Save It! Good Workstation Practices

You know the feeling: “It Was Here Yesterday.” A deadline looms and you’re running out of time. You have to finish your work by 10:00 a.m. tomorrow before your boss leaves for the conference. You look up at the clock and see that it’s 5:00 p.m. If you don’t leave right now, you’ll miss your bus and your vet appointment. “Too much to do,” you think. With that, you lock your workstation and head out the door, promising to come in early tomorrow to finish up well before 10:00 a.m.

The next day you arrive and log in to your workstation. You see that none of your applications are open any longer – and you can’t remember if you saved your files. As you get that sinking feeling, you remember that DLT applies Windows Updates when necessary and you should have saved your files and closed out of applications before you left. Good thing you came in early!

Thanks to the auto-recover feature in Microsoft Office, I’ve never permanently lost anything that I needed, but I know it could happen if my computer restarts. Computers need to reboot for many reasons: Windows Updates, a power surge, your system crashes. You could lose work if it’s not saved. Additionally, if Eudora is open and your computer restarts, you risk a corrupt mailbox.

Good practice is to close Eudora, Meeting Maker, and all applications that aren’t in use at the end of each work day. It may even save you time in the long run. And when working on something, always remember: save early and save often.