My smart phone is making me dumber.
(Cue the jokes about it being hard to tell.)
But seriously, I watched a video about millennials in the workplace over the holidays, and it got 
me thinking about how much I am around my phone. Turns out, it’s a lot.
Do I really need to respond to emails while I am at a red light?
Do I really need to check LinkedIn (or ESPN, Twitter, and Instagram for that matter) while I am walking my dog?
Do I really need to clean up my calendar on the elevator?
In this quest to multitask and be ultra-productive, I think my relationship with my phone has swung the other way. There is plenty of research out there suggesting the human brain is bad at multi-tasking, and I can attest this is true in my case. In trying to always occupy my mind, I have crowded out my ability to just be still and think.
Not only that, but over-relying on my phone has stopped me from actually thinking about rudimentary tasks.
I don’t know how to get anywhere because I use my maps app all the time. I just tap the address in my calendar and go where Siri tells me to.
I never could do math in my head, but now I don’t even try because I have a calculator in my hand at all times.
Like I said, instead of making me smarter, I am headed in the other direction.
(As an aside, I received an Apple Watch for my birthday last year, but it is now going back in the box permanently. I thought I would be able to check messages discretely with it on my wrist—and thus not have to pull out my phone—but every time I do, someone asks, “Do you have to be somewhere?” I thought the watch would help me be more polite but in fact it makes me seem ruder. Dumb and rude—not a combination I am going for!)
I made a New Year’s resolution not to bring my phone into meetings as a way to be more respectful to people with whom I am meeting, and to be more present and engaged while I am there. But I decided to take it a step further—my phone stays in my pocket more than it is in my hand or on my desk now—and I can already see the dividends. Just letting my mind rest, and wander, has led me to remember things on my to-do list that got lost in the clutter. It has given me new ideas about how we should go about our business in 2017. And it has given me space to ponder the big questions we face in commercial real estate this year:
- Will corporate relocations to North Texas continue? Or will companies start to view Dallas-Fort Worth as crowded, expensive, or tapped out from an employee perspective?
- Can we get to six million square feet of absorption again? 2015 was a banner year, and I did not expect we would get close to that in 2016, but we did. Can we do it again this year?
- Will construction costs continue to escalate at the same rate they have in years past, or will they finally flatten?
- What affect, if any, will the rise in interest rates have on our business this year?
- And most importantly, which company out there will want to hire KDC to develop a build-to-suit office for them?
So, if you see me driving around town looking lost, you can bet I am thinking about all of the above with my phone in the glove compartment. I might be a little slower to respond to some emails, but hopefully I’m better off for it. And, I will report back later in the year if this helps me come up with any of these answers.
PS If you have an answer to my last question, you can still call me on my cell phone. Definitely worth interrupting my wandering thoughts!
Colin Fitzgibbons is a vice president at KDC.
