Reflections on getting the iPhone
My iPhone arrived on Friday and I’ve been playing with it all weekend. Having previously not bought into upgrading my phone every few months this was a big physiological step for me. Sure I thought I wanted lightweight, anywhere, anytime mobility but viewed it as rather a luxury than a necessity. I thought, I’d get it with my eeePC once I’d sorted out how to connect to 3G. No need to carry a laptop around for day meetings which involved train journeys. And although useful, and an excellent device, it still involved booting up, signing in, loading an email client etc. These were still small but irritating barriers to my established work pattern. Take for example, reading email. During the day I have my email client loaded and it’s set to collect emails every 20 minutes. This results in a stream of at most 4 emails each time, of which, some can be answered immediately, some can be deleted, some can be stored for reference as they update me on a topic or how a project might be going. This is what’s meant by “keeping on top of the email”. It means keeping the different information streams ticking over. Leaving the stream unattended for a day or two and these simple sorting and sifting tasks, which only take a few seconds, take much longer when clumped together, and disturbs your working equilibrium.
Next there’s social networking, which has grown on me over the last few months. Services such as Twitter enable participation and sharing at a macro-level. Unlike email this has a different purpose. In professional terms, there’s nothing urgent that needs to be dealt with and as a result one does not feel the need to store and retrieve threads necessarily. I accept that I might miss something interesting, but it’s unlikely to be vital. What it does fill is those idle moments, when one might be thinking about a problem, and wish to share it, or pick-up on someone else’s thought and contribute to it. These moments can be hugely valuable to one’s own personal professional development.
Tomorrow, iPhone only, no other device, let’s see how I get on.
Image credit: Mark Trammell
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March 30th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
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April 2nd, 2009 at 7:49 am
So how did you get on? I haven’t as yet managed to make my iphone my only device whilst away at conferences, meetings etc - still need my laptop. But I certainly manage to do more “stuff” than before I had my iphone - but not all of that stuff, to be honest, is related to the task in hand - the iphone seems to encourage serendipitous activities
April 2nd, 2009 at 2:54 pm
I was pretty impressed, but it was not a heavy meeting day, no note taking, presentations to do or consume, or really urgent emails that needed an immediate answer. Clearly longish emails are not comfortably done, but it was ideal for just keeping in touch with things and feeling there were no surprises lurking when I got back to a machine in the evening or the next morning. Tweetie was enough to while-away a little time when I’d just missed a connection and sat down for a coffee while waiting. I can see how not also having my laptop would be a worry but it possibility means I’d open it for a genuine known reason.