Managing time and technology — an illusive search

Haven’t you sometimes gotten the unpleasant feeling of drowning in a sea of information and tech tools? Of applications and devices? Of enormous possibilities you can only seize and use a tiny fraction of?

There is little doubt that the biggest issue we are facing is the management of time and of technical resources. There’s no one to teach you how to do that, for the simple reason that no one has figured it out yet. Have you ever heard of a place, a school or college where you are taught how you can deal with social networking for instance? When you should do it, how much time you can allocate to it each day? Have you found the ideal way to manage your e-mail box? We’re all searching.

Technology gives you stunning tools and power with one hand and steals away your time with the other. Surrounded by lightning fast devices of all kinds, including of course the mobile ones, with all of them connected naturally, it makes you feel powerful and helpless at the same time.

Even the simplest tasks have turned into complex matters. Do you think the possibility of shooting a large number of pictures with a smartphone is a good thing? It is not necessarily. People take 100 photos of their kids’ birthday party because they can and because it does not cost a thing, but few pictures if any are good because most of the time they were shot, well, without any artistic mind-set. Besides, who has the time to review 100 shots and to keep say the 10 best, discarding the rest?

They tell you it’s a simple matter of common sense. However, the scope of technology today is such that you easily lose your common sense in it, assuming you had any in the first place.

There’s worse that lack of time. There’s constant multitasking, leaving you unable to focus on just one task so you can do it well and finish it. This kills quality work, creativity and the faculty to analyse things. This is particularly true with children who don’t have the experience or the maturity to realise, to understand what is happening to them.

There’s no methodology yet because the change is happening faster than any one can come up with a decent methodology. Go back in time only five or seven years, and compare the time you used to spend online back then and now. Frightening isn’t it?

There may be a few tips that could help — again, no real methodology or well-tested system, just simple tips.

“Set aside your own time as if it’s a meeting with someone else” is the wise advice of Jill Duffy, a writer with PC Magazine. Avoid, at any price, installing mobile applications that you do not absolutely need. Remember that you used to live perfectly happy without them.

I had a rather complex application installed on my smartphone and that I would use to tune my guitar. Of course the app does more than just tune guitars and comes with countless functions. Recently, however, it started to behave erratically and I had to contact the vendor again for technical support. Several e-mails were exchanged and finally the company asked me to uninstall, reinstall and pay them a nominal fee. I was so frustrated with the time wasted on this rather simple matter that I just uninstalled and decided to do without it. Instead I found on the web a 440 Hz tone signal (the reference frequency for the middle A note in music). That’s all I needed to tune my guitar. This example and common sense rule take us back to the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Apparently it was coined circa 1960 by some officer in the US navy.

Do not feel compelled to try out every single tech gadget, app, device or website that your friends “recommend”. This alone is a significant time-consuming activity and ends nowhere, in most cases. Wait till everyone is using it and has tested it well.

Google search certainly is the best thing that happened to all of us in the past 15 years or so. I am the first to admit it. This being said there are countless situations where searching the wrong way can take its toll on you in terms of time wasted. Even the basic search should be carried out smartly. Once you initiate the search don’t be distracted by ads and everything that is not relevant to your search. If you land on pages that are attractive but have nothing or little to do with your search close them quickly.

Teach your children to do one thing at a time. This is basic education. The web, tablets, smartphones and the like are like Ulysses’ sirens. You have to resist the attraction and to figure out how not to fall in the trap.