To Plan or Not to Plan? Technology and its Effect on Planning
It's 4:30pm and you've got a 5:00pm deadline for an important project bid. Your palms start to sweat as you frantically format the Microsoft Word Doc and cautiously link the subheadings of the Table of Contents to their corresponding page.
Beads of moisture slide down your palm to the tips of your fingers and drip into the millimeter gaps between your computer keys as you finish up the Executive Summary.
But, like usual, 4:59pm rolls around, and you successfully send multiple e-mails and barely beat the five o'clock buzzer.
More than twenty years ago, a 5:00pm deadline would have meant 4:30pm or earlier. You had to plan ahead and conserve precious minutes to print, scan, or fax a document. The time it took to walk the project bid over to your boss' office and place it on his or her desk had to be carefully anticipated.
Nowadays, these tasks, along with the elaborate forethoughts of planning ahead, have been put on the back-burner in the business process and have since evaporated from our minds. And it's safe to say that without the Internet, and the technologies that connect to it, we would be living in a completely different world.
The Internet is responsible for the eradication of many other activities we used to consider critical. Think about the old fashioned way to plan a trip. At one time, we rummaged through our desk for our most colorful highlighter and dusted off our favorite road atlas, and we mapped out what we considered to be the greatest way to reach a destination.
We spent hours tracing roads, looking up the historical significance of this highway versus that, and devoted a great deal of time estimating distances while relying on the resilient "finger equals a hundred miles" estimation-method.
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