Redoing

There are many frustrations LINK TO GROSSMAN PSYCH/IYOV/FRUSTRATION that we face in life through many of our jobs and efforts in many areas.

Nonetheless, although it seems like a small one one of our major frustrations is redoing a document, spreadsheet or other computer project.

The computer is not perfect and there are times in which we do lose material. Material may be lost as a result of a virus, a power failure, a dumb mistake that we make, a software failure, a hardware failure, or any other of a number of things. When that happens we do lose material and anybody who hears about it is going to give you great advance with 20/20 hindsight: Too bad that you didn't have a backup.

Well, we all know that we should make backups and we should do it frequently, but the fact of the matter is that we don't.

Certainly if we're in the middle of a document we don't make up a backup. If we're sitting and working on it, we might have been working on it for three hours. We just saved it to our hard drive. If that document is lost, then it is rare to havge a backup.

Granted there are systems which can arrange for backup onto a diskette or a removeable drive even under such circumstances but this article is for the rest of us.

That frustration can be very real and it is sometimes difficult to sit down and to get back and to start the work again.

If it is creative material, rather than material which is copied from another source, then we may be worried that we will lose a lot of the information that we originally had and there is justification for this.

However, from past experience, please let me assure you that in most cases the document is better the second time around. The information is more clear in our minds, we know what we want to say, we've "rehearsed" the material in our mind before putting it on the computer and now when we do it it is more ready for prime time.

There is thus little reason to be upset about it beyond the fact that we lost those three hours of work.

Take a deep breath, pull yourself together, and before you have a chance to forget what it is that you wanted to say, sit down right now and redo the material. You'll be happy that you did.

Actually, I'm quite convinced that material is never really lost.

I'm convinced that it will all be waiting for us and it's all saved and we will be able to see it all very clearly after 120.

However, you probably want it now.