Face time versus internet time

I am struck more and more by the dichotomy between internet time and face time. Often, it’s very difficult to time-budget my own activities, because I don’t know which time class an activity is going to fall in to. Let me explain…

Internet time

Internet time is activity limited mainly by two or three things:

1. How fast I can punch a keyboard
2. How fast someone else database/shopping cart system works
3. How often cron jobs for propogating information are scheduled

Typically, most of my internet time is essentially instant. At most, a few second while a web page refreshes. Occasionally, a few minutes or slightly more while a database does it’s thing. And once in a while, something like propogating DNS changes around the network, sometimes taking as much as 24 hours. All of this is no big deal, assuming the website is not “down!”

Face time

Face time is dealing with people, anywhere in the food chain. This is really hard. For example, I can purchase a book or a cool tropical plant on the internet, and watch the billing information traverse the system. First the invoice in my email, then the charge against my bank account or credit card. Happens fast, minutes during business hours.

But that has little to do with when I will receive my purchase. Or even if I will receive my purchase. I have learned to limit such purchases to products that are not mission critical, and products inexpensive enough to write my time off. So if the product arrives, great! If not, whatever, it wasn’t expensive enough for me to care overmuch.

Reconciling

The problem comes when I have to operate within both time paradigms at once. I’m not sure how to reconcile this. I am sure it’s a key component to my perception of how continuous partial attention can interfere with my productivity.

Some techniques must be just better general management:

• Screening: take more care in developing mission critical relationships with people. Don’t try to rely on someone who doesn’t know (or doesn’t care) about my schedule.
• Screening internet services works the same way. Make a small mistake in registering a domain, and it could cost you hours of labor spread over a several days to fix it. Especially if you have to deal with technical support. Bummer if this was the domain name for your new company.
• Banking: it’s pretty easy to set up an account, maybe an hour or two tops. Managing the account could be considerably more involved. Closing an account… now this can take some time. My current example: I am trying to close one account in favor of another. However, I have never received the check (debit) card for the new account, despite actually visiting the branch to inquire. I was assured it was issued. Where is it? Until I get it, I am going to have to keep using the account I want to close. Which means the third account for handling all my automatic deductions has to be kept funded until I can get the debit card in place for switching transactions. In this case, there isn’t much I can do except keep going to the bank, signing in on the wait list, and waiting to speak to a customer service representative. The bank says the card was issued, case closed from their point of view.

Update: 1/31/2010: Working with Google Reader is stupendously asynchronous. From the best information I’ve been able to find, Google Reader only updates when it decides to update, and there nothing in the world you as a user of Google Reader can do to make Reader examine a feed when you want it examined. This is incredibly frustrating as a content producer when I need to check on my own work.

Here’s a few things to ponder:

• I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I’m far from stupid. If I’m having this kind of trouble, and the it turns out the “I’m doing it wrong,” what does that say about the Reader documentation? I’ve done a lot of poking around, and collected a dozen very high quality links (from the likes of Matt Cutts even), and I don’t see it.
• This seems to indicate a severe gap between the people that design/code Reader, versus people to create content that Reader access, versus the actual reader on the far end.
• Do the designers never want to update material? Do they even produce that much content, personally, where this issue is a problem?
• Are content producers satisfied with a regular spew of material, where older material is discounted, ignored, deprecated, and disregarded, just because it’s “old?”
• Are readers so passive that they’re content to mindlessly graze on what gets served up in a feed, assuming that new is better?

Am I completely out to lunch? Personally, I don’t think so, and here’s why: the rise of “blogging” has allowed far more people to “publish” but with much less technical expertise that hypertext allows. It’s like people just “blast” their crap from MS Word to the web. The turning into, essentially, an instant delivery mechanism for what we could just send to our printers.

This is turning into a rant and starting to digress. Will refactor and republish later.