10 WAYS TO BE PRODUCTIVE WITH YOUR HANDHELD, SMARTPHONE, OR PDA
These days, many web workers are upgrading to more powerful handheld mobile devices — PDA, smartphone, Internet tablet, ultra-mobile PC — and they never seem to stop fiddling with them. From checking email to reading RSS feeds …
Context & Ripple Effects
Handhelds crossing over from gadget to work tool is the arc here: the New York Times ran a how-to on making a cellphone act like a BlackBerry three weeks earlier, and the Wall Street Journal's Type-A Bathroom piece back in February 2006 had already documented work habits colonizing the last device-free rooms. Web Worker Daily's contribution is the workflow playbook — turning always-carried hardware into an email, RSS, and task platform.
First-order effects
- Web workers who adopt the routine shift inbox and feed reading off the desktop and onto pocket hardware, closing the feature gap between ordinary handsets and RIM's BlackBerry that the Times' May 2007 how-to was written to bridge.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and RSS toolmakers inherit the consequences of a problem panelists flagged at the 2005 Blog Business Summit, when Molly Holzschlag could not find a blog's feed: subscription interfaces that already confuse desktop users get worse when squeezed onto a two-inch screen.
Third-order effects
- If carried devices become the default reading surface for feeds — the technology one analyst called the defining cultural shift of the post-2001 business community — the constraint on knowledge work stops being access and starts being attention, extending the erosion of boundaries the Journal traced into bathrooms and commutes.
The trend: Mobile devices are absorbing knowledge-work tasks once confined to the desk, making attention management — not connectivity — the binding constraint on the web worker.