Now that smartphones are powerful enough to feel like small computers, many people have ditched their desktop and laptop computers. For most of those people, a smartphone meets all of their needs when they just check email and use social media.
However, if you’re running a business, researching, or need to give your full attention to online matters, it’s best to have at least a laptop if you don’t have a desktop computer.
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Small screens make it harder to work
If all you’re doing is scrolling through your social media feed, the size of your screen probably isn’t a big deal. On the contrary, if you’re trying to get any kind of work done, a small screen will make you less productive.
When you have a small screen, you can only view one application at a time and see only a small portion of whatever you’re looking at unless you pinch and zoom or scroll horizontally sometimes.
On a small screen, it takes a lot of effort to get the full view of any webpage, email, image, or document, and since it’s not being viewed all at once, the experience is disjointed.
The other problem with working on a mobile phone is the quality drop in communication. Mobile devices encourage multi-tasking and shallow responses even to communications that require more attention. It’s hard to provide quality responses to important emails from a mobile device.
Responses are generally short and that’s because it’s nearly impossible to systematically respond to an in-depth email from a phone.
What looks like a few sentences on a laptop looks like a wall of text on a phone. On a small screen, it’s difficult to keep scrolling back to the original message to take in all the content and then provide a worthwhile reply to cover every important point. That’s something you can only do effectively on a desktop or laptop.
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You need a laptop to type documents
It’s not hard to see why typing documents on a phone would be a frustrating experience. No matter how fast you can type on a flat screen, and no matter how good you are at swiping to text, it’s always going to be slower than typing on a real keyboard.
You can use voice to text on your phone for convenience, but not when you also need to format your document and make it perfect.
Voice-to-text is fine for emails, but it’s not okay for creating important documents. With the exception of signing documents, to create and format professional documents, you need a laptop with a physical keyboard.
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A laptop is more powerful overall
While today’s smartphones are more powerful than ever, with fast processors and amazing graphics, they still can’t compete with a laptop. If you do anything that requires significant computing resources, you won’t last long trying to use your cellphone.
At best, you can probably get away with using a tablet for your main computer if you connect a wireless keyboard and mouse, but that won’t work with a smartphone.
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Smartphones encourage multitasking
No matter how many people praise the skill of multitasking, it’s not actually beneficial. What people call multitasking is actually rapid task switching. Nobody can perform multiple tasks simultaneously.
You can only switch between tasks, and the art of multitasking is simply switching back and forth between several tasks on a whim, sometimes hundreds of times per day. The result is that all tasks are completed with mediocre results, and nothing is done thoroughly, not to mention the exhaustion.
When you only have a smartphone, you’ll be tempted to multitask no matter what you’re doing. For instance, you could be emailing your boss, and get distracted by social media for a while and forget some of your points.
Or you could be engaged in critical work while being constantly distracted by push notifications flying in left and right. You’re unlikely to ignore all of those notifications, and if you’re trying to get anything finished on time, it will probably be late.
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Files are easier to store and retrieve on a laptop
When you use a device for work, you’ll need to create, save, and access files often. These tasks are much easier on a laptop than on a smartphone.
Files are stored on the hard drive either way, but smartphones make them hard to access compared to using a finder window on a computer.
Smartphones are nice, but laptops are king
Using a cell phone to get some work done is convenient, but don’t rely on them fully. Get yourself a laptop with a decent-sized screen and enough power to keep you productive throughout the day.
