Paying the smart phone tax by Seth Godin
It might be costing you more than you think.
Urgent or important?: Your phone has been optimized to highlight the urgent. It buzzes and beeps. It sorts things. It brings everyone else’s urgent things right under your nose, reminding you about them until they become your urgent things. A full day on your phone is almost certainly a day where you buried the important in favor of the urgent.
The moment: The smart phone brings the world to us, in our pocket. But if the entire world is there, presenting its urgencies, it’s harder than ever to be here, right now, in this moment.
Brevity over density: Just about everything produced on a smart phone is done in a hurry, because there’s something urgent happening just a click away. As a result, we favor brevity. Brevity in what we consume (LOL) and brevity in what we produce (GTG). It’s not clear that brevity ought to be our goal in all things, or in how we spend hours of each day.
The filter bubble: Even more than on the web, the closed gardens of the smart phone world mean that we’re most likely to consume ideas that we already understand, from people we already agree with. Not a path to growth, certainly.
Off the hook: Because it’s so easy to hit ‘send’ and because there’s so much noise, we can easily relieve the tension of creation with a simple click. Easy in, easy out, easy delete.
Like most things that are taxed, smart phones are often worth it, creating connections and giving us information when we need it. Perhaps, though, turning our phones off for six hours a day would be a useful way to cornering us into creating work we can’t live without.
[This is reposted from Seth Godin’s blog here.]