Friday, 14 February 2020

Getting To Grips With Everyday Technology

Image Credit: Janeb13 on Pixabay
{This is a collaborative post}

If you find that you frequently struggle to understand what you are meant to do with the technology in your life, you are not alone. A lot of people feel this way, and, likely, it will only continue to get more and more confusing and frustrating as time goes on and technology becomes more and more advanced. Of course, there is plenty that you can do to ensure that you understand it better and that you are getting to grips with it better, so that is a good thing to bear in mind. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the essential things you can do to make this process a lot easier, so that much of your life is going to be a lot easier too. Let’s take a look at this in some detail.

Simplifying Your Usage
First of all, you should bear in mind that you only have to use technology to the degree that you want to. You should not feel as though you have to use it any more than that. If you force yourself to do that, you will only end up being more stressed, and that is not the direction we want to be moving in here. So the first thing to do is to look at the technology you use in your life every day, and ask yourself whether it might be necessary or whether you might be able to do away with it instead.

If you can apply this kind of rigorous vision to all the technology in your home, you will already find that your usage of technology is much simpler indeed. So that is something to be aware of - and likewise, you should make sure that you are not over-complicating things by trying to use as much technology as possible. If you can do that, you will find that technology becomes much less stressful over time.


Taking a Course
If there is some technology in your life which you want to use, and want to make better use of, then one of the best ways to do that is to take a course in that specific thing. If you take a look around in your local area, you are bound to find that there is a course you can take for any kind of technology that you might be interested in learning more about. It could be using a computer better, your smartphone, or whatever else - there is bound to be a course in it. You might only need to do this for a couple of sessions to get to the point where you are happy with your usage of it, so you needn’t make this into a bigger deal than it is. But it could help you to live more harmoniously with the technology that you do use regularly.



Image Credit: Terimakasiho on Pixabay

Asking Friends & Family
If you are concerned that you are not really understanding something to do with technology, one way to approach this instead is to ask around with your friends and family for some advice on the matter. You might be surprised at how many people are willing to help you if you need them to, and it will often be the case that all you really need is to talk it through with someone once to get to grips with that thing. Of course, not all people will be equally willing, so you might need to be a little careful with who you ask. But generally, your loved ones will be more than happy to help you out here, and that might be all you need for a little support with understanding technology.

Using It
One of the biggest mistakes that people tend to make is that they think they can learn the technology in question without really using it. However, that is not going to be a good way to approach things, and you will find that you want to make sure that you are going to use the technology as much as possible if you want to learn it well. Using it is the only thing you really need to do, and in many ways, it is a case of ensuring that you are simply experimenting with the technology so that you can get more excited about it and learn its ins and outs. If you are learning how to use your new computer, for instance, then the only way is to spend a lot of time playing around with it, so just do that and you are going to get further than you might have thought possible. What’s more, you will probably find you enjoy it more than you might think too.

Keeping the Costs Down
One of the major concerns that many people have around technology is the financial side of things - and with good reason. Much of the technology we have to use in our everyday lives is, after all, pricier than we would like it to be, and it is going to be important that we each find ways to reduce those costs as much as possible. Keeping the costs down on technology can be trickier than you might think, but as long as you work at it and you try several different avenues you should be able to find that you can make it work surprisingly easily.

To illustrate how simple this can be, let’s look at the example of a mobile phone. You probably have one of these, with a contract that you have to pay each month. Clearly, you are going to want to make sure that the contract is as low as possible, while still giving you all that you need every month. That is a hard balance to find, but often it is a case of merely shopping around and trying different providers out and different tariffs. If you look at the smarty network UK, for instance, you should find that there is an option there for you to use the amount of data that you want to use - and you can even save money on future bills if you don’t use it all. That kind of flexibility can be really helpful if you are not sure how much data you are going to use in the future.

That’s just one way of keeping your technology costs down. As we saw at the start of this article, there is also always the option of simply reducing and simplifying the amount of technology you use in the first place. All of this is going to help you spend less, and that, in turn, will mean that you are going to get a lot less stressed out when it comes to using technology in your life.

Enjoying It
The more that you can learn to actively enjoy the technology that you do use, the more likely it is that you will get to grips with it much easier. For that reason, you should think about using only that tech which really seems to draw you in and forget about the rest as much as possible, unless some necessity means you have to use something occasionally. For the most part, enjoyment is what you should be aiming for, so try to find something that you feel that you can enjoy a lot more than other items. Do that, and you will find that it really does make a difference in how you experience technology and what you generally think of it too.

Keep up to Date?
There is a big question hanging over all of this regarding whether or not you should feel it is necessary to keep up to date with all of the latest changes all of the time. The truth is that there are so many updates and upgrades available at all times that you need to make sure your technology is upgraded to the point where it is most functional - but you should not feel as though you have to keep getting the latest thing just for the sake of it. That is something that a lot of people get stuck in, but it is really unnecessary, and you should just make sure that you are keeping up to date to the level that you want to. Of course, it might take you a while to work out what that level is, but that is all part of it.
Security
A final note on something that is very important these days: security. You do need to make sure that you are protecting yourself when you use technology as if you are not careful someone could take your personal data and do something pretty nefarious with it. So be sure to focus most of all on your security if you want to make the most of your everyday technology.