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Get out of my way tech!!

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Not to digress too much, but I decided to compare my life wihout my laptop for a week and replace it with my iPod touch and paper and pen. The results were stagerring. By not having to carry that extra 5 lbs, my life was already improved. Next not having to wait 5 min for a bootup was awesome. Maybe it is my ADDness but my productivity went up by 300%! So instead of trying to read my powepoints and PDF assigments onscreen I printed them out ahead of time. I was able to grasp the material faster and was able to make comments on the sides. I felt less interrupted and less overwhelmed with the paper. Also the iPod touch provided me with great email, streaming music, facebook, news, and blog posting thanks to all the fast apps. The battery life was awesome. I had to discover why..
1) humans are inherently non-multitaskers, we use context switching to believe we are at stress expense.
2) technology that just works and gets out of your way makes the experience empowering

I started to think of tech that was life enhancing or enjoyable because they don't get in your way of your goal.

iPod
iPhone
Kindle
Game consoles and gameboys
TiVo and media center
DVD and blueray players
Google search
Old macs
Old Amiga computers

Things that do get in your way:
Windows desktop
Windows mobile
Unix/Linux
Smartphones

Anyhow tech should enhance and complement your life and not waste or stress it!
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Comments

  1. ETdoFreshFebruary 22, 2010 at 1:31 AM

    The thing about Windows is just it's multifunctioned, "multi-goal"ed you may say. It sucks that it has a bootup time, but once it's up (and if you have a fast enough machine), you can do all the above without having to stop, and turn on something else. I agree everything else does their one task well and perhaps better than Windows, but when you want to do them all at once, there's no replacement for just sitting at a fast desktop and getting it all done at once.

    I'm not saying it's perfect, because I can envision a product that should do all this, and be small, portable, fast, and last forever... but I don't have the money to develop such things.

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