Smart Phones and Routines

I haven't posted here in about a week.  The reason is because my routine has been thrown off.

As you may have noticed, if you've been reading my posts, a lot of my news comes from Yahoo! sources.  And that started because of a pattern I adopted while checking email accounts.  I have an account with mail.com, and I would check it.  There are a few news links on the sign-in page there.  The I would go to the my.yahoo page, to check my Yahoo! email.  And the news feed on Yahoo! was better (in my opinion).  So it came to be that I would get my "news update" from Yahoo each evening.

This continued, even after switching almost all of my email to GMail.  I continued to check my mail.com account, then go to Yahoo! ... not to check email, but simply to get the news.  Most days, I would not even log in on the Yahoo! site, but would simply scroll through their news feed.

A week or so ago, I discovered a mail.com app for my smart phone.  I was checking for a particular email that I was hoping would come through, and the app made sense -- because I could check the account on my phone without having to go through the web browser.  So I installed that app, and I've been getting all of my email messages on my phone.

And that has disrupted my routine.  I would check email, go to Yahoo! for news, and find something to write about in the process.  Now I'm getting email on my phone, and sometimes I never even make it to Yahoo! for the news feed -- because checking email was the "trigger" that led me to the news items.

I have heard that mobile technology is where everyone is going ... that there will be fewer desktop computers and far more tablets, notebooks, and other portable devices.  There are enough things that I do (and need to do) on a desktop or laptop unit that it is hard for me to envision the change.  And yet, perhaps I just had my first taste of it.  With the smart phone getting all of my mail, it has disrupted my routine and changed how I do things.

It's subtle.  It's a small thing.  But my routine has changed, and it has done so because of a phone app.  Once we have an app for that, we change.