Technology addiction

I’ve talked a bit about this before but I think technology addiction is going to become a growing issue in 2015 and beyond. According to the most recent Economist, the average smartphone user now checks their phone around 150 times per day and as the market for your attention grows more and more competitive between all the media and technology companies, their products will become even stickier.

It’s the subject of Hooked which is getting lots of good write-ups this week. You can see why anybody building new digital products might want to read it — as the blurb says:

Hooked is a guide to building habit-forming technology, written for product managers, designers, marketers, and startup founders to provide:

  • Practical insights to create habits that stick.
  • Actionable steps for building products people love and can’t put down.
  • Behavioral techniques used by Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and others.

We’re hardwired to create habits. Combine a cue, an activity, a reward and repeat and you’ve got yourself something that your brain wants to do over and over again. That can be a good thing if you’re in control of it and building your own positive habits. But it can also lead to addiction if you’re not.

Like all addictions, there can be deeper issues at play. This BBC documentary last year about a military style internet addiction camp in China shows more about intergenerational issues than it does about the technology itself.

I’m not sure there are any easy answers but awareness is the first step to taking action so it’s something I’m trying to learn more about.

Ask someone else how long the job will take you

One of the best bits of Robin Ince’s Christmas Show at the Bloomsbury Theatre this year was Claudia Hammond’s bit on the latest science about how the brain perceieves time. In short, it does it really badly but there are some hacks you can use.

Apparently up until about the age of 4 we have very little idea about the concept of ‘tomorrow’. This is why when you tell a three year old that they can finish their lego masterpiece tomorrow, they will probably have a strop. Their brain hasn’t yet developed the idea of planning ahead.

And as adults we’re terrible at estimating how long something will take us — generally we massively underestimate the complexity of tasks. The best way around this in a work context is to ask somebody else to estimate how long something will take you — I might start trying this.

I think I also might buy Claudia’s book which is all about time perception and is called Time Warped. Maria Popova has a very nice summary.

How to win friends without being embarrassed on the tube

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For some reason I’ve always been put off reading ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People

‘ by Dale Carnegie. I think it was mainly the title — it sounds somehow manipulative and conniving, and the book has a slightly cultish aura — people who recommend it, really recommend it.

I’ve read it now though and I know what they mean. I think every startup founder and investor should too. I completely wish I’d read it when I was in my early twenties as a foundation for how to do business and act with integrity. I don’t think I was that far off but it’s full of gems that help.

I won’t summarise it here (there are plenty of other summaries out there — Wikipedia probably the best) but it’s well worth reading in full. It won’t take long because it’s very well written and is probably the template for all those easy to read self-help books out there. And if you read it on your kindle, you don’t need to be embarrassed by people knowing what it is.

Is less more? A few thoughts on curation.

Maybe it’s old age but I like things to be a little bit more curated these days. Rather than the “Everything Store” approach of being offered a vast choice I prefer some filtering on the part of the service concerned.

My archetypal example of this is a restaurant in Berlin called Die Henne which I first visited about ten years ago and went back to this week. There’s only one thing on the food menu (half a chicken) but they do it very well and they’ve now been doing it for a hundred years.

It’s an extreme example of curation (or choice editing as it’s sometimes called) but there are many more contemporary technology ones. We’ve just signed up for Mubi which is almost exactly like Netflix except that it only offers 30 films at a time rather than thousands. The strand that ties them all together is a team knowledgable about cinema who can choose movies that you might not have heard of but that you ‘should’ see.

Curation feels more compelling to me than the now standard five star generic recommendation system that Amazon or TripAdvisor offer. Even the supposedly ‘personalised’ recommendations of Netflix seem a bit naff. But maybe I’m just predictably becoming a consumer of all those curated top 10 lists…

Happy New Year (and a few resolutions)

Happy New Year! We spent ours in Berlin with me getting over a nasty cold so it wasn’t very raucous. The rest of Berlin on the other hand was very, very noisy. I hadn’t realised how seriously they take their fireworks. Today the streets are littered with plastic and cardboard from what must have been millions of flashes and bangs over the course of the night.

I did quite well at my resolutions last year and have kept up exercise and meditation much more easily than I expected. It’s funny how tech can help make things into habits (Runkeeper and Headspace gave the nudges earlier in the year but now I do both without much help).

This year I’m going to try:

  • Drinking less with some help from new BGV team Club Soda
  • Blogging more by adding it to my morning routine
  • Using a standing desk (think that will require some DIY next week)
  • Going veggie at home with some help from Anna Jones’s excellent A Modern Way to Eat.