Category: quality improvement

The Fruits of Pain

July 15, 2008 by JurgenAppelo

I recently blogged about a little personal disaster that resulted in 100 gigabytes of data being wiped out from both my hard disk and my backup disk. Fortunately, I was able to recover most of the important data that I lost. And despite the panic of the moment I can say that I might even be better off now.

The situation after the catastrophe is better than the one before.

Reconstructing my data folders required me to rethink the folder hierarchy, to clean up old junk I never used, to improve file and folder naming, and to clearly separate vital data from convenient data. Before the crash my data storage situation was a bit messy. It wasn't bad, but it just wasn't good either. But after the catastrophe I spent a lot of time creating a situation that is now much better than before. So, why didn't I do all of that earlier? It would have saved me a lot of trouble.