iPhone is a tricky device. It was the first mobile device I ever saw that solved the problem of web browsing on a tiny screen in a usable and enjoyable way. That was the main (and basically only) selling point for me when I bought it.
However the more I used it the more I understood one important thing — iPhone is essentially a reading device. It’s great to get and read e-mails on it, but it’s a pain to answer them. Same goes to everything, the on-screen keyboard just doesn’t cut it for anything bigger than an SMS or Twitter message. Most business users see this as a limitation and choose BlackBerry with it’s real keyboard. But after some time I understood that for me it’s a blessing.
The typical problem of an engineer (and many business users to boot) is information overload. I get e-mails every couple of minutes, RSS and Twitter messages even more often and am usually compelled at least to skim through them. This kind of constant division of attention is very inefficient, but I never could get myself to break this pattern.
With the iPhone everything changed. I set the e-mail checking to Pull/Hourly. Now at most every hour the phone will buzz and I will scroll through the e-mails and see if I need to answer anything. If I do I’ll fire up Outlook and go at it. If I like any RSS links, I will read them right there, on my iPhone, protected from the temptation to follow links ad infinitum. And I might answer a couple Twitter messages while I’m at it. That’s it, I’m done in 5 minutes, iPhone is back in my pocket and I go right back to work.
I never measured how much time and energy I spent fighting the information inflow before, but it sure as hell took more than 5 minutes every hour. Plus the constant multitasking took it’s tall from the quality of my efforts. Of course it wasn’t really just iPhone that solved my problem, but its limitations made it way easier to keep myself in check, and perhaps the same will work for you.
Tags: iphone