Anyone who knows me personally knows that I am a bit of an iPhone nut, and to some extent my iPad if I can get it out of the hands of my kids.
Primarily I use them for text/email communication and reading my RSS feeds, Twitter, and Facebook streams.
As my usage of mobile devices has grown over the past few years, I feel like I’ve also become more productive when working on my computer because I’m not spending time there reading RSS, Twitter, and Facebook.
A lot of this reading is relevant to my work as I try and stay current on what’s happening and find new things to read that will help me learn and improve. However, it’s all time spent away from actually producing real work and building things on the computer, and it tricks you into thinking that you are doing something worthwhile when it’s only marginally useful.
Not until reading this recent post by Seth Godin did I make the connection that I had separated my “fun” and “work” devices from each other.
I’m pleased this separation of devices happened naturally for me, but I think I should take it a step further and potentially remove bookmarks, apps, and anything else on my work laptop that is part of my news/fun world to make it even more of a clear separation.
For anyone else struggling with productivity or who just wants to be more productive, I’d recommend making this switch to using your mobile device only for reading and fun and making your laptop or desktop computer your work-only machine.
The downside of this, is now I spend too much time on my iPhone or iPad when I’m out and about! Especially because I can also check work email and text from those devices. Perhaps the switch should go both ways and I should remove all work from my mobile devices? Let’s take it one step at a time…