Disclaimer: This was written after 15 hours on a plane. Please ignore any and all spelling and grammar errors. And all run-on sentences!
I’m sitting in JFK airport in New York and I’m bemused by the sheer volume of people who are sitting around me with their laptops out and their Blackberries cranking.
And, to be honest, I can’t help but think “what on earth are these people doing?” (Granted I am one of them and people are probably asking the same question of me.)
I think air travel today really brings into context just how addicted we are to “getting a connection.” From the eager employee in seat 34A who has to keep firing out emails from his Blackberry right until the plane takes off. To the countless number of people who switch on their cell phone as soon as they land. Just to tell someone “We’ve just landed!”
It makes you wonder what happened before cell phones were invented. Did we have scores of colleagues and family members sitting at home and in the office asking each other “Do you think they’ve landed yet?” “But what if they HAVE landed? How will we ever know?” I think not!
And worse still, the one solace we took from air travel, those few hours spent in the air when no one could get a connection, are looking more likely to be taken from us as well. Can you imagine how infuriating it will be when the person beside you can ‘yak’ on their cell phone the whole way through a flight?
I can’t help but think that our addiction to being connected hinders our productivity, rather than helps it.
Going away from the airport analogy, just think about how many times a day you check your “vitals.” That is, your email, your myspace/facebook/bebo/blogger/twitter and your favorite RSS feeds. Plus whatever other sites you check on a regular basis. And, on top of that, begin to think about how much of that time spent is actually productive and how much of it is just a desire to know what is happening, right at this minute.
The fact that we have so much information at our fingertips causes us to think that if we don’t know what is happening in the world around us every minute of every day then somehow we might be missing out on something.
Maybe I’m talking to myself more than I am talking to anyone else but what would happen if we only checked our emails once or twice a day? If we only checked our favorite sites once a week, and we only checked in with our RSS feeds when we actually ‘wanted’ to read, rather than being addicted to getting the smallest updates on the world?
Who knows? Maybe that assignment that’s been looming over our shoulders would get done. Or perhaps the chapters that we need to study for class may somehow end up being read.
Either way, as the wonderful wireless web becomes more ubiquitous, I think it’s important that we really begin to assess the best way to spend our time when we’ve “got a connection.”