Do you leave your computer on at night?
If you are like me, the first thing you do in the morning is sit down at the computer and check out the news, or your RSS feeds, or hit the Stumble Button a few times. Do you really want to wait 2 or 3 minutes while your computer starts up? If you are still with me, chances are you leave your computer running all night just so that it is ready to go for you in the morning.
Well, here is some food for thought:
Workers in the United States waste $2.8 billion every year by not turning off their PCs.
The good news is hibernate and sleep modes can drastically reduce power consumption while providing a good alternative to leaving the computer on.
You can read more about the effects of leaving your computer on overnight at ScientificAmerican.com
I leave mine (both my desktop & my servers) on all the time. The servers I guess aren't anything odd – they run all the time because they're needed all the time. My desktop, however, stays on for two reasons. First, it does things over night (like run backups) that would severely limit my use during the day. More important to me, though, is that it collects information.
If I turn my box off overnight, my RSS feeds stop collecting. I pull in ~500 news items each day, and ~250 "personal" items (most of which aren't really "personal" so much as "not for a specific client.") Most RSS feeds only feed out the last 10 (or sometimes, 20-25) items. If I turn my box off, I lose all but those 10 items, which can be upwards of 100 posts. I also miss communication: A lot of people like to "leave a message" via IM/Skype, & I respond when I'm back at my desk. With the exception of Skype, I think, when you're offline, you're offline.
I also lose social networking, like Twitter. It might be no big deal if I followed 10 people who tweeted twice a day, just to socialize, but with 175 followers, some of whom hit the hourly tweet limit on a regular basis, my timeline on the website literally stops after 2-3 hours – the "archive" just can't keep up with the volume. I'm getting business leads & gathering business intel, not to mention building relationships with clients & potential clients. I can't afford to miss what's being said.
It's all made even more important when you don't keep normal business hours. People love that office hours go until 1:30AM when they have a late-night emergency & don't have to wait for morning, but it does tend to mean that anything going on in the AM has to be collected & attended to later. I'd rather pay the extra electric bill than suffer the business consequences.