Hypothesis:  Technology is making people lazier.  Here’s a simple equation:  average work pace * Time = Work output.  Someone can work at a certain pace to produce an amount of work after an amount of time.  People will often use work outputs to gauge when they have completed a day’s worth of work.  The problem is people have been using the work outputs of past generations as their references for their own outputs.  Thanks to technology, our work pace can reach larger magnitudes than previous generations.  This means we can achieve the same work outputs as previous generations but in less time.  Therefore we put less effort over time because technology multiplies it to match that of our predecessors.  

When my dad was in college, if he needed a scientific article on a certain subject, he would scour the archives of his university’s library.  If they were organized by subject, he would have to look through the stacks of journals to identify which ones were reputable, published within the last ten years, and pertained to his specific topic.  Today, by searching keywords from my library’s online homepage, I can obtain a list of peer-reviewed, recently published scientific articles that are related to my research topic within minutes.   

The problem is that rather than using technology’s boost to increase our work outputs, we use it to decrease the amount of actual time we spend being productive.  Even though it takes ten minutes of actual work to pull up a list of scientific articles, it sometimes takes an hour.  Let’s say at 2 PM someone sits down to obtain the list.  But first, they check Facebook.  They find a friend had posted a link to Reddit where they later find a link to a YouTube video and before they know it, it’s 2:45 PM.  We need to stop using technology to accomplish the same amount of work with less effort and start figuring how to use it so we can accomplish more in a day’s worth of work.