GWD ... or On Becoming a Bedouin ...

I remember seeing for the first time "Lawrence of Arabia" and being awestruck by the desert and it's vast beauty ... equally striking was the Bedouin life where it seemed that all of life was carried and made into the next camp ... imagine also these memories being resurrected as I read this article today on the "New Bedouins" of the cyber frontier ... it struck home as today was another without computer and I am getting into the "GWD" mode (Getting Work Done) after suffering from paralysis and withdrawal ....

All of this was prompted by an inquiry and subsequent dialogue with a client that came into the picture through a web inquiry ... in my normal workflow I would reply by email, structure the situation on a mindmap, structure a proposal (collaborating with my partners on both) and then formally preparing a proposal for consideration ... this was GWD in my normal and previous computer aided life.

Fast forward now to this week as I have had to master the ability to GWD without basically having my trusted computer and files ... if you have followed this journey, you have seen how the recent surge in web based applications, especially the mind mapping genre, have been a boon to my ability to tackle a more or less normal GWD situation. Well, in this vein, I attacked this process with my present toolkit and wonders of wonders, it worked ... in fact, it worked almost too well ... the speed and simplicity of the web based applications take a lot of the extraneous dressing away from the task and allow an economical flow that allows for a different approach, but the same results ...

I took the email and defined the situation using MindMeister ... once I got the ideas down, I created a gif of the map and shared with my partners for comment ... once that was done and changes incorporated, it was a simple matter of exporting to a word file (rtf) which was the outline form of my map ... from there the work was flushed out in its final form to be presented to the client ... I would download or save to my desktop and use google docs for the word processing, so basically all I used to complete my flow was the browser ... all of my final work is saved on the net now and I will download later when I get my computer back ...

If anything good can be said about the situation, it is the lack of computer has caused a drastic rethink of the process of GWD ... I have now also started to question my need of computing power ... I will reflect on that aspect in the next installment ...