Heavy Duty Learning

It seems that life is now ... and perhaps, forevermore? ... to have a heavy-duty learning curve. A really heavy-duty learning curve! The past week I made no wonderful new photographs, nor even spent time post-processing images on the computer. Yet it was fast, furious, and exhausting.

For the past several years I've been learning about our Brave New World in the Digital Age, but it seemed more in the theoretical of how one speeds up things than the practical details. It has seemed there were always more details to work on. Now I'm getting a much better picture of how to vastly speed up the doing of what I do, in the particulars of actually doing it. And I am so relieved.

So much of the "instruction" or help (and that is not a good word to use around me right now ;) ) seems to consist of glorious statements of what all you can accomplish with this blog reader and that newsfeeder and this gizmo and that plug-in for Photoshop and that app for face-book. And my, you can make links to all kinds of people if you twitter!

Ok, so, what do I do next? I go to the next page on the help file ... and am told of other glorious things I can do with this gizmo, NOT ONCE do they actually say here's the step-by-step process! So, when we invoke the start-up procedure, we find easy-to-follow steps in clear English, right?

Naw, couldn't be so lucky. We find ... gibberish. Truncated statements. Oddly used or phrased verbiage. Options that don't seem to do anything, or if blindly chosen, do something very different than what it seems like the verbiage suggests. And a "help" system written by the same dolt who wrote the pages about all the glorious things you ... theoretically ... could do with the gizmo. If somebody actually would ever say how!

But this week, I actually have been able to read, view, and digest several highly informative instruction sets on ... DOING ... something! The details of how to accomplish what the software is designed to do! Amazing, how this little bit of real help turns one's outlook around. Just amazing.

So we are now in the implementation stage of delightful new tools and tasks. In ways that should both streamline my work and allow me to do more to and with my images and words than I have been, and in less time. Ta-Da!