The Fear of Being Too Connected…
May 22, 2008
By Marissa Jacquay
As I’ve begun to meet with more customers and prospects and define Unified Communications, and how it plays into enhanced productivity within their organizations, I keep getting the same response. Well Marissa, I like the idea, but I don’t want to be TOO connected.
Mobility, in regards to communications has changed so much over time. I think back to childhood, and life seemed simple. Maybe it was due to the fact that I was young and had a child’s perspective, but making trips out and about, and running errands with my parents was simple. We put on our shoes and our coats and we left…I never heard them say, “Oh, hang on, I forgot my cell phone,” or “I will call or text you when I get there.” I remember my neighbor had the first cell phone I had ever seen, and it was connected to a bag that you had to carry around, and I thought that was so cool, strange, but cool. Then pagers came into the picture, you were somebody if you had a pager, and knowing the lingo that if someone paged you with a “911″ after it, that meant, it was urgent. Suddenly more convenient analog cell phones came into the marketplace, and yes they were bulky, but they were better than the original phone in a bag and these allowed for more mobility. And today, well, most people have some sort of a mobile device.
Okay, you’re probably asking yourself, why is she rambling? The point I’m trying to make is this, just as we grow up and mature from children to adults, technology does the same thing, and as technology evolves, society adapts to that changing technology and although we have early embracers…we also have those who wait, and wait, and suddenly the technology embraces them. They have to adapt or they’re lost. Look at the World Wide Web. Company web pages were a thing of the future, but today, if you don’t have one, or don’t have some aspect of e-commerce you’re losing a piece of the pie and the competition might just leave you in the dust.
We’ve gone from basically not being connected at all, to developing ‘Blackberry Thumb’ and being connected to our devices 24/7. You have the two extremes, and you’ve got that happy medium. Technology is only going to keep progressing and changing, and it’s up to all of us to “Roll with It,” but remember that we have choices, and it’s up to us to determine the boundaries that we set with our communications. Productivity is what is pushing these changes, but remember that increased productivity may allow you to still stay on top of your work responsibilities, and still manage to have a life outside of work, and the benefit of this is that you know can have the best of both worlds, and one or the other doesn’t have to suffer. In the past, you had to choose to stay late at work to answer e-mails or leave early to attend your child’s baseball game. Now, you can leave on time, answer the e-mails from your smart phone while you’re waiting for the game to start, and still have the life you choose outside of the confines of the brick and mortar office. It’s a balancing act that may take some practice, but with being TOO connected, the positives outweigh the negatives, and at the end of the day, it is all about CHOICES, and it’s okay to turn off those mobile devices and CHOOSE to come back to them when you’re ready.
Marissa Jacquay is a technology specialist with G3 Technology Partners and works with businesses to analyze and assess how technology can solve business problems. She can be reached at 317.876.6535 or by email at marissa.jacquay@g3tp.com.
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