Tag: Goals

Technology Won’t Get Someone To A Goal They Haven’t Defined

I created this blog to be about how a person can make their technology work for them. Personally, I like technology, gadgets, and tools.

However, I often talk to friends who want help with some piece of technology. “I just want it to work” is a common statement. In my opinion, they are working for their technology more than it is working for them.

Some of the biggest difficulties I’ve seen people have with technology is they haven’t decided what they’re aiming for. They don’t know how their steps today will get them to a place they want to be in the future.

A Simple Example

As a very simple example, one restaurant I frequent has a loyalty program. The loyalty program requires installing an app on a smartphone. I sympathize with why the restaurant wants their customers to install an app. There’s customer profiles, direct to customer messages, tracking trend with regular customers, detailed data on what dishes are doing well. But why would I, the customer, want to download the app?

There are some rewards for the loyalty program, discounts on dishes or next visit or something-or-other. I read through the apps list of what information it tracks, and honestly it was more than I wanted to share with a restaurant app.

Data harvesting aside, each app on my smartphone and each program on my computer is a place for trouble to start. It’s a place for a conflict with other programs or with the operating system to arise. It’s something to potentially eat up my computer’s or smartphone’s processor cycles or memory space.

Is there anything so important about a restaurant loyalty app that it’s worth all that hassle? No, not for me.

The Existence of Something Does Not Obligate Me To Buy It.

Too often when my friends ask me about helping them with some piece of technology, they never stopped to wonder why they got it in the first place. Yes, there might have been an end goal of more money, less worry, more time, a task being easier to accomplish. This piece of technology was presented to them, and there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of thought about “Will this thing in front of me get me to the goals I want to achieve?”

Many times, there wasn’t a goal set at all. Someone told them it was a good idea or a recommended idea for something-or-other, and now there’s this piece of technology that they are working for.

Monday Mindset: Technology which is supposed to be magic, isn’t.

I regularly talk to people who are frustrated the piece of technology they bought isn’t doing what they wanted.

I ask what they wanted. What they wanted is not what they bought because they wanted something which can’t be bought. They wanted to create something beautiful, they wanted to impress someone else, they wanted to make something people would pay money to buy, they wanted to make something which would have all the family names and family tree on it and “would bring the whole family together.” (Yes, those are all true stories and that quote is an actual quote from a conversation I had.)

The technology they bought was expected to do this, because — and that’s where the reasoning starts to get shaky.

Usually, if I ask long enough what the reasoning was I’ll find an assumption that the technology they bought should be able to do this because technology can do anything. Technology is magic.

But it really isn’t magic. Whether software, hardware, digital, electronic, old, or new, it’s a tool. It can help the user achieve a goal. The user still has to choose the goal. And that gets back to what is the goal and why is that the goal?