Five Ways to Use Mobile Tech to Make Your Life Better
Mobile technology offers so many ways that can be leveraged to make our lives better. Those of us who like mobile tech so much often forget how it can be used best to make an impact on our lives. Here, then, is a list of five ways to use it to make a difference:
Pick up your mobile phone and call someone close to you. It doesn’t matter if it’s the lowest feature phone or the best smartphone on the planet. Pick it up and call a family member you haven’t spoken to in a while. Call that old friend you don’t talk to enough. Call someone you care about and who cares about you. Don’t tweet them, don’t email them — call them.
Pull out that laptop and use it to reconnect with someone. Don’t email them or type them a letter. Instead, pull out a piece of paper and a pen. You remember what those are, right? Sit down and write a thoughtful letter, using the pen and paper, to someone who needs to hear from you. Tell them what is going on in your life since you last spoke. Ask them what is going on in theirs. Reconnect. Then use the laptop to look up their address, so you can write it on the envelope. Then mail the letter the good, old-fashioned way, with a stamp. The pleasure of getting an unexpected treasure in the mail is still a great way to make someone’s day brighter. The feel of the paper as they read what you’ve written by your own hand will make an impact on them. Show them that you care.
Grab that fancy navigation system and use it to go visit a family member you haven’t seen in a while. Maybe it’s that aunt who’s a little bit crazy, or a cousin you haven’t spoken to in years. Drop in and say hi. They are family, after all.
Send a special text message to your Significant Other during the workday. A little “you make me happy” message. You’ll feel so good for doing it, and he/she will feel wonderful. So much joy for so little effort.
Use that laptop and fire up Skype to video chat with someone you rarely speak to. It doesn’t matter who, someone you care about. The feeling you’ll get when you’re chatting and watching their face is priceless. Skype is not just for business — use it to reach out.
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Skype is a great thing, but recently, I have been getting spammed like crazy by requests from shady names to add them to my contacts. It’s ridiculous, I leave my computer for 20 minutes, sit back down and there are 6-7 invites from luscious.lola19 and a bunch of other ridiculous names. Sorry for the rant, I’m a huge fan of skype, but I have privacy settings enabled and the only way I have found to stop it is to be logged off all the time.
I have heard this is a bigger problem on the latest version of skype and the older versions not as susceptible.
Gee, James; what happened to you over the weekend getting so emotional?
Did you have a near-death experience or something?
You really should be doing all the things you recommend most of the time, anyway.
Have a great week – and tell a stranger something nice now and then throughout your week – just to make their day more pleasant.
Great post.
I like that you have tied technology to actually connecting with people.
It is unfortunate that the norm has become using technology to be impersonal with people.
I believe that technology use will continue to evolve how we interact with those that matter most to us.
Can’t I just handwrite an e-mail on my TC1100 instead? (Outlook 2007 has Ink support, so don’t tell me I can’t do that.) I’m specifically trying to go paperless.
Oh, and for the record, the cell phones in my family are all dumb phones, and they are used to CALL people and…well, nothing else. If we’re not there to receive the call, leave a voicemail. We don’t deal in SMS or push e-mail, and our plans reflect that (no unlimited texting or data).
(Admitted, I find my current phone to be mostly dead weight and want a smartphone, but not enough to pay for my own plan plus a smartphone that meets my standards (easily 600 US$), which would probably have minimal voice minutes and unlimited data as the primary feature. I’d rather call through Skype or Google Voice if I can, but I’m not exactly a typical user of such devices, either.)