This Christmas Take a Break from the High Speed of the Internet

I remember my Dad, sitting at the kitchen table with a pencil, columnar pad, cranking an adding machine. He literally spent days calculating prices for all the varied products his company sold.

When I was older, we’d visit automotive trade shows stateside 2 or 3 times a year; if you wanted to import new products, that’s where you’d find them. We’d walk up and down the aisles for hours, looking and talking with manufacturers.

To make a deal, there was the obligatory dinner/drinking session after the show with the new vendor; that’s how it was done in those days. Back in Toronto, contracts would be dictated, typed, checked by the lawyer, and mailed back and forth 2 or 3 times.

The whole process could take one or two months.

Nowadays that collapses into hours or days; everything about anything is on the Internet; docs are emailed back and forth at lightning speeds; spreadsheets do in seconds what once took my Dad hours.

Everything has become so damn efficient.

We’ve all become busy people living with high velocity changes. Sure, new challenges and opportunities abound; it’s also a lot easier to crash speeding down the wrong path.

Almost everybody has a phone with a camera; this USA Today article is a timely reminder that the Internet is forever; and so are images posted from your office Christmas party!

This holiday season, take care, count your blessings, spend some quality time with family…and turn off your email, smart phones and iPads for a couple of days.

Merry Christmas