Your Technology Should Meet Your Needs

When assessing your technology use, and its impact on your work/personal life, an important question, is your technology meeting your needs, or are you meeting the "needs" of your technology? Are you considering if your technology use is improving your life, your productivity, your relationships? Does it lead to greater writing productivity? Does it improve your writing? What are the costs and benefits?

It is easy to fetishize the new, the cool and the advanced, but its essential that you critically explore  their impact on your life, your work, your writing and your relationships.

Some self-reflection would serve you well. Take 15 minutes and do a freewrite about this issues.

I Do Not Text

When people tell me they will send me a text, I inform them I don't use that tool, and will not read or respond to them.  I just don't. Ever. Never. Yes, I seem as if I am from an other planet in such moments.

I do not wish to engage the world in that manner. If someone needs me immediately, they can call. However, I am not willing to be on call to 24/7, and text messaging connects us in ways that are far, far to intrusive for my tastes.  If you wish to write to me, send me an email, which encourages at least a moment of thought and reflection

Consider how quickly you respond when you hear your text messaging "go off." How often does it break your concentration, and thus make you work longer and harder? Is it helping you meet your personal and professional goals?

Choose what technologies you use carefully. Own them, or they will own you. Clients who carefully consider their technology use find small changes and be transformative. Simple changes can lead to huge gains in writing, work, and productivity with little loss.

That said, the actual nature of the tools we use define how we use them. Many technologies are designed to be addictive.

And text messaging?

A good article to read about text messaging, from a few years ago.

What would happen......

If you did not check your work email, or long onto social media, until after lunch?

The Smartphone Dystopia

Don't believe me--lowly social work professor--about the dangers of smartphones and other technologies that you use on a daily basis? No worries, how about the inventors and innovators who design these tools, once evangelists of their emancipatory qualities, and now, some of their most ardent critics?

Read this article by Paul Lewis, Our Minds Can be Hijacked: The Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia.  Hopefully, it strikes a bit of fear in you, or at least trepidation, about technologies that are deigned based-upon the latest research in biobehavioral psychology. This is a good place to explore the role that technology plays, and can play,  in the lives of writers and scholars.

Technology and Writing

Over the least couple of years, I have become increasingly aware of how important it is to help scholars figure out how their technology serves them, and how they serve their technology. I am going to write a few posts in the coming weeks about this work, and hopefully provide scholars some food-for-thought that might help their writing productivity, and enhance the quality of their lives.