Slower Computer, Higher Productivity
While good enough computing maybe the future of the tech industry, the unfortunate failure of one modern machine has seriously improved productivity in an age of constant distractions.
My MacBook died. Again. The nice man at Apple Care tells me it’s a hard drive failure. Again. You might think I lob the machine around, no consideration, just chuck it in my bag – but no; for the last month it’s been happily sitting, safe and sound on a laptop stand on my desk. So I’m sitting there, listening to Leo Laporte and the machine just stops responding, pin wheel and everything. I hard-reset it an no OS X for me. Great. No machine, and to top it off as of next week it’s exam season for me.
Fortunately, being sat on the desk full time, I have a Time Machine backup of the drive so my files, in particular my class notes, are safe. With any luck the restore functionality works wonderfully and I’ll have my machine back in no time at all and restore it right over the top. In the mea- time, however, I’m on my Blue and White PowerMac G3. For comparison: Black MackBook, 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB DDR RAM, OS X Leopard, vintage 2007 vs PowerMac G3, 450 MHz o/c, 512 MB SD RAM, OS X Tiger (slowly), vintage 1999. The machine is 10 years old. While its a beautiful machine and my first Mac (kept for sentimental value), obsolete is a generous way to describe it.
Yet, my productivity is up.
As I mentioned, it’s exam season for me right now and my revision has been almost non-existent; I am easily distracted by the vast amounts of interesting content to be found on the information superhighway. Not being able to open more than 4 tabs in my browser without it slowing to a state where I can no longer scroll coupled with a total inability to watch video at a frame rate higher than 4 frames per second has made me really consider the way I work with my computer.
Email drives me, for a student I get a fair amount, and as such I really appreciate a good desktop client, like Mail.app on OS X – but there is no way I’m going to set that up on this machine, it’s only temporary and I have GBs of the stuff which will have to be synchronised before the barely usable spotlight search can provide anything like accurate results. My new found tab limitation has really killed my obsession with this killer app of the 21st century.
My two favorite time killers, Digg and Slashdot, are also stemmed by my browser’s limitations. Where as before I’d browse down Digg or Slashdot and open 50 pages of trivial information, audio, photos and media. Now I have to seriously consider every page. Video of dancing hamster? No point. Photo stream of worlds cutest cats? Only if I want to reboot the machine two photos in. Want three different options on a particular current affairs issue? Not all at once. Flipping back and fourth to open links, it’s just not the way I browse the web. I like to cue my content up.
So I spent the entire day on the university website doing quizzes and practice tests, reading materials and browsing the student discussion boards for tips and reviews of exam questions. Not only do I feel like I’ve made serious progress in the last few hours I’ve unlocked reams of additional content to review which should help me tie up my studies over the next few days.
But make note: once I realised this old beast could handle one page of text at a time, notice what I had time to do… oh well, maybe I’ll pass next year.