The Web Lifestyle

I went to bed the other day, try­ing to get some rest since I haven’t been get­ting much of that lately but it turned out to be impos­si­ble. A fire of pas­sion was lit in my mind. The kind of fire that turns your brain into a never end­ing think­ing machine and gives your eyes a look sharper then the edge of a knife. You know that fire.

The con­cept that trans­formed my mind into this hur­ri­cane of thoughts was a con­cept by the famous Bill Gates, the so called web lifestyle. I have read about this con­cept in his book Busi­ness @ the Speed of Thought and I find it fascinating.

Gates is, just like Steve Jobs, a great vision­ary with a habit of accu­rately pre­dict­ing the future. In a speech 7 years ago, he stated that “busi­ness is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last fifty,” and I believe it already has.

Now more than ever, busi­ness is about speed. Speed often seems to walk hand in hand with tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs allow­ing for shorter busi­ness processes. Since I am of the new and upcom­ing gen­er­a­tion, tech­nol­ogy and speed have been in my life since early ages but many of todays busi­ness men and women have not had much expe­ri­ence with tech­nol­ogy and there­fore I believe that many of them have a prob­lem under­stand­ing the impor­tance of it.

Gates writes in his book about some­thing he calls the dig­i­tal ner­vous sys­tem of a cor­po­ra­tion. This dig­i­tal ner­vous sys­tem is the back­bone which allows for infor­ma­tion to flow not only inside the cor­po­ra­tion but also from the out­side. The effec­tive­ness of the ner­vous sys­tem deter­mines the health of the cor­po­ra­tion, thus a healthy cor­po­ra­tion is one that lets employ­ees and cus­tomers access and share infor­ma­tion at the speed of thought, with a sim­ple click of a button.

But my thoughts are not about the ner­vous sys­tem. You see, the ner­vous sys­tem relies not only on the cor­po­ra­tions abil­ity to pro­vide the fea­tures but also on the indi­vid­u­als abil­ity to adapt to the web lifestyle. Now, take another look at those words and let them sink in for a while. Web lifestyle. My inter­pre­ta­tion of this con­cept is seem­ingly sim­ple; always acces­si­ble, always access­ing. The tools are all around us, the web infra­struc­ture is greater than ever and the pos­si­bil­i­ties are endless.

Get­ting work done fast is many times a direct result of fast infor­ma­tion flow, and that is what the web lifestyle is all about. Bring­ing effec­tive­ness to the peo­ple. Going from thoughts to actions in sec­onds rather than min­utes or hours. Cars get faster, inter­net con­nec­tions get faster and so do busi­ness processes. The future is already here.

The web lifestyle is some­thing I have grown up with and live by. I own a Mac­Book because of its sim­plic­ity and abil­ity to get the job done. 1400 wisely invested dol­lars that make me acces­si­ble through MSN, AIM, Skype, email and so forth. iCal keeps me orga­nized and I have wire­less inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity wher­ever I may go.

But that’s not enough. My .mac account allows me to sync all my data between dif­fer­ent devices and access it online, all in a sim­ple man­ner. My cal­en­dars, shared files, con­tacts, emails and book­marks are all avail­able for me from any­where in the world. All this is done auto­mat­i­cally with­out even the need of push­ing a button.

Cell phones no longer only makes us acces­si­ble by phone 24/7. They also allow us to send and receive emails from any­where in the world. Smart phones are even bet­ter, giv­ing us the abil­ity to do all this but also edit our cal­en­dars on the fly, or even com­pile and read doc­u­ments. We’ve got all the tools we need.

Paper and pen­cils are things of the past. Processes that ten years ago took days or even weeks can today be com­pleted in a mat­ter of sec­onds. It is all about adapt­ing to the web lifestyle.

I am not merely talk­ing about tech­nol­ogy here. It’s about infor­ma­tion flow and how tech­nol­ogy can be used to max­i­mize effec­tive­ness in our every day lives.

We only live until the day we die. Why not make the most of it?
Adapt to the web lifestyle and get more work done in less time.

“The most mean­ing­ful way to dif­fer­en­ti­ate your com­pany from your com­pe­ti­tion … is to do an out­stand­ing job with infor­ma­tion. How you gather, man­age, and use infor­ma­tion will deter­mine whether you win or lose.”
– Bill Gates

• Day 3: Mac Time-Tracking Apps
• Day 13: Safari 5 First Impressions
• Day 16: Free­lance Best Practices
• iPhone Apps Dis­cov­ered in Jan­u­ary 2010