In my blog post last week I presented a way of looking at tech that may help us with overwhelm. Perhaps it’s me waxing philosophical about something I believe in. Except, I keep hearing that tech overwhelm is a real thing for a lot of people. I think it’s important to sometimes look at reason’s why. And maybe consider some of it is in our approach.
I borrow from Brian Tracy’s book on productivity Eat That Frog. He has two chapters 15 – Technology is a Terrible Master and 16 – Technology is a Wonderful Servant.
My philosophy for dealing with tech overwhelm is to work on treating technology as a tool that serves us. Rather than something that we struggle with adopting.
During my career as a technologist I met plenty of other technologists who embrace creating tech for tech’s sake. Their passion for tech is usually at the heart of it. But… I believe if people spend more time and energy on understanding your thing, the time and energy they will save using it, then it might not be worth it. And the solution is probably going to overwhelm.
While this is not the entire source of the overwhelm problem, it is something that influenced the growth of Agile software development. A need to go back to the customer’s need – the why.
Which takes me to my philosophy of making technology your servant.
The big way that technology can serve us is to make our lives easier, to save us time and energy, so that we can focus no what truly can move us forward.
One way to discover our why is to considering the everyday repeatable tasks we do in business – what I call the habits of business. To look deeper at these to determine what jobs these do for us. And to ask is this a job that we need to focus on, or a job we can delegate to free us up. Then the question is are we going to delegate it to a person – internally or outsourced? Or can we delegate it to technology?
While I know it can get more complicated than this. There are now over 8000 MarTech tools on the Marketing Technology landscape graphic that Scott Brinker puts out annually. And a lot of the jobs that we get technology to do end up have interrelated pieces. It can all be overwhelming.
Still, I think it’s worth taking a breath now and then, to pause and ask ourselves what habits of business can we delegate to technology to make our day to day work easier. (And which do we not need to). And start again from there.
>>> Head over here to read the blog post
What do you to overcome tech overwhelm?
