To make the best out of the technological tools available today in our lives we need to adapt and change. I need to motivate you to adopt a lot of radical techniques in several areas of your life. It's going to take a lot of effort and time, so if you are not convinced and you are going to quit half way through, it's going to be a real waste. But once you've changed your methods it's going to pay back immensely. It's going to give you back you time with plenty of interests, it's going to save you money, perhaps make you earn more money, make your life safer, make you healthier, and perhaps happier.
Can you imagine doing your current job without e-mail, Google, or Wikipedia? You were able to do it 10 years ago. Today you are 10 times more productive. You productivity 10 years ago was nothing compared to what it is today. And now it's not a choice to go back. Everything is revolving so fast around us, that if we were to be so unproductive as in the ages without Google, it would be like going out to hunt for food instead of getting it at the supermarket.
Well, in a year from now, you'll be 10 times as productive as today, and if technology keeps evolving at the current pace, I cannot start to imagine how it's going to be in 10 years. "It's going to be a wild ride", as John Cohn from IBM says in the video posted below. Watch it, it's short and has plenty of technical terms in there, but this guy know what he is talking about.
The age of paper is over - Get yourself a scanner, digitize all your documents and throw the paper away. It might not be obvious to you, but this can have the greatest impact on your productivity today. It will save you from a lot of headaches and you'll start loving it very quickly.
Get a smartphone - If you don't have one, when you are on-the-go, you are not living the digital life anymore. The Digital Life is not something you can turn on or off or run away from. The only time you are allowed to stay away from it is when you are asleep or at a beach in the Caribbean.
Store your stuff in the Cloud, not your hard disk - Don't loose your precious documents even if a meteorite strikes your city and be able to access them anywhere. Once you have this set up and running, you won't even notice that they are stored far away from you.
Do you still use a paper planner? - How is your paper planner going to tell you that you have an important appointment next week? The on-line planner is probably the most important online tool that you'll be using in the digital life era. It's not just a place to write down appointments, it's an intelligent system that can manage priorities, detect potential conflicts, proactively alert you of important upcoming events, arrange activities with other people, and more.
Are you using a GPS-based navigation system in your car? - Oh, perhaps you know your way well, but do you know the fastest way today at 6 pm? The GPS alone will only tell you where you are. A GPS receiver connected to the internet is a scary toy. Your phone most probably has a built-in one already.
Your TV is going to get a lot smarter - Forget about DVD or BLU-RAY. Media is on the Internet or your PC (not for long though). Your TV connects directly to the Internet and you can watch whatever you want, any time you want, including your own family recordings.
Email attachments are obsolete - Start keeping your documents in the cloud and sharing them. The age of collaboration has arrived!
Get ready for the Internet of Things - Oh yes, even your microwave oven will be connected to the internet, so it will know when you are almost out of pizza and will order more for you. Your smart kitchen will be taking care of your healthy diet.
Become a high-performance digital student - Just one more application of the digital life. Combined free, monster-size, searchable, interactive, hyperlinked encyclopedias, with graphical and interactive demonstrations, specialized software, online workgroup software, and file sharing change the whole student panorama.
Security, privacy and Identity - Doing things on your computer and the Internet is safer than face-to-face or on paper. Fact, not opinion.
Social Networks - People that socialize over the phone, 15%? People that go to clubs, 25%? People going to community activities, 25%? Those inviting friends over on Friday nights, 35%? What about people on Facebook? You might not like it, but it's the way it's done today.
Are you ready for this?
I wish to start scanning everything, among other reasons, because of a question of physical space and disorder. There is also an emotional reason which is how grate it is to know your own history will be available forever. It suggests certain immortality, certain concrete sense that "some things may live forever" ... or something like forever. But one has accumulated such an amount of paper, and must make the time to do all the scanning and digitalizing.
ReplyDeleteBeing a digital student, which I actually need,seems to me the most difficult of all. There is a certain basis of knowledge and skills required to understand or even recognize what your computer can offer you. A good dictionary with not only clear definitions, but as well "translations" of the digital vocabulary. There are some definitions in the digital tutorials, but these always seem to define or explain things within its same digital language. I think there is a need for better translations of the digital vocabulary into non digital vocabulary of a great part of the adult generation, as a dictionary on which something in french is defined and explained in english. This would promote progress even more and better.
As for social networking, I do some, and sites like linkedin and specially facebook, have been quite an experience. Beggining with 'who must I have as friends in my facebook account?' This is not easy to administrate. I even ask myself what "kind" of friendship is all this about. In spite of all it´s privacy settings Facebook is an impressive evidence that relationships are becoming more expansive, and less intimate. It requires a new way of communicating in all meanings of the term.
Thank you for this first tutorial; it's a great guide!
I also want to congratulate you for having been part of the team behind the Nobel Award in Physics !!!