Senior accounting and finance major
“Put down your smartphone and do something productive.” “If you spend all day staring at that phone, you’ll never amount to anything.” “Kids these days spend too much time worrying about their technology and not enough time worrying about the real world.”
You hear all sorts of things like these from members of older generations (and from people in younger generations with particularly Thoreau-esque attitudes). There is a firm belief in our culture, developed from years of mistrust, that technology is the root of all that is wrong with our society today.
The theory goes something like this: Technology allows us to do things faster and more efficiently, provides us with more easily accessible entertainment, and generally allows us to do things humanity as a whole has never been capable of achieving before. The increased speed and efficiency makes us lazy and impatient; the entertainment causes us to become bored far too quickly; the increase in human achievement is unnatural and means we’re doing things we’re not supposed to be doing — things that might even cause cancer, if we’re not careful.
This whole idea is mostly silly. Having a balance in life is important — as is getting fresh air — but there’s no reason the balance shouldn’t include modern technology. In fact, in many cases, modern technology can make finding the balance much easier. Back in the old days of PalmPilots, smartphones were most commonly used as personal organizers; when used effectively, they can still be excellent for that purpose.
Now, with that out of the way, here are some of the easy ways to use your phone as an effective personal organization tool:
• Make it your central hub for communication. Other than when I need to send a particularly long email or make a particularly fervent Harry Potter-themed rant on Tumblr, I try to do all of my non-personal interactions with people over my phone. This allows me to have one thing to check regularly for new communication, instead of having to jump around from device to device. If you only ever check your phone, it becomes second nature to check regularly after a while.
• Build a comprehensive scheduling system. Over the course of the past year, I’ve perfected my own system. I use ColorNote, an Android app that lets you create little Post-it notes on your home screens, featuring to-do lists for each day in the next two weeks and another entire home screen with to-do lists for each of the sixteen remaining weeks in the semester. Every time I finish a day, I rotate it to the next day two weeks from now and add any assignments listed for that day on the weekly to-do lists. This both forces me to look at my future assignments daily and gives me the massive joy of checking off finished assignments twice. If this sounds too complicated, find your own way. As long as it keeps you organized, it’s worth it.
• Keep your home screens organized. I put all my productivity apps on one screen, all my fun apps on another screen and all my widgets on a third screen. That way, I can’t get distracted by Facebook every time I go to do something productive. An organized home screen is an organized mind.
There is also any number of apps geared toward personal organization; try them all until you find something that works.
Just because a phone is distracting doesn’t mean it has to be a distraction. A phone, used properly, is the best organization tool you’ll ever have — no matter what your parents might think.
