Being a “Tech Slave” Sounds like something from a SCI-FI movie. But it is becoming true to form in a way you did not expect and is excepted as a new norm without a blink. It’s costing you more than you think. Something it was suppose to be adding to… Your quality time of life.

Let me explain some examples:

While I like my iPhone, spending a hour a week updating apps is not fun. Very often you need to re-learn how they work as they change with each update. More often than not, this costs me money from the mistakes that become made from the minor changes. About 4-6 times a year I am asked to update my iTunes software on my computer and takes about an 30 minutes on my computer. Now if I do that, I can hook my iPhone up to that computer unless I update the ios on the iPhone which takes at least another hour as long as all goes well.  Time not well spent.

In order to keep the email spam down, I hand select the emails manually and block the spam senders domain (@spamaddress.com), not just the full senders address (user@spamsender.com). Because more often than not, they own the domain and will use a new address user of it the next time. So I spend at least a hour a week tending to my email server so I can see and enjoy those emails I want to read. Tending to a few websites, I use google analytics to see who the visitors are and how well the site is doing as in what they are reading and how they came to the site. Now, there is spam in the analytic data that I have to tend to just like spam in the email. Not as easy to block the spam referrer so that the data I am looking at is legitimate and has value to me unless I spend about 1 hour a month to keep it cleaned up.

Now my computer needs both operating system updates and software updates nearly everyday. Now I could just let that all run automatically in the background and never know that it happened. But I choose to pick the the time when they are installed. Mainly not till well after I have done whatever important work that may need done in the short term because many of these updates either have bugs or adversely affect what I thought I could do before that update. For me, doing it that way most often is a time savings. But it still costs some time.

Everyday someone puts a new TERMS OF SERVICE AGREEMENT in front of me that I have no time to read the details of and they don’t tell me what it’s all about in a summary so I can look just at the parts of the changes to know if I’m promising my next borne away. The few I have read completely and many more that I check lightly seem to have some right that I had and no longer going to enjoy like the right to join class action lawsuits. But many have adjustments to who they can share your data with.  Many of those are “partners” who can re-share that data with God only knows who. The fact that I do check at least some of them and caught a few with things I could clearly see things I did not want the possibility of subjecting myself to means that I really need to read them all and know more about the legal wordings. If I actually had the time and full knowlage, I probably would get nothing else done in my life.

I could go on and on but the short story is in the future, your going to need more time to service your technology.

Since all this tech is moving to your car and your home, I can only see more of the same.

Imagine not being able to drive your car until you take a update for its computer. Or you just did and now it won’t start Or perhaps your washing machine, microwave or heating/cooling system. It’s coming !

Don’t fall in love with your tech. Every hour of life spent on your tech is a hour of life lost.

Use it for just what it’s worth because if you don’t, it will use you for what you are worth and that doesn’t pay anything.