Do you get time to stop and smell the roses?

We now live in a world that is saturated with technology, there is no way to get away from it or deny it, unless you are camped out in the middle of nowhere on a Bear Grylls type adventure you are never 10 meters away from a piece of technology that is hooked up to a internet connection and able to receive and transmit gigabytes of data at the touch of a screen.

We are firmly in the “Catch Up and On Demand” era, you can now pretty much catch up on any of your missed favorite TV shows on a device that was primarily designed years ago for making and receiving phone calls, where in the 90’s you had to rely on setting your VHS timer correctly, which if any of you can remember was a major task unless you had a degree from Oxford or Cambridge. We love the freedom that technology has given us, we are no longer chained to the time constraints that we previously had in our lives.

Modern digital technology is a godsend; we are able to communicate with people all around the world in a click of a button, sending mass amounts of data in seconds. Without modern technology the world we live in today just wouldn’t work. Could you really wait for a customer or client to send you information in the post or vise versa? It would be unheard of, customers don’t think that it is acceptable to wait for information and nor should they, especially when in an email you can send product or service information on beautifully designed datasheets, and with hardly any limit on what you can send, customers can be given every bit of information in seconds.

But is this a good thing? Yes, giving customers what they want in an instant shows great customer service, but from a personal point of view is time being given a little extra “push” to move faster by technology? Take the M Media and Design offices for instance, the past three months have flown by. We first moved into our new offices which seem a life time ago, hired our new Account Manager who now feels like he was never not here and the first quarter of 2014 has finished in a flash. Would this time have seemed like it had moved slower if we weren’t always online and we didn’t have access to information via technology 24/7?

We all have the times in the office when the network goes down, or there is a power cut. How long does the time seem from the initial system failure to it going back up? It seems like a lifetime, especially if you have something important you are working on or are waiting on an email to come in, but in reality, more than likely, the network is back up in a flash. It is the lack of having a connection to technology that seems to make our perception of time go slower.

Just take a look around your desk or in the immediate vicinity, you will have a piece of technology close by, we are sticklers for constantly checking social media and news outlets for the next post or story, most of us even take our phones to bed with us. It’s because we don’t want to miss out, we have become accustomed to instant information, we want to know straight away instead of waiting, we will happily spend 10 minutes glued to Twitter or Facebook constantly swiping in a downward motion, forcing our technology to update.

So it is no wonder that time seems to be moving quicker, how many times, honestly, do you spend checking your phone or tablet in a day, and for how long? All that time adds up and snowballs very quickly without you noticing, say you see a post or a tweet that interests you, you click a link that opens a browser, you then read the post in full, but wait there is further recommended articles after you have read the one you are on which then adds further time, all this from a single 140 character tweet! Over a 24 hour day you could easily spend a good few hours using technology and because it is broken down to the odd 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there you don’t actually notice, but if you spent that time concurrently you would soon notice that it is a massive chunk of your day.

This article is almost tongue in cheek, you will most probably read this online, either on your computer or on a mobile device, you might have had it sent to you by a colleague or friend, but you will have taken the time out of your day to read it, probably on a mobile device. We do live in a fast paced environment due to technology, but, because of the advances in technology we are able to release information & data to the masses in seconds, you are able to find and read it on many different devices, you are then able to share it with colleagues & friends and more importantly it will be in the ether forever – you will be able to come back and reread this over and over again without having to keep a hardcopy.

So while technology makes our lives run a little faster, the rate of which we can get access to information is always going to be paramount to us and our needs will increase, we don’t want to hunt around for things we want to read, we want our devices to tell us what we might want to read, depending on our interests, taking out the hassle.

We are in no way bashing technology; we love it, all of the guys in the office love to mess around with the most up to date gadgets like they are the newest action figures from our childhood. We totally understand that as a company of our type we couldn’t work in the way we do without technology, it is a basic requirement of our business. Technology is never going to go away, and that is a good thing, modern technology makes our lives in general a lot easier and while we like to think we could willingly just “turn it all off”, deep down we know we couldn’t or even wouldn’t if given the option, but sometimes it is always good to stop once and a while, to take the time to have a look out the window and smell the roses.