4 ways to be a sensible techie

I write about technology for a living, but tech, and the way I use it, frustrates me all the time. I am constantly finding technology slow or annoying or buggy, and I am always on the lookout for new ways of doing things. Right now is a good time to implement some changes in how I use technology so I came up with four tech resolutions, Some of these might be applicable to you, too:

1. Stop chasing Inbox Zero. I have got 91,109 unread messages in my inbox, and I feel fine. Even worse, I have 4,152 messages flagged for follow-up that I haven’t yet gotten around to doing anything about. Do you consider me a slob for letting my e-mail get so messy? Do you have a similarly overgrown inbox and find yourself racked with guilt and anxiety, vowing to turn over a new e-mail leaf — you want to respond faster, respond more consistently, come up with system that helps you avoid missing important messages? Do you find yourself veering towards declaring e-mail bankruptcy — a public admission to all your friends and colleagues that you have given up responding to them? I say forget all that. I have tried for years to manage my e-mail. There was a time I chased Inbox Zero — the zen state of having no more messages to read or respond to, and thus, supposedly, feeling a sense of guiltless peace with the world.

Maintaining Inbox Zero is hard, but if you are diligent and have time to spare, you can probably do it. Beware, though, that we are all always getting more and more e-mail — so the time you devote to tending to it will always increase. But here is what I have decided: Inbox Zero isn’t worth all that time. I haven’t seen any evidence that diligently responding to, archiving or otherwise maintaining one’s email improves life in any way. Sure, you don’t want to fall down on your duties — if responding to your boss is an important part of your job, then of course you should respond to your boss. But if you are good at your job you will do that anyway.

2. Use Twitter less. In 2012, Twitter evolved into something I have been always looking for: The world’s perfect news source. For news junkies such as myself, there was no better way to follow breaking events such as the Sandy Hook shooting, Hurricane Sandy or the fiscal cliff meltdown. Even big, months-long stories such as the presidential campaign were best filtered through millions of tweets. I found that Twitter not only helped me keep track of what was going on, it also added much-needed perspective around the news. A few years ago I wrote a book in which I worried about the internet’s capacity to spread rumour and plug us into our own echo chambers. Since then Twitter has become the most powerful force to address those problems. This might surprise you, since Twitter is often criticised as being a disseminator of half-facts — how many times has Morgan Freeman been reported dead on Twitter? — but as BuzzFeed’s John Herrman pointed out in one of the year’s smartest blog posts, “Twitter’s capacity to spread false information is more than cancelled out by its savage self-correction.”

More and more, these days, I find myself following Twitter not for news but just as a way to procrastinate. I get pulled away into the minutiae of news, the stuff I would never have cared about in the past. That is no way to live. Twitter is the world’s most comprehensive news source, but as a result it is also the least efficient. Your time is better spent doing other things. Or, at least, mine is.

3. Become a better mobile typist. I am a terrible typist even on the best keyboards, and on touch-screen devices I am hopeless. I am slow and make a lot of errors. Sure, lots of people have trouble on touch screens, but I know many who are ninjas on them. And not just children. Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facebook’s IPO investor letter — more than 2,000 words — on his iPhone. I don’t want to write a treatise, but I do want to be able to do more than just dash off one-word texts. Right now e-mails I send from my phone are torturous to compose and full of errors. Surely I can do better. How am I going to improve? Practice, of course. There are lots of typing-trainer apps available for mobile devices. I am going to pick one up.

4. Record more of my life. Ever since I had a child a couple years ago, I’ve been capturing more and more of my life for posterity. I snap photos and videos of my toddler every day. As a journalist I also capture a lot of my conversations — I take notes and record phone calls and face-to-face interviews. Yet I keep missing stuff. My son has been talking for about six months, and it has been remarkable to see how his speech has changed over time. One of his first words was “cookie”, but he would pronounce it “cook-a”. Then, over the course of a few months, he began to learn the correct way. Now his original pronunciation of “cookie” is lost to me; I didn’t record it because I didn’t realise how ephemeral it was, how it would soon become something else, and how I would forget it. So now it will be gone for ever. Now I plan to record a lot more videos.

–Washington Post

Farhad Manjoo is Slate’s technology reporter and the author of “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society”.