January 14, 2005, 1:17 PM — I have a Windows laptop PC on my lap at the moment. Its battery pack is slowly warming up and it will soon become uncomfortably hot in the vicinity of my right knee. It is a small price to pay for portability. After all, keeping Drive C whizzing around and the processor cool consumes power which generates heat which has to go somewhere.
Ah, yes, good old drive C. A venerable institution in the PC world. What emotions are evinced when you think about drive C? For me, a four letter word suggests itself. A heartfelt, loudly vocalized four letter word:
MINE
Drive C is mine, mine I say!. My drive C is mine and mine alone. Who owns your Drive C? You do. Who controls where files go? You do. Who dictates what folder structure is used? You do. Can everybody else just get lost if they think that can influence the layout and housekeeping of your drive C? Absolutely.
Let us try another drive letter now. Drive H. Have you got one of those? It might not actually be H. It might be F or Z. The drive I am looking for is the one named after your original departmental server when you first networked some PCs together. It was probably running Novell Netware. Do you remember the day when it dawned on you that your "personal" computer now had a drive letter that was not yours but 'ours'?
Amazing things happen in the transition from drive C to drive H. At a technical level, all sorts of wonderful trickery goes on to fool your machine into thinking it has sprouted a new hard disk. However, let us leave that stuff alone and look at an equally important thing that happens, not in your machine, but in your head.
Drive H is not yours. It is 'ours'. As a consequence, its structure, the names of its files, responsibilities for doing things to files, are shared within a group of people. This shift from 'mine' to 'ours' has an incredible housekeeping effect. Drive H is a shared space and as such, we need to play by social rules in our use of it or face rebuke - possibly public rebuke - from our peers.
The result is that Drive Hs the world over are in much better shape than Drive Cs. Tidy directory structure. No files called keepmefornow.doc. No temporary files spraygunned all over the root directory. Nothing surprising there really. However, what I find surprising is that I have successfully used this Drive-C-to-Drive-H psychological effect to help keep my own work in better shape than it would normally be.
In software development land, the psychological equivalent of Drive H is called source code control. In my case, a system known as CVS[1]. At the moment, I am the sole developer on an internal skunkworks project. It could just as easily live completely within the confines of my local computer - on Drive C. Instead, I have put it into a shared space under CVS. Nobody else is looking. Nobody else is working on the files therein. However, thanks to CVS, my mind is subconsciously operating as if they are. CVS is a public space and I have to behave myself. True, I have slightly more work to do to work with the files that I would have if I squirreled them away on drive C but all things considered, the benefits easily outweigh the costs.
Of course a number of other things just drop out of the shift from 'mine' to 'ours'. which is nice. I get centralized backup (woo hoo!) and should Gall's 15th Axiom[2] dictate that my skunkworks project spread its wings to a bigger audience, I'm all set.
The moral of the story? Use human psychology to your advantage. Exploit the peer pressure effects of the Drive-C-to-Drive-H phenomenon - even for one person projects and even if the person you are 'fooling' is you.
