Alarm Clocks And Online Collaboration

Alarm Clocks And Online Collaboration Have you ever purchased a piece of equipment that you thought would come in very useful only to leave it lying around for months because you could not figure out how to set it up? Or not set all the functions up, because it would have taken hours to read through the handbook, which looked as if it had been translated by a machine anyway?

Most people have experienced the situation at some time or another. I had an alarm clock some time ago that had dozens of features like waking me up at different times on the weekend to during the week and randomly choosing a radio channel every day to wake me up. It also had a feature with which I could train it to recognize some voice commands, but I could not be bothered with all that.

I simply wanted it to wake me up whenever I set it. Video recorders are similar devices. How many times do you hear of people setting their video recorder to record a movie only to get a documentary on another channel? It used to happen a lot, didn't it?

The aspect that I am getting at here is that the designers of these machines have been told to put as many features as possible into them up to a price in order to be all things to all people. However, in making their equipment so convoluted, a great deal of people decide not to bother using them at all and will avoid that make in the future, which is the exact opposite of what the manufacturers wanted.

The next time you go out looking for some electronic gadget, you will say to yourself: "Oh, So-And-So, you need a diploma to use one by So-And-So. I'm not buying one of those".

So how can this affect you? Well, if you have to coordinate anything that you want others to take part in or be animated about, try not to make it excessively complicated.

I am not saying 'dumb-down', just don't show off by putting all the bells and whistles on it simply to show that you can do that. People will not thank you for it, they will take no notice of your project.

This has a lot of implications for on line projects where individuals can be hundreds of miles apart but still be working together on a joint project from home. Open source programming is a fine example of this type of work. The team leaders should keep everything as simple as possible if they want the maximum co-operation.

One way that you can use to test to see if your project is being understood is to ask. It sounds obvious and it should be, but a lot of team leaders will not ask because they think that it makes them look weak and unknowledgable. Again, in fact, the opposite is the case. A good team leader is not a despot; a good team leader is a good organizer and is considerate.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a variety of topics, but is now concerned with team building activity ideas. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Small Team Building Activities