Work, organization and communication all come together when we collaborate with others.

Do our technology tools facilitate our efforts or complicate them? Propel us forward or hold us back? Enhance our effectiveness or stymie it?

It’s easy to get the thinking process backwards when it comes to what technology will help us best collaborate with others.

In this week’s discussion, Jorge and I turn the thinking around and and suggest that different expected outcomes require different methods of collaboration.

It therefore becomes counter-productive to begin with choosing a technology solution.

Confusing? Listen in.

Joining this series mid-stream? Catch up on the entire series here.

Do you find yourself sending an email, leaving a voicemail and texting your message just to make sure you get through?

With such a wide repertoire of communication options available today, we should be communicating more effectively, not less.

And yet.

How do you choose which communication method or technology to use for your various purposes?

In this week’s show, Jorge and I discuss whether we’ve got the cart in front of the horse when we assume the best way to communicate is always by using the latest technology.

Listen in.

Joining this series mid-stream? Catch up on the entire series here.

Are you buried underneath your own organizational system?

Do your categories, folders, tags, and lists confuse more than direct? When do all your organizational tools merely become your next mess?

Organizational software can become the next mess to tend. As if you didn’t have enough to do already.

When is it more work than help to add another tool to the tool chest?

The answer is different for each of us depending on our working styles, relative affinity for technology, and our specific practical needs.

Join Jorge Rosas and I as we discuss how to think about the interface between technology and getting organized.

Listen in.

Joining this series mid-stream? Catch up on the entire series here.

More features does not mean getting more done.

Do you spend more time writing your report or formatting it? More time using your software or learning how to use it?

The point is, you’re trying to get work done. You’re looking for tools that will help to that end.

Having all the features may or may not help get you there. And should those layers and layers of features, in fact, get in the way, then they have become your sabotaging enemy instead of your facilitating friend!

How do we think about what tools we need to best get our work done?

Listen in.

Joining this series mid-stream? Catch up on the entire series here.

Do you work for your tools or do they work for you?

Imagine a hammer and a saw telling a carpenter how to build a house. Silly image?

Not if the tools involved are your workplace technology.

More often than not, our computers, our telephones, our word processors and databases are dictating the terms by which we can access their benefits.

We become unwitting partners in this unfortunate role reversal by shopping for the latest, fastest, most versatile, most interconnected devices available. As if having the most features meant having the best tool.

Not so.

Join me and our special guest, Jorge Rosas, in a new series on Technology… When Less is More. Jorge is a passionate early adopter of all things tech, programmer, webmaster, musician, and producer of the Working Matters podcast.

We dare to suggest that you are the carpenter, and it is the house that you want to build that determines what tools will best serve you and not the other way around.

Technology… When Less is More
Week #1: Slave to Your Tools?
Week #2: Getting Work Done
Week #3: Getting Organized
Week #4: Communicating with Purpose
Week #5: Collaborating Effectively

Listen in.