On Smartphone Addiction, eCommerce and Coffee
Some interesting pieces that I read last week:
Lately, I realise I have been spending quite a lot of time on my phone. While I do most of my reading on the phone, I am getting fed up of mindlessly falling for the cues it keeps generating to keep me glued to it. It’s easy to get lost in the labyrinthine of linked stories. Searching for how to reduce my smartphone usage brought me to this article by Wendy Wood, a social psychologist whose book Good Habits, Bad Habits I am currently reading. Wood recommends adding layers of friction between you and your smartphone, i.e. bring so much tedium to getting to your phone that you have to think twice about accessing it. ‘To curb that cellphone habit, try disrupting cues by turning it off, burying it deep in your backpack or leaving it at home. It also helps to replace the habit with an activity that’s enjoyable,’ she writes. She also mentions that on average, Americans check their phones 52 times day. I fear that I do it more often. So I will try some of her recommendations, including, for example, leaving my phone in the other room while reading a book. The effort of fetching it might delay the need for instant gratification.
eCommerce has gained even more significance in the current times. However, if we look at the overall eCommerce penetration across all categories, it’s still quite low. Despite that, here is a slightly old (from 2018), but still relevant analysis by Benedict Evans of why that’s bound to change. For a start, initial assumptions about internet access and speeds have significantly inverted with better connectivity and penetration of smartphone. So, the building blocks are in place for accelerated growth. Second, new building blocks of machine learning and crypto currencies are beginning to become applicable. These will be essential as more and more eCommerce queries shift from desktop to phone and from text search to voice commands. As a result, new successive layers of meaning will be added to our search queries thereby helping us buy better (and more). Early use of predictive analytics is already visible in healthcare where some of the early research is taking place; this will soon penetrate to other areas. Now is perhaps the best time to study eCommerce and the resulting opportunities, for the ongoing pandemic has nudged us all to overcome any initial hesitation to try eCommerce for categories that we wouldn’t have previously considered.
Coffee, the cocaine of the masses, is a shared love, a productivity enhancer, a sleep disrupter, and an important cog of the capitalist wheel. This essay in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik covers all these facets of modern day coffee culture. ‘An alternative to alcohol, coffee was central to teetotalling Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages, and spread from Turkey to points west, where the coffeehouse became the cockpit of the Enlightenment, and even up to little Iceland, where it became the national sacrament,’ he writes explaining the rise of coffee as the world’s most favoured drink. But alongside came the divide between the growers and consumers, the peasants and the workers — both exploited by capitalism. They were driven to grow as cheap as they could, we were encouraged to drink as much as we could. The concept of free coffee at work emerged, despite little to no proof that coffee actually improved productivity. Whether you agree or not, read the essay to get a sweeping view of the many dimensions of coffee and its role as a ‘first naïve emissary of internationalism’. A fascinating read indeed.
A quote that I read last week:
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.
