I was originally going to call this article, 5 Reasons I’m Definitely Getting An iPad but thought better of it due to the many differing opinions flying around now, especially after the official launch.
To reiterate, this is how I will be using the iPad for my business, and is not something I’d expect anyone else to do – and I’m also not so pretentious to think that no one else has thought of these reasons before; I’m just putting in my $0.02 to the opinion pool.
The main reason I chose to write about this was that I can see the iPad has great potential for saving freelancers a LOT of time when working from home in that it removes all the general tasks I’m listing below from the “work” computer and putting it in a device they have to physically switch to when doing anything with it. It will create the habit of only picking up the iPad device during allocated times or when absolutely necessary.
1. Email – Reading, small responses
When I upgraded to my iPhone just on a year ago, it was to replace my much worn out Palm Treo. I originally bought the Treo because I wanted mobile access to the increasing amount of emails I was receiving daily and really didn’t want to go “all out” and get a Blackberry. (Personally, I cannot stand the Blackberry devices and I didn’t feel I was quite ‘business-y’ enough to warrant one.)
The iPhone completely changed the way I received and processed my daily emails when out-and-about, blowing the Treo out of the water on so many levels, and now the iPad has arrived.
Many people in my situation that don’t necessarily want a media-consumption device are breathing a sigh of relief because, honestly, while receiving emails on the iPhone is great and really easy to do, replying (even minimally) on that tiny touch-screen keyboard can be a nightmare. It’s bad enough trying to text half the time, let alone reply to an important email accurately and swiftly.
So, my first and most important reason for why I want an iPad is for emails. Pulling them down onto the device, reading them and then responding will be much easier because of the larger screen (reading) and also the fact that there’s more screen real estate to display the keyboard on, allowing for greater accuracy and control over the responses being typed.
Ultimately I concede that it’ll be the same experience as using the Mail App on the iPhone, only bigger and more comfortable – and comfort is always a good thing.
2. Calendar – Sync with Google Calendar, iPhone and Desktop client calendars
I would have made this a tie for the top spot, but to save on confusion I’m leaving it in spot two.
This is something I’m really looking forward to. The Calendar App has been completely re-imagined for the iPad and looks totally awesome.
A little history: In the past decade, I’ve probably bought about 15 paper diaries; anything from the little pocket ones to the hard-cover day-to-a-page office diaries. Of those 15, I’ve only successfully used one of them for about four months before just stopping, as usual.
It’s not for a lack of trying, believe me. I’ve tried so many ways to use it: Keeping the diary open to the correct day, reviewing it each morning, carrying it with me everywhere to “make sure I put in new appointments when I make them” … None of it worked.
When I got my iPhone, however, and synched it up with my email client (Mozilla’s Thunderbird with Lightning Calendar add on) through a Google Calendar, I’ve not had a problem keeping dates and appointments, or more to the point, actually putting them into my calendar.
I’ve also linked my Google Calendar to my wife’s email address so she can add appointments and receive notices of new items I have in there – it’s a great way for us to keep up-to-speed with each other’s movements and helps us plan things around what we both have planned; I can only imagine this would be a great habit to form early on before / as I move out to be a full time freelancer.
Saving viewing and minor appointment edits, as well as having the ability to add appointments and then sync them onto the Google Calendar when in Wi-Fi zones is something that will be a great help because I don’t have to be stuck with lugging around a heavy paper diary that only has limited space and ability to edit, and doesn’t restrict me to being near my desk when getting a phone call and having to check my appointments on the Xth of June.
3. Social Media – monitoring, small responses
As many of us do, I spend a fair bit of time monitoring, interacting, reading, creating and saving a lot of information on/from/to the Social Media-sphere and as we all know this can become more and more time consuming the more involved you get.
With the myriad of SM sites out there for us to choose from, it’s too hard for one person to keep up with all of them, let alone their chosen selection, without having too much “down time” during their day.
Desktop Apps like TweetDeck or Seesmic and browser-based aggregators like Threadsy save you a lot of time by allowing you to add your social news streams into the one convenient place, with most supporting the reply / repost / forward / comment features of the sites they’re pulling the feed from.
The downside to these programs are many but are beyond the scope of this article to discuss. Suffice it to say that, despite these programs being designed to ease the burden of keeping up with several sites all over the internet but putting them in one place, they’re still operating on your computer where it’s all-too-easy to either have them running or have them available at the click of a mouse button.
My idea of utilising the iPad for this purpose is just the same as the first two, and indeed is the underlying purpose for all of my points: It gets you off your work computer, (keeping that purely for constructive purposes), and gets you onto a device that takes on the air of being the central consumption device for these services.
Reading, replying to and consuming social media streams on the iPad may take a little getting used to, but with so many major SM sites having their own Apps to go on there, and so many aggregator services in the same boat, there’s bound to be a way for you to make a minor modification to your SM time schedule by switching to the iPad semi-exclusively for your day-to-day SM fix.
I’ll be doing this for two reasons – one being that I’m extremely easily distracted and two because I’m really easily distracted. If there’s spelling or grammar errors in text, it takes me forever to read something because I just can’t get past the errors. If I have sounds and popups telling me I’ve got new messages, I can’t concentrate until I know what the message was and I’ve cleared it or responded, and that just won’t do when I’m in the middle of some streak of creative awesome.
4. RSS – Monitoring, filtering & reading upon waking / sleep
Personally, I’m not a great fan of RSS, however I’ve recently come to the realization that there’s several different ways of having it delivered, and my favourite so far is to sign up to RSS by email.
Truthfully this could be a tie-in to my #1 point, but I thought that this was more of a sub-point deserving its own attention.
RSS feeds are a wonderful way to get the quality content from your favourite websites without having to actually physically navigate to each site to consume their new posts. The newest material is delivered to you to either an RSS application or to your email inbox (or in a browser, such as Safari).
Around mid-2009 I got myself a desktop app to manage several RSS feeds that I wanted to keep up with without having to bookmark and individually view each website – the trouble was that I was receiving constant updates whenever content was published on the sites, and several of the sites published 10+ times per day! I simply couldn’t keep up with them all.
Recently, however, I discovered that Mozilla’s Thunderbird has the ability to handle rss feeds separately to the regular email inbox folders, so I’ve tentatively started subscribing to a couple of blogs I follow in this setup.
It is my hope that with the recently launch of iPhone OS 4.0 and its subsequent installation on the iPads later in the year, the totally revamped Mail App will be able to have a similar set up to Thunderbird and hence can be used almost exclusively for browsing the articles I find relevant, again removing another task from my workstation to a portable device that can download the content and deliver it wherever I am in need of a bit of reading.
5. Mobile – Note taking, mind-mapping / brainstorming, list writing / keeping
Probably the most important thing for me is the portability of the device. Sure, it’s not as small / light / convenient as the iPhone, but as I mentioned earlier it’s going to be a hell-of-a-lot more comfortable for note taking, typing and generally interacting with the device than the iPhone is.
Something I’ve been suffering from is a general ‘daze’ in the way my mind is working – I’ve developed a strange short-to-mid-term memory loss that comes-and-goes and is non-exclusive to any particular topic which isn’t a good thing because I’m one of those people who can remember the lyrics to almost any song he’s ever heard but can’t remember to turn the kitchen light off when leaving for work, or to remember that my wife started a dance class straight after work one night and I called her work when she didn’t come home for two hours after her normal time…
The iPad’s Notes App has been extended from the iPhone to cater for the larger screen real estate, as have other core Apps. This is great because they work in much the same way, (so I’m led to believe), so it keeps a certain level of familiarity about them so people used to Mac products or the iPhone Apps can start using them straight away, making use of the little add-ons and tricks employed on ‘sidebars’ etc.
I guess this isn’t really a reason that will help with time-management or with the business, except to say that I’ll rarely have an excuse not to remember to take notes or anything like that. It’s more something that I need because my brain is so scattered than something that could help many people who aren’t in a similar situation.
Final Thoughts…
Really, I wrote this post for myself; to remind myself of the core reasons behind me wanting to get the iPad, so I didn’t lose focus on the true goal I’ve set for myself when I get my home office finished before the end of the year and I really knuckle down in getting self-reliant.
If you enjoyed the points I’ve got here or have any other ideas for how it could help boost productivity and lessen distraction, please leave your comments below. Nay-sayers are welcome, but please be kind – I’m still new to the blogosphere and this is merely an opinion piece, not an informative or educational one.
Regards,
Laneth Sffarlenn.
