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How Productivity Habits Reduced the Impact of Theft … Twice

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Lodewijk van de Broek of the How to Be an Original blog.

In the past two months my laptop has been stolen twice. The first time someone broke into my car and the second time was four weeks later when someone invaded our home. That second time they took the entire bag I take to work, with the laptop, my PDA, some paper files and notebooks.

According to the police the two incidents are most likely not related, since the home invasion appeared to be a quick one. We are only missing some “quick grabs”. But it sure does shake your world!

My family and I learned many lessons from these two events, and my employer too (as they were company laptops). But what struck me in both events was how minor the damage was as far as data loss was concerned, both digital and analog. This was largely due to productivity habits I have adopted in the last year.

No data on laptops
A year ago I wasn’t all that organized at all. I used to clutter my laptop’s desktop with temporary files, and store all kinds of documents on the local hard drive. This is an annoying habit, because there are all kinds of places to search if you happen to look for a specific file.

I changed this to be more productive. I adopted the habit of not having any unique data on my laptop, whenever possible. I moved all document to the company servers (see this equivalent for home users), give or take a file that’s a work in progress, and I mean that literally! And I adopted a habit of keeping it like that.

This habit has saved me a lot of time on a day to day basis. But it saved me massive amounts of work when my laptop got stolen. Imagine the consequences:

I would have lost a great deal of non-recoverable work
I would not have known what I would have missed exactly
I would have been searching for files that might or might not have been on that laptop for many months to come
Possibly company critical information might have been on the streets

Synchronize electronic devices
This may sound stupid, but if you have unique data on your PDA or other electronic device: synchronize or back-up often! I didn’t do this often until several months ago. This was both due to simple laziness and due to technology challenges (two-way synch horror).

I changed this for my (private) appointments and my contacts only months ago. But I had just started using my PDA for my GTD-system when it got stolen. That one was local…so all data was lost. And I can start over again.

Carry only what you need
In quite the same manner as I cluttered my laptop, I also cluttered my workspace. I had many backlogs, and I often took a lot of paper home, so I could work from home. I didn’t need all of it, but I knew that the specific piece of information I needed was somewhere in that pile.

This too has changed in the past year. I set up an archiving system according to the Getting Things Done guidelines and worked my way through my backlogs. Now whenever I wanted to bring stuff home, I would just lift that specific folder from the archive and take it home.

When my bag was stolen, it happened to have no folders in it. Nevertheless this habit saved me a lot of the same troubles as described above, because I probably would’ve had a large pile in there otherwise.

With the new habit I would have known exactly what folders I was missing. It wouldn’t get them back, but at least I would know what I was missing.

Skills are more important than notes
I did carry two notebooks around too. One was with the notes of my training to be a certified NLP Practitioner and one was the Inspiration File with ideas for my blog. They were both on paper only, so they really got lost. Losing the notes only a week before the certification wasn’t convenient (to say the least)!

What I learned from losing both notebooks is that the skills are way more important than the actual books. I didn’t need the notes to be a good NLP Practitioner, and I didn’t need my Inspiration File for inspiration. Losing them affirmed me in my skills, but it was darn inconvenient nevertheless!

Imagine your bag being stolen right now
Adopting productivity habits has brought me more than I had imagined. They save me a bundle of time in day to day life and they saved a lot of time and annoyances in the case of the theft. Twice. In a month.

So if Leo hasn’t convinced you yet on the benefits of productivity habits, add a possible theft to the equation. Just take a look at the bag you carry to work right now. And imagine what the impact would be if it got stolen. The impact might be a lot bigger than you expect!

For more from Lodewijk van de Broek, check out his blog, How to Be an Original, or subscribe to his feed.

If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us or on Digg. I’d appreciate it. :)

How Productivity Habits Reduced the Impact of Theft … Twice

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Lodewijk van de Broek of the How to Be an Original blog.

This habit has saved me a lot of time on a day to day basis. But it saved me massive amounts of work when my laptop got stolen. Imagine the consequences:

I would have lost a great deal of non-recoverable work
I would not have known what I would have missed exactly
I would have been searching for files that might or might not have been on that laptop for many months to come
Possibly company critical information might have been on the streets

With the new habit I would have known exactly what folders I was missing. It wouldn’t get them back, but at least I would know what I was missing.

For more from Lodewijk van de Broek, check out his blog, How to Be an Original, or subscribe to his feed.

If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us or on Digg. I’d appreciate it. :)

Posted on 29 January 2008 in Productivity & Organization |
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Comments (23)

Leo Says:

January 29th, 2008, 21:23 pm

Just wanted to emphasize to everyone that this is a guest post, not written by me.

Also wanted to thank Lodewijk for the excellent post!

Israel Says:

January 29th, 2008, 21:31 pm

either way, it’s good. i liked it and am now RSSing his site. thx.

John-Michael Oswalt Says:

January 29th, 2008, 21:34 pm

Great Post. I am a student and had my car broken into twice right around Christmas. First with my gifts I bought, then with gifts received. But I did learn a great deal about what I really need, and what I don’t. I always sync my data to a flash drive or portable hard drive and keep it in a separate place.

My favorite point that you make is skills are more important than notes. As a student, it has taken me 4 years to learn this, but with a job on my horizon based on my skills and not on my major, I can agree that the most valuable things cannot be stolen.

Alan Says:

January 29th, 2008, 23:45 pm

To the post’s author (or anyone who can answer this question): why were you studying for NLP certification? I’ve heard of Neuro-linguistic programming (and I just wikipedia’d it) but I still don’t really get it - what is the point of it? I under it’s about controlling frames of conversation somewhat subtly?

I’d appreciate it if you could elaborate a bit on it.

Thanks,
Alan

Iris Gross Says:

January 29th, 2008, 23:50 pm

Maybe he was studying NLP because he wanted to? What a question! Why do you study what YOU study?!

Sonia Simone Says:

January 30th, 2008, 0:49 am

These are great points, thanks to both Leo for hosting it and Lodewijk for writing it.

I love hosting information on the Web. Highrise, Backpack, Delicious, etc. are wonderful inventions.

Lodewijkvdb Says:

January 30th, 2008, 1:09 am

First of all, thanks for the opportunity Leo!

@Israel:
Thanks! And thanks for the stumble and digg too!

@John-Michael Oswalt:
There’s so much that can’t be stolen. I realized that too when this all happened, and at the same time it makes you quite aware of how precious some things are. If they would’ve stolen the bag with our video camera, they would’ve taken almost all video material of the first year of my son (who is now 15 months old). That would’ve hurt!

@Alan:
It’s a bit off topic, but I started studying NLP because I’m interested in the interaction between communication patterns and thought patterns. My initial goal was to learn about this so I wouldn’t be an obstacle to myself by using language that would hinder me one way or another.

NLP is a set of techniques that have to do with communication and thoughts. There are subtle techniques and language patterns, but there are also strategies to work on problems. A lot of those strategies are based on very successful people, one of my favorites is the (Walt) Disney strategy which is used for creative processes.

What I like about it is that it makes you very aware of the language you use and the impact it has. And I like that it’s result oriented instead of problem oriented, everything you do is focused towards a solution.

banji Says:

January 30th, 2008, 1:14 am

I actually suffer the same thing when I accidentally format the wrong partition. Silly me.. All my years of data disappear just like that.

The keyword has always been “backup”. And I know from own experience that backup’ing and organizing your life’s work and data is almost as tiresome as it sounds. But… there really are no other way around it.

I bet the first thing a person who lost a laptop think is what datas were lost, not the price of the laptop. right?

LessonInLife.com

Eugene (Editor, Varsity Blah) Says:

January 30th, 2008, 1:57 am

Backing up regularly is crucial. I learned that the hard way after having my phone stolen and taking a quasi-eternity to get my contacts back!

Charles Says:

January 30th, 2008, 3:50 am

Just wish I had a laptop to carry with me wherever I go. When I get one, I will know some things I was not aware of before,

Thanks,

Charles

elizabethb Says:

January 30th, 2008, 6:02 am

This is so true. I had my wallet and mobile stolen from me at the weekend (I’m still waiting for replacement cards, SIM cards etc).

I had a pretty good idea of the cards that were in my wallet and had Card Protection insurance so I could ring one number (at 2 in the morning!!) and cancel the lot. Another productivity tip maybe.

I’m not so far along in the simplification/productivity game so I still lost some stuff on my mobile. Fortunately, when I upgraded to a new mobile last year I transferred the numbers off the old phone to my computer so I still had MOST of my numbers on my computer. But I hadn’t updated the records in about a year so there are still about a dozen numbers that I reckon I need to find again.

The big regret though is that my phone also contained many photos and some video footage that I hadn’t copied to my computer - I was always going to but never got round to it. As a result all my holiday snaps from last year have gone along with many photos of my baby niece and video footage of her first Xmas. Those are a particularly sad loss because those moments will never come round again.

Tim Says:

January 30th, 2008, 9:37 am

@Leo and Lodewijkvdb
Thanks a lot for this post guys.

It’s a good reminder of priority for making habit to backup valuable data. I know about GTD a few years but I can’t tell that I have good backup/archiving habit…

And also I’d like to express some regret that such things as theft still happen in our world.

Tim
http://gtd-tools.com

Dot Hage Says:

January 30th, 2008, 12:18 pm

Thanks for the interesting post. That’s an unforeseen benefit of keeping it simple, and motivation for me to simplify more than I have managed to do so far. My sympathies, Lodewijk, on two scary and invasive experiences.

On the positive side, last year I lost my PDA and was devastated. It was my “everything,” and even though everything was backed up on my PC, not all of it was accessible without the PDA’s software.

A few days later, I got a phone call from a stranger, who told me that he had found my PDA on top of a box in Magruder’s supermarket. Since I know I would never set my PDA on a box, I think it must have fallen out of my pocket and been picked up by someone and put on the box. Which means that not one, but two people were honest enough not to steal it, and in less than two weeks, I had it back unharmed. One of them had gone to the effort of taking it home, searching it for my identity, calling me about it, and being home for me to pick it up.

I think it helps to remember the good people when the bad people have invaded our lives. Best wishes to you, Lodewijk, and I hope this never happens again.

Al at 7P Says:

January 30th, 2008, 15:07 pm

Hi Lodewijk - congrats on not losing data (and not a lot of money since it was not your own personal laptop).

Regarding skill vs notes, I would also extend that advice for passwords. I don’t turn on the “Save Password” option for that reason, and I’d feel vulnerable if my laptop was stolen with passwords automatically stored.

Charlie Says:

January 30th, 2008, 15:40 pm

This is an interesting perspective, Leo. It’s cool to show the less thought-of benefits of productivity in a way like this.
cheers!
Charlie

Chaz’s Notes
Personal development for the modern age
http://ich4z.blogspot.com

Anon Says:

January 30th, 2008, 16:53 pm

Nice post. Two secrets for laptop work: backup and TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt allows you to keep data on your laptop but encrypt it and so worry less if it is stolen. Unless the theif works for the NSA! :-)

Mark Dowling Says:

January 30th, 2008, 19:01 pm

Totally agree with Anon - Truecrypt is an awesome tool. And the NSA would struggle to crack a Truecrypt container. If you do need to have work data on your laptop, it’s a solid way to keep it safe.

Jenny Cook Says:

January 30th, 2008, 20:08 pm

This is so true. I work for a small company (only 5 of us) and we got 3 laptops stolen recently one evening. This could have had a massive impact on us as a business as we don’t have PCs, just our laptops.
Luckily we work remotely on the server and never keep anything local. We all worked from home for a day and the new laptops arrived the day after. No data was lost and we were able to work in exactly the same way from home or from our new laptops with no adapting required.
All very good stuff!
Jen

Umm Layth Says:

January 30th, 2008, 20:26 pm

This is very true. We’ve had a laptop stolen, a computer that crashed, cell phone that broke, etc. etc. and we’ve never really been smart about it. I’m going to start putting important stuff that I save on my computer into my email account and anything that I may need soon into some cd or flash drive. I’ll also be saving my recently added contacts into my phone book (which I rarely use now) and my email, just in case.

You’ve hit an important point. Thank you for the reminder.

Alan Says:

January 30th, 2008, 21:26 pm

@Iris Gross

No need for hostility. This is ZEN habits after all :)

I was just curious, as I’d heard about NLP and figured that maybe Lodewijk could explain it a bit. I know it was just tangentially mentioned, but I’m interested in social dynamics and was hoping the author could shed a bit of light on the subject of NLP.

@Lodewijk

Thanks for the response. A few months ago I read something about it the concept and it seemed a bit vague; so thanks for clearing that up. I appreciate it.

Nathan Bowers Says:

January 31st, 2008, 5:35 am

Its funny, several of my favorite blogs have been talking about data loss recently and I had just posted a guide to backing up your data on my blog. Maybe we all got the same batch of bad hard drives (or there’s a crime spree).

A basic backup strategy entails: 1) bootable backups to save time 2) an offsite backup in case of fire 3) bus-powered external hard drives to declutter your wire situation and 4) backing up has to be painless for you to stick with it.

Anne-Marie Says:

January 31st, 2008, 14:10 pm

I just got my car broken into and purse stolen a few weeks ago; thankfully, they didn’t get my iPhone or laptop (thank goodness) but I lost my inspiration paper notebook.

Like you, I keep a notebook with all my random scribblings during meetings and I felt the loss of that notebook very acutely - most with feelings of “What good ideas were in there that I am not acting on now?”

If I had been following a better back up system with my paper notebook, I would have been saved some stress.

Thanks for such a great reminder about the importance of backing up and maintaining productivity and filing habits.

Darryl Heron Says:

February 5th, 2008, 11:08 am

It is good to see a post like this from time to time to remind us about some of the things that we should be doing. I had a problem with some software that was pushed on us at work, this gave me a nice blue screen and I left my notebook witha colleague so that the help desk could arrange a session to look at it and hopefully retrive my data. It was stolen right from locked cupboards at work, I was surpirsed to find out that about 1 notebook a week is reported stoen at work. Something to keep in mind.