later when their system explodes.

[d2x2]

hit reply to an Email so it can be edited and add notes in a different font color so it's easy to see who said what

You have just described the worst thing I can think of. After two replies and two edits, you now have three colours and nobody is able to tell what is going on - and the colours look disgusting too. Oh and no date/time either. I absolutely hate that.

Having said that, if you can agree with others on the way to work then it's a good start.

[miva2]

another one: Writing a long, well-structured, relevant post and then deciding not to post it.

Good I don't do most of them
Rebooting (or shutting down completely) my laptop more often is something I should remember. Too often I just let it in sleep mode while plugged in. (even up to a week!)

[Giampy]

22: replying to a message without deleting the useless quoted text.

Reply by reply, after some replies the message gets enormous and we must scroll an endless quoted text to reach the answer at the bottom: "Yes".

[TaoPhoenix]

another one: Writing a long, well-structured, relevant post and then deciding not to post it.

Good I don't do most of them

The few times I came close to doing that, a flag goes off in my mind that if I'm writing something "long, well structured, and relevant to something", chances are I'll want to post it eventually, so I have saved some of those as "unsent drafts" that I later fold, spindle, and mutilate into other posts.

P.S. I'll give Paul Keith a cupcake for being in my top 10 list of people who consistently write long, well structured, relevant posts!