Is Communication Technology a Time saver?

It wasn’t all that long ago that people sat down and wrote letters in order to keep in touch with family and friends, and even to conduct business. Provided that there was a reliable postal service, things seemed to work well and mail generally arrived timeously. That all changed with fax machines. Now a letter was typed on a computer or even a typewriter, and then sent via a fax machine to the recipient who also had to have access to their own fax machine. Business was speeded up as there was no longer the delay caused by postal deliveries.  Nowadays very few people appear to be faxing as a form of doing business as e-mailing has become the medium of choice for most of us.

With the advent of mobile phones, landlines are often rarely used by individuals, although they are still a necessity in many business organisations. Looking back over the last few decades, there was a time when even having a home telephone was deemed a luxury. Many people had to make do with using public telephone boxes and putting the required number of coins into the slot provided in order to place a call. There are young people today who may never have seen one of these, let alone used one.

The benefit of using a mobile phone is that one is able to make and receive calls wherever one may be. No longer is it necessary to be in an office or at home in order to get in touch with people. This is rather a double edged sword, as there is no escaping being called by clients, any time of the day or night, unless the phone has been turned off. A big advantage, however, is that it is possible in many instances to contact one’s doctor, if the number has been made available to patients, in a medical emergency situation, outside of specified surgery hours. Other situations where mobiles are invaluable are when one has burst water pipes, or burnt out gate motors, where the specific expert needs to be called for help and is contactable on their mobile.

Having so many opportunities at our fingertips to communicate with one another, why is it that we are always complaining about not having enough time? Just looking at the whole scenario of everyone having a mobile phone, often an I-pad and a laptop, is it perhaps that all these modern gadgets have a tendency to become time wasters. One only has to look around to see that the majority of people, regardless of age, are carrying their mobile device with them wherever they go. Therefore, it is very tempting to constantly be checking for messages or interesting gossip on facebook instead of getting on with the job at hand. It would be interesting to monitor just how many working hours are wasted due to employees spending time on their phones instead of doing the job for which they are employed?

Many of us easily become addicted to all sorts of things – food, alcohol, exercise and nowadays, the internet and social media.  Downloading games onto one’s mobile seems like fun, but it’s quite frightening how, sitting playing casino slots, or one of the many more challenging brain testers, the time just flies by. So, all things considered, was the pace of life actually slower in bygone days when people used old style forms of communication, and are we all perhaps guilty of wasting precious minutes in the way in which we are using the so-called time saving devices.  Makes one wonder.