The Campbell Academy Blog | Colin Campbell (209)

For Tech's sake

Implementing a new piece of technology into your life is brilliant if it makes it truly better.

It is awful if it makes it worse.

It is pointless if it does neither.

All of my blogs and most of my emails and a lot of other work that I do is dictated onto an Olympus digital recorder, this was innovative 10 years ago, but it is not innovative now.

Nowadays I would have a wireless digital recorder, which would have a sim card and be able to immediately upload my files online and send it to anywhere in the world to be typed.

The truth is though, if I changed the system now (and I could tomorrow) it would not make it measurably better.

It could possibly make it worse and in no likelihood make any difference.

Sadly we jump on the tech bandwagon in all aspects of our life all too quickly without asking the question, will this make IT better and even deciding what IT is.

For almost 10 years I have rang Evernote software for lists and Asana for project and task management.

I have had a million recommendations for a million other products to do those jobs, but I can’t see how they would make IT better and I can’t see how it would make my life nicer.

We are finding this with smartphones now, aren’t we?

We’re just not quite as excited about this smart phone as we were about the last one and certainly non of us that are old enough to remember how excited we were about smart phones when the IPhone 3 first emerged.

In my own world, (dental practice), this is nothing but clearer than clear.

So much technology is now available, but to what benefit?

When we live life at the speed of light, it is very easy to make a decision's to say, yes I will buy something (particularly if we have the money) but it is much more difficult to take the time to decide whether or not it will make IT better.