When you purchase something you are paying for 100% of the features. The challenge is that when you actually introduce this innovation into your life, you will only use a small percentage of it. For example, you buy that shiny new Apple iphone 12 for $1000 bucks it is loaded with lots of cool features. BTW, you are usually paying FULL retail price for these phones. You may think you are getting an awesome deal, but for whatever reason, the mobile phone industry has hoodwinked a majority of us to pay full retail price for their phones through plan commitment gimmicks. Regardless, you are paying for all these wonderful features – but there is the thing. You will only use about 5% or less of them. In fact, you will use about the same features that you used on the iphone 4s. The processor maybe faster and the camera superior, but for the most part you are not using a vast majority of the feature improvements that drive the price of the device up. This is the way of things. Innovations are introduced into our life, we pay for them, and then proceed to use very little of the innovation.
Vehicles are good examples. They are loaded with new features, but little of it diffuses properly as we never take the time to learn or adapt to the new technologies. We drive around in cars loaded with technology enhancements, that we will rarely take advantage of. By the time we sell the car in 5 – 6 years from now, we will only have adopted a small percentage of the technology. Cars are rather simple however, phones which are much more complicated diffuse with an even greater percentage.
The question becomes how much benefit can we gain, in an acceptable time frame, to our personal lives by learning or adapting to more of the innovation. Clearly there is benefit to integrating technology innovations into our lives, but the question is how much. A good example would be the “assistant” technology built into your phone. If you learned how to use Siri or Google or something similar, you could issue voice commands to get assistance. How many repetitive tasks do we spend our time on that could be easily replaced by simple automated voice commands? Well, I tried to figure this out. I was able to automate certain things that did save me time, but after spending several hours with this technology I was not able to gain a benefit that would make my time commitment learning the innovation worthwhile.
However, there is a lot of things that we do in our lives that are repetitive or even unnecessary. The trick is to be mindful of what you are doing. When you wake up and get started with your day, if you are mindful, you will notice where you spend your time and why you do so. If we are mindless and robotic in our approach, then we find ourselves doing things for no purpose, or for no real benefit. Being mindful is not easy, it takes time in reflection really analyzing what you are doing and why. From time to time I will track my activity during the day to see if I can find ways to improve. You will be shocked at what and where you spend your time. You may think you are being productive, until you really look at it.
Learning a new innovation to decrease innovation rates is not a good ambition by itself. Learning a new technology to remove, reduce, and repeat a regular activity has direct benefit to your life. Learn new innovations with purpose. By them with purpose. By so doing, you can start to make your life exponentially more productive.
Guy Reams
