Don’t use your mobile…for everything.

You check your phone. Half an hour later, you look up and wonder what you were trying to do.

You take some notes on your phone, but never look back on them, and can’t even remember making them.

You use an app ‘for free’, only to realise too late that the company was making money off all the information you were putting into it — often without realising.

We ought to be more careful about how we use technology because people are increasingly manipulating us with it.

But the old “limit your use” wisdom is ironically limited in its application. It suggests there is something inherently wrong with technology, and betrays a naivete about it. Many would agree with limiting gaming and entertainment, lest addiction or other imbalance take over. (None of which necessarily suggests inherent flaws. You can have too much water, for example.) But what about work and organising and that good stuff?

Using a mobile is efficient. It saves you time and energy by utilising the down time you have in between things. It is much more carry-able than laptops, yet retains much of its power.

That’s it’s promise and design. And it delivers.

But it sneaks in other things. And we get lazy or simply don’t realise that our behaviours are changing.

Digital note taking doesn’t aid memory

We use it for note taking for all the reasons above but don’t realise that note taking by phone — or laptop — is not very good for memory. Writing aids our memory much more. So we end up with thousands of notes and saved articles from websites but aren’t much more knowledgeable from it.

The key here is to understand your purpose for note taking and the purpose of the app. If they match, go ahead. If they don’t, you may have been duped.

So if your aim is convenience, use mobiles. But if your aim is memory, paper may be a better option (not discounting memory apps — but these are not for notetaking). Or if your aim is increasing in knowledge, it’s better to have a non-linear way of taking notes, so you can go off on a tangent quickly, make connections and doodles all over the place, effortlessly strengthen correlations as you come to know more about the topic, and so on (like a mind-map, or blank paper). If you feel you need to concentrate on the topic as it is being presented — by lecture, sermon, talk, or otherwise — it may be best to just take photos of slides and digest later.

Digital note-taking does not foster creativity or problem solving

We don’t realise that almost every way you can take notes on any digital device is linear. 1 dimensional. You write from left to right. Or top to bottom. Whereas paper is 2 dimensional. Remember writing in the margins? You can’t do that digitally. You’re restricted. Yet it’s often those little comments that contain the most insight. Want to draw a concept? Can’t do. Keep it in sight as a reminder? Now that is partly why I don’t buy eBooks — you forget you have them; you lose them; and you can’t easily lend them (if allowed to at all).

“The medium is the message” — Marshall McLuhan

The phrase “the medium is the message” means that the medium — ie your phone in this case — carries an implicit message, quite separate from the content in that medium. The understanding of the medium itself is key to helping use the medium wisely.

To use a note-taking app such as Evernote for the convenience of note taking can be good — except when we use it to just write thoughts down in a linear fashion when we really need to think laterally.

Therefore the medium of most typical note taking apps may not work for you if you need to make connections between concepts and facts and ideas; or when we are initially investigating a topic and need lots of space to doodle and ask questions; or if we’re a visual learner and need to draw something alongside it; or if we’re evaluating multiple options and we’re forced into crude tables that don’t quite work and are difficult to just add another column.

On the other hand good old fashioned paper is excellent for all of these things — but performs poorly if you want to make a final essay that’s legible. So best practice is going to start with paper and then move to digitisation at some later stage, unless your usage of paper-like digital whiteboards like Mural can achieve your goals just as well.

Letting a navigation app do the work will reduce your mental map

We use maps for convenience — and convenient it is — but we trade that, blindly, for loss in our brain’s ability to map. If you don’t use your brain to know where you are meant to go you will literally lose it (brain studies have long proven that our brain is plastic and changes rapidly over time; see also Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains). We then become slaves to these devices, in a small way. (But hey we’re ‘slaves’ to washing machines, water and sewerage systems, cars, and a whole host of technologies we use these days — so it’s not necessarily bad, if the negatives such as the costs are tolerable).

But if you intend to be a taxi driver, bus driver, or a driver for a ride-share service like Uber, or if you commute by cycling, you might not want to solely rely on app navigation. They are great for quickly locating a route, and where traffic is, but when they lose signal you may instantly become a stress-head. You’ll want to be able to know the rough direction and route straight away, so you can leave your starting point quicker, not stress on signal loss (and not stress your passengers), and quickly recommend places nearby to visit relevant to the customers needs. If you rely solely on an app for those things, you’ll be sorry.

Untamed emails harm productivity

We use email for convenience. But how many times have you gone to check your emails and wasted heaps of time checking random links, suddenly looking up and remembering the world around you 20, 30, 60 minutes later? We use it for convenience. Marketers use it to distract and entice you. We sometimes realise later that while we’ve wanted to stay up-to-date with some news or a blog, we haven’t needed that information. We’ve wasted our time. We’ve been after useful information that can save us money or enlighten us and we’ve been robbed of our time through useless information and our money by useless contraptions and subscriptions.

It could be better to sort email by purpose. For example, setup three different emails. One for important stuff that you can be free to check as often as like because it has important stuff — but doesn’t have distracting stuff that isn’t important.

Then setup a second email address and redirect all junk mail there, and only have that setup on your laptop or home computer. Treat it like going to your physical mailbox. ‘Collect’ the mail once a week.

In this way we are attempting to shape the medium away from its negatives and towards our purposes for it.

Your third email address (or rss feed) is for signing up to blogs, news and such that aren’t urgent but are important for staying up-to-date in your area of expertise. But they’re very distracting. Have it only on your work computer, unless you work for yourself, in which case there’s little peer pressure to keep on track; in this case, it may be an idea to send these emails to a printer, and pick them up over the lunch break the another room (have the printer in another room too). If you’ve dealt with it (printed it), you can safely move on; your brain will be able to forget that piece of information and be ready for the next task.

The point is, have an intentional process for each type of email. Don’t just try and deal with everything as it comes. That’s losing control, and succumbing to the whims of others who don’t have your best interest at heart.

The other aspect is that once you have a clearer idea of what you actually want to achieve from the task, you’ll have a better idea of the best medium to use.

Information bias harms relevancy

We use the internet for, say, quickly looking up facts. That’s our purpose. But the search engine we use may have hidden bias to push us toward what it thinks is most relevant, and it may well be different to what you consider relevant. If the business behind the search engine is left of politics and you are right, but you think it’s neutral, you may being steered towards a view or set of views that you don’t hold, without realising it.

This political bias is seen today heavily across traditional media and social media. We still often perceive news sites as unbiased despite their heavy left bias, on top of a heavy anti-religious bias. So our intention is to find news that’s relevant to us and yet we end up consuming information that deliberately forgets to mention what we wanted to know, in a way that makes us think we have read ‘news’ (in reality most media today is propaganda, in that a point of view is decided, and then stories given to support that view, without an alternative view given sufficient or any airtime).

If you don’t know the bias of who you’re reading, or think they are unbiased (which is impossible), you could be better off asking a friend who is cluey about what’s going on in the world — and their enemy.

To be intentional in this information age we have to realise that all information has a bias. Blindly consuming any and all information that comes to us will result in us believing fake news and all manner of lies, deception and stupidities.

You may want to setup two custom search engines (https://support.google.com/customsearch/#topic=4513742) to aid you in this: one, with a trusted list of websites that fit your way of seeing the world; and the second with websites that are from an alternate viewpoint. Try to learn at least two sides to every story.

What are we attempting to know?

But again, our blindness goes deeper. To be ‘in the know’ we apparently have to watch or listen to the news, online or off. Why? What about the person who always knows what to do in any circumstance, because they chose to learn from history? Surely that person is more ‘in the know’ than the one who simply hears the bad news but is not inspired by past heroes who did good in spite of the bad times, and what motivated and shaped them to be that kind of person.

Here is where we run into the inherent bias of the Internet. Information on the Internet tends to be global, not having regard for international borders. It tends towards the big issues. That could be good in some applications, but for the run of the mill person, did you ever realise that your news fix is being biased away from your local community, against for example the lonely, poor or sick neighbors down the street from you? Of course, it’s not necessarily an issue if you’re aware of this, and use the Internet accordingly (and yes; perhaps even use it for developing local connections). But personal connection is always far more powerful, if your goal is to help the local community.

Conclusion

What’s the purpose of your task? Match it to the solution and don’t just blindly use the mobile for everything. Select “the right tool for the right job”.