Look around your office, if you have one.

I got an email from my wife the other day with a list of things that are disappearing form our daily lives.  Younger folks don’t miss them, they are already irrelevant to their lives.

As a good way to predict what your work life will be in a few years, look around your office (if you still have one) and try and think of the work as it was, or must have been like just three decades ago. (When the old grey haired guy down the hall started work here, or some simulation of what he or she might look like had they survived.)

The 1980 PM office

• Single line telephones with no speakerphones or wireless.
• No fax machines (They are already going extinct after only 25 years or so)
• Black chalk boards (if one at all) Maybe a cork tack board.
• A Rolodex (some of you won’t even know what that is)
• Carbon copies (then carbonless copies)
• Adding machines pretending to be “computers”
• Coat hooks.
• Book cases, with books.
• File cabinets with files rather than obsolete computing  junk.
• Real wood desks.
• Uncomfortable desk chairs.
• Pink phone message pads.
• Sticky pads (invented by 3M in the mid 1970’s)
• A real live receptionist.
• A typing pool.
• A hard square briefcase (not a messenger or laptop bag)
• A light table to overlay drawings and tracings.
• Green accountants tablets. (for writing not medicating).
• A mainframe computer that was slower than a pencil.
• Yellow pencils and erasers.
• Liquid-paper, white out in the white bottle with the black label.
• Copy machines almost as they are today, and I don’t know why?
• Maybe even a mimeograph machine.

Write down everything you see in and around your office, and try and figure out when and how it will become obsolete. Then invest in the replacement product companies.

My bets:

• Assigned offices, hell why even have a headquarters building.
• Desk top PC’s will be gone within 5 years replaced by netbooks, ipads, and/or thin client servers.
• Mice and keyboards of any kind.
• Remote controls, garage door openers and keys replaced by iphone type devices.
• The desk top telephone as you see it now. Why we have them is a mystery to me already!
• Paper, but we though that it would be gone a generation ago, but we make more now than ever. Paper must be in our souls.

This might be a good team building exercise next time you start a meeting!