Dearest readers, I hope most of you are at least starting to shop for holiday gifts because time until Xmas is slowly running out (especially if you shop online and rely on holiday shipping with all of its seasonal delays). With all this shopping, your work, office parties, Xmas parties, New Year's Eve plans, family and friends you really hit the messaging apps hard. Whether it's your texting app, Telegram, Google Allo, Whatsapp, Kik or any of the other ones out there, you might find a significant issue pop up. If you use a laptop or desktop at home, and have a similar setup at work, you spend the majority of your work day on those; the amount of time you spend curled up on a sofa with your smartphone or tablet is short, and gets even shorter as you get older (partially due to hours spent at work). The significant issue, then, is that using your phone to message back and forth is severely disruptive to your work time and home time spent on a desktop or a laptop computer. I'd like to go over what disruptive means in this case, why and how it's bad for you, how web versions of messaging apps are making a comeback to solve this problem, and what this may mean for smartphones in general.
Using smartphones to actively communicate with family, friends, relatives, coworkers and others is increasingly disruptive as you are getting older and spending more time in front of a laptop or desktop computer at work and at home. At work, trying to perform tasks, meet deadlines and perform creative problem solving is very difficult when your attention is deviating towards your phone. There are many unanswered messages and you feel compelled to disrupt your workflow, focus and attention away from the computer. This kind of disruption- whether you reach for your phone or think about it a lot- decreases productivity, focus, job performance and ultimately affects your ability to achieve your professional and life goals in the shortest possible time frame. A pretty serious issue, isn't it? You're trying to get things done at work, or trying to relax and watch something on your laptop at home, yet every minute or more frequently than that you are stopping, turning away and responding to messages on your phone. If you think you can handle it, think of all the times when you burned out and decided to ghost on people who used to matter to you- just dropped them because it was becoming too much for you, managing all of this messaging. You lose people, you lose connections and you mess with your own life plans.
Smartphones are amazing, sure. However, they confuse the hell out of most of us in what they really are. The companies that make them usually advertise them as very powerful and convenient productivity, entertainment, media capture (photo, video) and communication devices. We've all seen the ads, we all know this to be true. Except, it's completely false. The truth is that smartphones are all that, but ONLY ON THE GO! The companies kept boosting screen sizes, internal specs, operating systems and so on to trick us into using them at home and at work for tasks in which they are totally inferior to proper laptops and desktops! They made tons of money off of it too, sending desktop and laptop sales into a downward spiral. They made us forget that if we own a computer and/or work on one, as soon as we are near it, using it makes us so much more productive versus using a smartphone that it's downright scary.
So, what has happened over the last few years, and especially the last 12 months or so, is that popular messaging apps have received their PC, web-based counterparts so you can finally message on your computer again without pulling yourself completely away from your work or home computer time every few seconds to check your messaging on a different, less productive device with a totally different ecosystem. Personally, I like to use Allo and Telegram on my computer and it has made me more focused, more productive and I feel less stress and anxiety than when I kept switching between two different devices every minute. Best of all, messages and their read statuses sync across my computer and all of my other devices, and notifications pop up everywhere at the same time (I can choose which device to mute too so there's not too much ringing and dinging haha). Now that Google Chrome has built-in notification pop-ups that work very well, it's very easy to turn off the annoying sounds everywhere, and just look for visual notifications if that's what you prefer.
Therefore, no matter how old you are, how busy you are, or how much you value productivity, understand this- the good old desktop and laptop are still kings of productivity and best multi-tools in the electronics world, and that's why they still exist and will continue to exist. Once you decide to drop your phone as soon as you get to work or to your home and do everything on your computer until you decide to relax on your bed and then get to sleep, you will soon realize a few important things. You only care about your phone in terms of what it can do quickly and effectively on the go, but you don't care about it replacing your home computer because it'll slow you down and mess you up. You will stop using many apps that don't have a computer version or counterpart unless you need them specifically on the go or they exist to perform tasks primarily on the go (e.g. Snapchat, Instagram). You will push yourself to do productivity and messaging on your computer and finish things faster, with more time left for you to spend doing other things away from screens. Finally, you are going to realize (if you haven't already), that most apps on the Android and iPhone app stores are either useless, or merely very poor versions of their computer counterparts; you may even begin to realize that the age of apps will come to an end sooner rather than later.
If there is one thing I'd like you to take away from this, dearest readers, is this- look at your home and work computers and start using them again the same way they were used before the rise of smartphones- to integrate tasks into one device, on one screen, designed in such a way to get things done, get them done fast, and get them done right. Thank me later ;)
Using smartphones to actively communicate with family, friends, relatives, coworkers and others is increasingly disruptive as you are getting older and spending more time in front of a laptop or desktop computer at work and at home. At work, trying to perform tasks, meet deadlines and perform creative problem solving is very difficult when your attention is deviating towards your phone. There are many unanswered messages and you feel compelled to disrupt your workflow, focus and attention away from the computer. This kind of disruption- whether you reach for your phone or think about it a lot- decreases productivity, focus, job performance and ultimately affects your ability to achieve your professional and life goals in the shortest possible time frame. A pretty serious issue, isn't it? You're trying to get things done at work, or trying to relax and watch something on your laptop at home, yet every minute or more frequently than that you are stopping, turning away and responding to messages on your phone. If you think you can handle it, think of all the times when you burned out and decided to ghost on people who used to matter to you- just dropped them because it was becoming too much for you, managing all of this messaging. You lose people, you lose connections and you mess with your own life plans.
Smartphones are amazing, sure. However, they confuse the hell out of most of us in what they really are. The companies that make them usually advertise them as very powerful and convenient productivity, entertainment, media capture (photo, video) and communication devices. We've all seen the ads, we all know this to be true. Except, it's completely false. The truth is that smartphones are all that, but ONLY ON THE GO! The companies kept boosting screen sizes, internal specs, operating systems and so on to trick us into using them at home and at work for tasks in which they are totally inferior to proper laptops and desktops! They made tons of money off of it too, sending desktop and laptop sales into a downward spiral. They made us forget that if we own a computer and/or work on one, as soon as we are near it, using it makes us so much more productive versus using a smartphone that it's downright scary.
So, what has happened over the last few years, and especially the last 12 months or so, is that popular messaging apps have received their PC, web-based counterparts so you can finally message on your computer again without pulling yourself completely away from your work or home computer time every few seconds to check your messaging on a different, less productive device with a totally different ecosystem. Personally, I like to use Allo and Telegram on my computer and it has made me more focused, more productive and I feel less stress and anxiety than when I kept switching between two different devices every minute. Best of all, messages and their read statuses sync across my computer and all of my other devices, and notifications pop up everywhere at the same time (I can choose which device to mute too so there's not too much ringing and dinging haha). Now that Google Chrome has built-in notification pop-ups that work very well, it's very easy to turn off the annoying sounds everywhere, and just look for visual notifications if that's what you prefer.
Therefore, no matter how old you are, how busy you are, or how much you value productivity, understand this- the good old desktop and laptop are still kings of productivity and best multi-tools in the electronics world, and that's why they still exist and will continue to exist. Once you decide to drop your phone as soon as you get to work or to your home and do everything on your computer until you decide to relax on your bed and then get to sleep, you will soon realize a few important things. You only care about your phone in terms of what it can do quickly and effectively on the go, but you don't care about it replacing your home computer because it'll slow you down and mess you up. You will stop using many apps that don't have a computer version or counterpart unless you need them specifically on the go or they exist to perform tasks primarily on the go (e.g. Snapchat, Instagram). You will push yourself to do productivity and messaging on your computer and finish things faster, with more time left for you to spend doing other things away from screens. Finally, you are going to realize (if you haven't already), that most apps on the Android and iPhone app stores are either useless, or merely very poor versions of their computer counterparts; you may even begin to realize that the age of apps will come to an end sooner rather than later.
If there is one thing I'd like you to take away from this, dearest readers, is this- look at your home and work computers and start using them again the same way they were used before the rise of smartphones- to integrate tasks into one device, on one screen, designed in such a way to get things done, get them done fast, and get them done right. Thank me later ;)