There is a good discussion over at Palm247 about using your PDA for planning your schedule. Shaun McGill starts the discussion with his experience, and then he ends it with a question, “Do you feel that your PDA dominates your life or has it given you more time to relax?”
Personally, I believe our panic (or busy) nature has more do to with society in general. We are expected to do more with less because of the technology available to us. Let’s take look at a simple example, the washing machine.
The washing machine definitely saves a lot of time when compared to using an old scrub board. For the sake of the discussion, we will say it saves people four hours a week. People do not take that four hours to relax, they use that time to do something else. Thus, we are basically doing more things in less time, in other words, being efficient.
If we take the simple example of the washing machine and apply to all the other technological advances that have been made in the last century, we have only pushed ourselves into doing more things in less time. Thus, we constantly put ourselves under pressure to get more and more done. By doing so, we believe we are being efficient with our time, which we probably are. However, being efficient with our time is one thing. Being effective with our time is something totally different, and I believe effectiveness is something to be considered when looking at the endless of things to do.