Is Technology Making Us Less Efficient?

It’s time for me to climb up on my soapbox once again. I hate to do it, but I just can’t hold back any longer.

Have you noticed how much time we spend saving time and trying to be more efficient? (Read that again.)

It’s occurred to me that all of these tools designed to save us time are actually taking the lion’s share of it. Today, we don’t go anywhere without our cell phone and our laptop. Walk onto any airplane and you’ll see what I’m talking about. There’s a plethora (I get to use big words when I’m on my soapbox) of technology, including the aforementioned cell phones and laptops, plus Kindles and other e-readers, iPods, iPads, and just about anything else you can think of that blinks, beeps, or buzzes.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that technology can make life easier. Hey, I’m a huge fan of the dishwasher — it sure beats those dishpan hands! But when you’re wired all the time, it becomes a distraction. Suddenly the technology is managing you instead of the other way around.

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You hop into the car for your morning commute. Before you’re even out of the driveway, you put your Bluetooth in your ear and  pick up voice mails left on your cell and office phones. No time for NPR, you’ve got work to do.

With your messages in hand, you attempt to return a few of the more important calls only to discover that no one is at their desks at this early hour. So what do you do? You leave a bunch of voice mails that they will have to return and the game begins.

With no one to talk to, you sneak a glance at your email as you roll to a stop on the freeway in bumper-to-bumper traffic. C’mon admit it, you peek when you’re sitting still. As you scroll through the messages, you’re jolted to attention when the driver behind you lays on his horn. You creep forward 15 yards, come to a stop, and take another look.

You might even key a few responses with your thumbs while sitting in traffic. Think about that for a minute. What could be more inefficient than typing with your thumbs?!? But, what the heck, you do it anyway and mark it off your list.

You walk into your office in the morning and turn on your computer. Of course, you’ve already read many of the more urgent messages on your phone while you navigated the freeway on your way to work. But now you begin to respond to the messages that have miraculously filled your inbox overnight; the result of a bunch of colleagues with your same addiction, sending one-line messages from their handhelds and laptops.

You look up, two hours have passed, and you’re about to be late for a meeting. You haven’t even begun to work through your “to do” list because those people constantly sending messages are dictating your day. You know that in today’s hyperconnected world, 30 minutes is an eternity. How many times a day do you say something like, “I don’t know what he’s doing, but I emailed him a half hour ago and still haven’t heard back!”?

So we all learn to play by the rules that come with our technology. You head down the hall for the meeting, scrolling through more messages and typing with your thumbs. As you pass a colleague in the hall, you nod acknowledgment as you continue to walk and type.

The meeting starts and most of the participants have a laptop, handheld device, or both. Everyone is paying attention to everything except the speaker. When feedback is required, the room falls silent. Moments later, heads begin to lift from the screens to see why that voice is no longer droning on in the background. The speaker repeats his question and everyone scrambles to catch up because they really hadn’t been paying attention. The meeting lasts 30 minutes longer than scheduled because of everyone’s inattention.

Your day continues in much the same fashion with emails filling your inbox — which you feel obligated to respond to immediately — and your phone continually buzzes with alerts.

Then it’s time to head home and you leave knowing that your day isn’t really over. You hop in your car and immediately are back on your cell phone. You walk in the door to the house, after spending your entire commute talking on your cell phone, and immediately check your email on your handheld device while your children look up from their laptops just long enough to acknowledge your presence.

Over dinner each member of the family has one hand on a fork and the other on their smartphone. Someone makes a vague reference to a movie they saw or a book they read a decade ago, and the cell phones are whipped out of their holsters as everyone scrambles to “Google” it to discover the name.

The rest of your evening is spent at home reacting every time your handheld device buzzes to let you know you’ve received another message. One message is important enough for you to pull out your laptop to fire off a response that is too long to be typed with your thumbs. Then it’s time to crawl into bed and start it all over again.

Here’s my issue. Instead of managing these tools that are designed to make our lives easier, they are managing us. The technology and the people behind it are dictating the activities of our days. We no longer control our agenda. There’s no quiet time for reflection. There’s no down time to recharge. We are constantly wired and it can’t be good.

Look, I don’t have the answer, but I do know it’s a problem. We need to unplug. We need to take back control of our days. We need to manage the technology instead of letting it manage us.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Peter Drucker which reminds us of the importance of intelligent time management.

“Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.”