When time-saving gadgets becomes time-stealers

Technology is supposed to save time and make us more productive but sometimes it accomplishes just the opposite. Steve Ranger picks the top three time-wasting offenders.

A friend of mine - who perhaps understandably wishes to remain nameless - recently spend a weekend organising his vast collection of USB memory sticks, clearing off old documents and such like.

Now memory sticks are great things - but not so great that spring-cleaning them should take up a whole weekend. After all, gadgets are meant to save time and effort, not create more work.

Unfortunately quite a few technologies conspire to steal the day away - things that get sold to us as time-savers but actually end up eating up more time than they should.

I don't mean time-wasting in terms of your operating system crashing and deleting six hours of hard work (although there is plenty of software that will do that quite happily if you want it to). This is more to do with technologies that somehow suck up time like hungry miniature digital black holes.

A quick and extremely non-scientific poll at Silicon Towers (on a day when we weren't all working from home) came up with the top three time-wasting techs - although I'm sure there are plenty more out there. Feel free to let us know about your nominees by posting a Reader Comment below or emailing us at editorial@silicon.com.

In no particular order here are our top three pet peeves.

Instant messaging

Faster than an email and twice as annoying when you are busy doing something else. OK, so it's great for getting that quick query sorted without having to pick up the phone or walk around the office but unlike email it's hard to switch it off and ignore it.

Which means that every time someone zings a message at you to 'make the tea' or 'checkout what Smith is wearing today' or something similar, you lose track of what you're doing and have to start again - which then means everything takes twice as long as without IM.

What's web 2.0?

Read all about web 2.0 in our Cheat Sheet.

Digital music

I reckon I spend quite a large proportion of my commute untangling the headphones of my MP3 player. But that's not the worst - ripping the CDs onto the laptop to be transferred onto the MP3 player takes ages, especially if your laptop dies and you have to rebuild that collection.

On top of that you have the tyranny of the podcast. I'm signed up to lots of podcasts, mainly because they are brilliant. But whereas before I could miss a show on the radio and feel sad and then move on, now I have it sitting on my iPod.

That's great because I never have to miss anything but also a disaster because I now feel I have to listen to everything. Which means spending hours ploughing through podcasts which in turn becomes a chore - up there with ironing and washing the dishes. The same thing could apply to reading all the news from your RSS feeds, of course...

Social networking

It's great to be part of the web 2.0 phenomenon and set up networks of colleagues and friends but why does it have to take so long? Most people I know now spend more time fancying up their Facebook page than actually talking to their real friends.

Now, the larger point here is not a Luddite one about the technologies - it's about our usage of them. Our instant messaging woes would evaporate if there was a well understood etiquette around when and how to use it - and the same applies to many of the other technologies, whether you are using them in the office or outside work. Blame the time-waster, not the technology.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm in a bit of a hurry. I have 39 hours of podcasts still to listen to this week...