My purpose in this post is to help you think through the answer to whether technology is holding you back. It is an important assessment for you to make, one that can impact your career, and how well you do in life.
So, let’s get into it.
The past week or so I have been thinking about the following:
- Warren Buffet does not use (or have) a cell phone. [This is according to an interview of him I saw a few months ago.]
- A Chief Operating Officer of a large organization, a good friend of mine, did not use a personal computer until about 2 years ago, and now uses it a bit for email.
So we have two examples of very successful men who have not used personal technology to become successful. Does that mean technology plays no part in their lives? No, of course not. They have people who work for them who are technology gurus and who use technology to generate performance indicators, trend charts, and to manage problem identification and corrective action systems, and so on. What Mr. Buffet and Randy have done is to effectively use the key time management principle of “delegate to people who can do the job for you.” Of course, they also employed the sound management principle of having good systems in place. They can both go home at night and not worry about whether someone needs to call them to make a decision.
But, the question does arise: can technology hold you back? Would these men be less successful if they used personal technology in their success equations?
Well, I doubt that these two individuals would be less successful. But, I can sure tell you of cases where people have gotten mired down in personal technology, to their detriment.
For instance, one gentleman emailed me a while back to ask a few questions about implementing GTD and Covey’s methods. His questions centered around the technology he was using. As we carried on the conversation, I learned that he spends hours trying to get “just the right icons” in his PIM on his PDA, so that everything “would look just right.” And I wondered to myself if his PIM would be good enough to help ever recover those hours he wasted (I did mention this to him and I think it may have helped him move on).
Now I am not making fun of him. To the contrary, this is the sort of trap that technology can get anyone to fall into. I’ve certainly done my share of wasting time trying to prettify my PIM (or too many hours tweaking some PowerPoint presentation).
It’s this kind of thing that can hold you back, by getting you more wrapped up in the technology than in getting real value out of the technology.
An Area Where We Can Use Technology Less
Another area where technology gets us to waste time, instead of saving time, is by getting us caught up in information overload. Technology makes information so readily available that it is easy to use it to take in “too much information.” For example, we start out with a feed reader that has a few feeds in it to the few blogs that we like the most. A month later, we have added a dozen or so more blogs. Then, another dozen. Before you know it, you are spending hours reading your feeds. And why? Probably 80% of them are just different versions of the same story.
And then there are things like Twitter, where you keep adding on people to follow. Again, you start out with a few friends. Then, you decide it would be neat to follow someone like Robert Scoble, who tweets a lot (at least he did … I think he has slowed down a bit). And, then you add others who are “prolific tweeters,” and before you know it, you could spend half your day reading the tweets of people you are following. (By the way, I am not trying to make fun of Scoble: I love the guy. But he is very prolific. Too prolific for me. But he is a great guy with a good mind and good heart, and we can all learn a lot from him.)
Now that you are wasting time with feeds and Twitter, add in FaceBook and its private mail system, and your other five sources of email, and wham: time-saving technology is now causing you to waste a lot of your valuable time.
If you do have too many feeds, there are ways to reduce the number of your feeds without worrying about missing good information. For example, SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin, a really smart dude with lots of great articles, had a good article recently listing the sites he visits regularly, and some of those are “aggregator sites. Those sites do the rummaging and filtering for you, and list just the top stories. The ones he listed are
I also have Scoble’s Shared Google Reader Items in my feeds, as he goes through hundreds of sites and finds stories of interest. (The link for Robert’s feeds is on his blog’s sidebar.) I probably have more feeds than the average person, because part of my job is to stay informed on what is “going on out there,” so I can find good information for you. But, I also work to keep the list manageable … it is very easy to wind up with too many feeds.
Some final thoughts I have on information overload:
- It’s not as if we are overloaded with valuable information: we are often overloaded with useless information.
- It could well be that being overloaded with useless information causes us to be underloaded with valuable information.
Of course, if we are victims of this latter point, then technology truly is holding us back.
An Area Where We Can Use Technology More
One of the areas where technology can help us is in automating tasks. This is an area where I personally need to improve. I have virtually no automated tasks set up on my iMac or on this website. If you are good at using technology to automate any of your activities, I would personally like to hear from you and I suspect a lot of our readers would, too.
Wrap Up
My intention has been to get you thinking about the role of technology in your life. Is it hurting you more than it is helping you? What steps have you taken to ensure technology serves you instead of you serving it? Maybe you have learned some lessons you can share with us.
I’d like to thank Thomas Hall for being a great “sounding board” on this topic. He and I were chatting over the weekend, I mentioned this topic, and he reminded me about the information overload piece.