Inter-Office Odyssey: Web/Tech

J.D. Biersdorfer, in his Technology Q&A column for the New York Times, offered information on Web sites that make it easier to send giant files - some of them free of charge. (E-mail accounts generally limit file attachment sizes to 5 or 10 MB, so if your file is larger you may have trouble sending the file or the recipient may have trouble receiving it.)

Here's his rundown on what's available:

Pando.com - Offers free and paid versions and works with both Mac and PC. You can send files up to a gigabyte in size free through Pando. The company also has paid plans starting at $5 a month to send even larger files.
YouSendIt.com - You can send files of up to 100 MB free with its YouSendIt Lite service — or files up to two gigabytes in size with the company’s $5-a-month service.

Another option is just to park the large file somewhere and let your recipient retrieve it. There are several free services for this:

These sites are also useful to store backup copies of presentations and documents you may need while traveling, especially if you are not bringing your own laptop.

The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.

The result, says Carl Honore, journalist and author of In Praise of Slowness, is a situation where the digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run more smoothly are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks accomplished.

Desperate for some quiet time to think, people are coming up with low-tech strategies to get away from all their technology. That has Microsoft and others taking note and looking for ways to create software that can be more adept at preventing interruptions.