Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price

I was reading the New York Times on my iPad at breakfast this morning when I saw the above photo and died laughing.

The article is really interesting and talks about our addiction to gadgets causing problems with our ability to focus, which then hurts deep thought and creativity – a lot of the stuff covered in You 2.0. They even cite a UC Irvine study, which I’m pretty sure is the study done by Gloria Mark, who’s in the film.

One thing I’ve noticed is a lot of the gadget addicts, or at least people who can’t handle the balance between interacting with the real world and virtual one (gadget etiquette), seem to be adults in their 40s and 50s.

Ever since my father got a Blackberry he’s always checking email (and he still talks really loud on the phone in restaurants, holding the mic in front of his mouth like he’s on a walkie-talkie). It’ll get to the point where his fiancé and I will tell him to put the damn thing down.

I’m not saying I don’t text or email at dinner, but I’ll only do it if I’m left out of the conversation and I’ll stop mid-text if someone starts talking to me.

And as for multi-tasking, my mom claims she can multi-task, like talk on the phone while writing an email, but it’s total BS and I’ve called her out on it. She’ll be on the phone with me and I’ll quiz her on what I just said and she won’t remember.

So is that age just a rough transitional generation that’s figuring out how to incorporate the use of gadgets in life while still maintaining human interaction, while my generation is used to having smart phones and can better handle the two?

By the way, this is my first fully iPad generated post, and it was a great and easy experience.

As you’ve have seen on the site or Twitter, for the past year I’ve been working on a documentary on high school combat robots called Bots High.

The national championship is approaching, where the teams I’ve been following will battle it out to see if their robot is the battling king of the nation for the climax of the film.

I started a Kickstarter campaign to fund filming this championship with multi-cameras, and also to finish the film.

View the Bots High Kickstarter Project.

I’m in the last few weeks of the project funding, and I’m determined to reach the goal, so I have an offer for you. Pledge $25 or more, and I’ll send you a link to a digital download of You 2.0 with all the interviews. That’s the $10 version, plus access to all future interviews.

Just forward your backer email to lifehackdoc@gmail.com and I’ll send you the link. You don’t even have to wait for the project to end.

Please tell your friends, fans, and followers about this deal, since it’s only good as long as the project is active.

This post is about an idea I’ve had for a while, but I’m fast tracking it to try to get it out this week.

I’m sifting through the transcripts from most of the interviews I did to compile them into an eBook, which I’ll be releasing for free.

Now don’t feel like this renders the videos useless. Some stuff that’s in the book is in the videos, some stuff is in the book and not in the videos, and some is in the videos but not in the book.

Plus the written word does not do justice to the way some of the writers deliver their message (Merlin Mann comes to mind).

So stay tuned to find out how you can get it when it comes out. If you want to purchase an ad in the book, contact me. I’m trying to fund my next documentary.

Check out the order page to get the documentary and over 1 and a half hours of interviews for only $9.99. Plus, when you purchase this option, you’ll get all future interviews at no extra cost!

If you just want one interview in particular, you can also purchase each interview on its own for only $1.99 each.

It’s been a long time coming, but it finally happened. Download your copy here!

This is some typewriter hating right here.

Of course he could have always downloaded this to his computer.

Because You 2.0 is made of about 30+ videos, it’s not an easy ‘find the best export option and throw it online.’ My original plan was to put a close duplicate of the DVD design online. Encore, which I used to author the DVD, has an export option to create an exact version the DVD, menus, videos, and all, in a Flash movie.

I thought this would be easy and the best solution (so I could maintaing the options of watching the interviews by interviewee or subject and the play all playlist) but for whatever reason WordPress does not like to display this. I’ve tried a million different plug-ins and code and nothing.

So I could export each video as an individual Flash movie, but then I lose the option to play all.

I know Flash is very powerful and there’s ways to make what I want (like playlists) but I don’t know Flash, ActionScript, or XML that well. If someone out there does and wants to help out, I’ll give you a big fat link and logo for you in the sidebar.

So anyways, what I’m thinking now is I’ll export everything as Quicktimes and play it that way. This does have an advantage that I like, which is I’m a big fan of if you buy media, you should be able to watch it anywhere, anytime, on any device. So publishing in Quicktime would allow you to put the file on your iPod or iPhone, or convert it to something else for your device.

Hopefully this won’t kill the servers, but we’ll deal with that if we reach that point.

So please bear with me. Like I said, it’s 30+ movies so I have to re-export them all and build a page for each of them, and do a whole link web.

Cubicles – The Documentary

This is the first documentary I made back in film school. As you can see, my fascination with offices has been around for quiet a while.

If you’ve been wondering where cubicles came from, how they affect the way we work, and where office design is going in the future (and I know you have), then look no further, all your answers lie above.

You can check out more short films on office design at the Cubicles Film YouTube Channel.

I feel like Merlin Mann has some of the best thoughts on the whole hacking movement, and what it’s become. This video sums those views up pretty well. For more serious thoughts, we talk about it a lot in the film.

Saw this poster at The National World War II museum in New Orleans. Probably one of the best graphics I’ve seen that captures the spirit of life hacking.

Couldn’t find an actual graphic of the poster. Anyone have any better luck?

Great TED Talk by Dan Pink on how rewards do not make a great motivation tool. There’s tons of research from decades worth of studies that have proved this, yet the system still continues as normal.

There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.

He also touches on Results Only Work Environments (ROWE), which I’m a big fan of and that idea was part of what inspired me to go independent.

Also making the rounds is the release of a study by Stanford concluding that multitasking makes you bad at everything you’re doing.

The huge finding is, the more media people use the worse they are at using any media.

So, bottom line, if you see an executive multitasking who works on rewards, run far away.