I want to be a better person, especially a better tech person, since, as a sometime “thought leader” in the space, I’m supposed to set an example. Of course, I never do and only take the long, hard, and necessary look in the mirror as the year draws to a close. I make promises to myself about all the ways I’ll be better in the new year, stacking up a list of resolutions that are improbable and ultimately unattainable. I hope I at least get credit for considering them.
Perhaps if I list them all for you, I’ll feel the shame of not keeping them and do better in 2025.
1. Less time on my phone
I make this promise to myself and those around me every year and stick to it for usually a week. One year, I took a two-week social media break at the end of the year, but, like someone who loses a little weight and then puts more back on, I returned to my phone and social media with even more passion and verve than before.
But the amount of time I spend on my phone is becoming a problem. The other day, TikTok accounted for 48% of my battery usage. That’s bad. And my wife is running out of patience. My attempts at multi-tasking – paying attention to her and the phone simultaneously – are failing.
I could try ending this year and starting 2025 with a 20% reduction in phone and social media time, but then I’ll be at CES 2025, and you know how that goes. The reality is I need my phone to do my job, but I do not need it for all the other stuff. I’m sort of stuck in a vicious cycle of social media posting and then social media checking. The latter is about seeing the notice and approval of thousands of people I do not know. It’s a cycle I long to break.
Look for a similar post next year.
In my attic are boxes of old photos, stacked like monoliths to a bygone era. Sometimes, I brush the dust off the top of a box or two and start rifling through 35-year-old photos, rediscovering memories I thought were lost. This is quite unlike the experience of conducting a search in Google Photos or even Apple‘s Photo app, where I can usually find the collection of images I need.
What I realize is that there’s a whole section of my life that’s digitally undocumented. Apparently, I am not alone – a recent survey by ScanMyPhotos, a service that will, for a price, scan all your old pictures (as well as VHS and films), found that 90% of analog photos are not digitized. That’s a lot of decaying and brittle memories that will likely be lost to time in the next decade or so.
Mitch Goldstone, who runs ScanMyPhotos, has been on my case for years, trying to get me to use and review his service. They send the boxes, and then you package up the photos, and everything gets returned along with your digitized images.
I keep promising myself (and Mitch) that I’ll do this, and yet I don’t, even though I know I will never get the job done myself. Back in the early aughts, I started digitizing my old 8mm video tapes. It was such a massive project that I only got halfway through and have never returned to the project.
Perhaps 2025 is the year I finally take Mitch’s advice. Also, I’m selling tickets for people to come to visit my mountain of photo boxes in 2026.
3. Paying attention to the metrics my Apple Watch and Oura rings capture
Thanks to wearing both the Apple Watch Series 10 and Our 3 smart ring almost 24/7, I have more information about the internal workings of my body than ever before. The details should qualify me, if not for doctor status, then at least residency.
The problem is that I ignore all of this data. I couldn’t tell you how well I slept or my standing heart rate. Am I stressed? Do I sit too often? Who knows?
I track every workout – mostly core – and each long walk with my wife. I know the details of those workouts but not the trends. Sometimes, Apple Watch congratulates me on seven consecutive days of exercise, and I marvel at the medal animation, but I never dig into the details.
I live an unexamined physical life, and I want that to change. In 2025, I want to start digging into the details of my sleep habits and see if I’m hitting a new peak heart rate during workouts. I want to know the full scale of my walking routines. Like, how many miles am I walking a month? I don’t know, but I could. Is my BMI on the right track? After the holidays, I sometimes feel a bit – um – bloated. It’s time to track my weight in these apps and see how they sync up with everything else these systems know about the physical me.
I worry that I’ll still be too busy for this kind of introspection. Isn’t it enough that I work out almost every day? It should be. Still, if I’m going to wear these things, I should be getting more out of them.
I promise by next year, you’ll find I’m still working out and know next to nothing about my physical health.
4. Using my iPad for more than just TV watching
I used to draw on the iPad all the time, but my hectic schedule leaves little time for one of my favorite hobbies., You know what I use the iPad for almost all the time? Watching TV. I stream Sling, Peacock, Netflix, Disney Plus, Hulu, and Amazon Prime TV on it all the time. When I’m working, it’s the screen I like playing in the background. I’m not watching – much – but I hate working at home without the background chatter of coworkers and appreciate how the hum of a game show dampens the silence.
However, the M4-running iPad Pro 13-inch, for example, is an incredibly powerful system. I want to do more. Can I, for instance, use it in place of my Macbook Air M3? I have the excellent Magic keyboard, and even though I can’t run as many app windows as I’d really like, this seems possible.
Also, why not take more notes on the iPad? It can recognize my scribbles and convert them to text. I also could do some serious photo editing on the platform.
At the very least, I’d love to draw on the iPad daily. How do I carve out time to do that in 2025? One answer might be carrying the iPad mini (A17 Pro) with me. It has most of the same capabilities (no right-sized, physical magic keyboard, though). If it and the Apple Pencil Pro are always in my bag, maybe I’ll pull them out of the backpack and leave my phone (and that tantalizing TikTok stream) in my pocket.
I can do this one, right? Maybe.
5. Standardizing on on smart home platform
Installing Google’s latest Nest Learning Thermostat was a harsh reminder of my smart home’s thoroughly confused state. Supporting every platform imaginable in one home is a recipe for disaster or at least dissatisfaction. Forget making automations on scenes when you have a patchwork of intelligent systems.
Considering what I do for a living, it’s embarrassing. Even my family is calling me out on it, especially after we stayed at a friend’s home, which was entirely standardized on Amazon Alexa, where everything just worked. My wife said little about the situation but offered heavy side-eye.
It’s time for me to fix my own smart home and start culling the disparate plugs, lights, and cameras, choose one platform, and begin the upgrade. This worries me a bit, though, because it means I’ll probably choose Google Home (I have zero interest in switching out my two Nest Thermostats) and must remove some of our Alexa smart plugs. That seems like a small thing, but our “First Plug” is one of the few smart home devices my wife recognizes by name. “Alexa, ” she intones, “turn on First Plug,” and our Christmas tree lights spring to life. Imagine her frustration if the one plug she knows by name disappears.
But this is the kind of pain I must endure if I finally want smart home homogeny. And please do not tell me that Matter fixes all this. It has yet to help, and I don’t think it will solve many problems in 2025.
The plan is in place…I’m ready to move on with this in 2025, except I have a smart deadbolt that doesn’t work with Google Home, and if I swap that out, someone here may kill me.
Other things I think about addressing in 2025 but won’t:
- Playing fewer word games (they’re stressing me out)
- Shooting and editing RAW photos (I’m losing so much visual information with JPEGs)
- Clearing out my cloud storage (I’m running out of space everywhere)
Look, try not to judge me. At least I’m thinking about all this. What about you? Feel free to email me with your successful tech resolution efforts. I will be chastened and maybe share some in a future post.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
