I wonder if I’m the only dinosaur that sees the dark side of gadgetry. I fully admit to being enthralled with my iPhone and I love the incredible power of the internet to provide information and access worldwide. I surely don’t want to have to return to making phone calls from gas stations and restaurants during my business day travels. I like not having to remember a hundred phone numbers. Using e-mail instead of snail mail for documents and correspondence has saved me a lot of postage, time and file cabinet space.
But along with these undeniably positive boons come the price of connectedness and the time needed to maintain multiple umbilical cords. The attachment can be subtle and addictive. For example, I left the house on my bike yesterday to run an errand. I stood at the front door for a minute or two debating whether to leave my cell phone at home. It was both exhilarating and risky to not have my worldwide connector with me. It felt almost like hiking into an unfamiliar forest without water or a warm jacket.
I know many people who have multiple e-mail addresses, two cell phones (one for work and one for personal), a home phone, and possibly a home fax line. I have consolidated my pipes into one congruent flow so that all my e-mail, from multiple sources, goes to one location, and I have only one phone number. I do have to spend a fair amount of time each day filing correspondence in the right location for future reference, and deleting voice messages and emails. I probably save much more than I need to.
My phone is an integrated device, so it reduces the number of gadgets I need from many to one: phone, calendar, weather, stock quotes, geographic locator, map, internet, contact list, e-mail, music, movies, reference books, camera, video clip recorder, notes, voice recorder, games and lots of extra applications if I wanted to get really addicted. I expect my iPhone will give foot massages next year. Then my addiction will be irreversible.
Now we have the social networking and the associated business term, “social media”. Undeniably these cross-pollination methods on the internet and mobile devices are becoming pervasively used by millions. I know a person who is using two match-making websites, Facebook, MySpace, LinkdIn, Plaxo and her own website. She spends up to two hours a day managing her multiple sites and their content, not counting the e-mails that are connected to those activities. One can presume that the value from such associations is still dependent upon the nature of the offering and the presence or absence of demand for products and services. So there is a certain amount of luck involved in the “success” of the connections made. Maybe it’s mostly luck. All I know is that I can’t join every networking medium I’m invited to because I can’t possibly keep up with the traffic.
The proliferation of these labor-slaving devices will necessarily reduce our true productivity unless their use is strictly disciplined. The twenty-first century equivalent of the water cooler has accelerated gold-bricking to an all-time high. (For you youngsters out there, “gold-bricking” is the conscious, active effort to be lazy while appearing to be productive. The term originates from the con artist applying a gold coating to a brick of base metal.)
All you have to do to make your own judgment as to whether our high-technology devices and applications are a net gain or loss is to eavesdrop on cell phone calls, see what people are working on so seriously on their laptops and track what they’re really doing in the office at midnight. The appearance of productivity is phenomenal, however. We all look extremely busy and important. The serious frown on our face helps the image as well, ensuring that we are not approached by anyone who might ask us for help in some task.
So if you want to take an honest look at your own use of gadgetry and whether it is making you more or less productive, I’d suggest you start with a time log of what you spend your gadget time doing. There are two categories to track. The first category relates to economically contributory activities: giving information to someone else so they can continue to work, including decisions they are waiting on; getting information from someone else so you can continue your own work; problem-solving exchanges where ideas for solutions are shared; learning about something that will directly affect your ability to work, keeping track of appointments so that you don’t miss commitments and can plan your work hours; using tools to ensure you are where you need to be when you need to be there (maps, travel arrangements, directions); producing actual work product; conducting transactions related to how you earn your living or take care of your family or household.
The second category is everything else: listening to music, posting to your Facebook site, responding to your network of friends, maintaining your systems and tools, deleting spam, web browsing just for the hell of it, looking at the slide file of inspirational photos sent by your cousin, passing along the chain letter that will make you wealthy, playing Spider solitaire, reading and posting blogs (that have a readership of twelve), etc. I think we’ll find the average time spent will lean more heavily towards the second batch of activities.
We need to adopt the new technologies to help us as they can, of course. We have to be very careful we aren’t adopted by them.