The other night I tried to charge everything before bed and ran out of outlets. Phone, work phone, laptop, tablet, watch, earbuds. I stood there holding a cable thinking, when did this happen?
I didn’t set out to own this much tech. It just piled up. A watch because it would “make life easier.” A second laptop because work needed its own. And then there’s the iPad. I paid $1,260.73 for it, and I’m still looking for an excuse to use it. It mostly sits on my desk looking expensive. Every so often I pick it up, scroll for a minute, and put it back down because my phone or laptop already does the same thing. Each purchase made sense at the time. Together, they’ve turned into a small job I never applied for.
Every company tells you the same story. Stay in our ecosystem and everything just works. Your watch talks to your phone, your phone talks to your laptop, and your life runs smoothly in the background.
Sometimes that’s true. But most of the time my devices don’t feel like a team. They feel like a group chat where everyone’s talking at once. A message comes in and my phone buzzes, my watch taps my wrist, and my laptop pops up the same notification a second later. One text, three interruptions.
And I’m not even fully in one ecosystem. My work laptop runs one thing, my phone runs another, and my TV has its own account I barely remember the password to. I have photos in at least three different clouds. If you asked me where a specific picture from two years ago is, I honestly couldn’t tell you.
The part that bothers me most is what it does to my focus. I’ll sit down to read or study, and within ten minutes something lights up. Even when I ignore it, my brain doesn’t. I’ve caught myself reaching for my phone when it hasn’t made a sound, just out of habit. That’s not a great feeling.
There’s also the security side, which I think about more because of my work. Every connected gadget is another way into your home network, and the cheap smart devices are usually the weakest ones. Most people never update their smart plug or doorbell camera. I’m guilty of that too.
So I’ve started pulling back a little. Nothing dramatic. I’m not moving to a cabin, and I’m not selling the iPad (yet). But I’m trying a few things:
- Turning off notifications for almost everything except actual people
- Keeping my phone out of the bedroom
- Picking one place for photos and slowly moving everything there
- Getting rid of devices I haven’t touched in months
It’s only been a couple of weeks, but my evenings already feel quieter. I’m reading more, and I don’t feel that low-level buzz in the back of my head as often.
I still like technology. I work in it every day. I just don’t think the answer to “my life feels too busy” is another device that promises to organize it.
Maybe the better upgrade is needing less of it.
