PCs Are Over. Small Businesses Should Shift to the iPad Right Away and Boost Productivity!

From ACIDHOUSE, INC., this is Tetsuya Ashida.

What image do you have of an office desk worker's job?

You probably picture sitting in front of a PC, glaring at the screen, answering the phone, taking notes, making documents, and replying to emails.

But I think this is a way of working we should throw away if we want to raise productivity from here on.

And when you take a scalpel to the old ways, you notice that many of them waste time and effort.

This time I want to take up this topic.

Check the content in text

Aren't PCs already white elephants?

It's one thing if you're doing specialized, heavy processing like design, video editing, programming, or accounting, but for ordinary desk work (just email and making documents), I think they're no longer necessary.

Smartphones and tablets already exceed the performance of PCs from a few years ago, and don't you think it's irrational to do desk work on a big, bulky PC whose performance goes to waste?

In fact, Horiemon (Takafumi Horie), Katsuaki Sato, and others have stopped using PCs and work with smartphones alone.

Meanwhile, you see salespeople lugging around rather heavy-looking Windows laptops.

I feel quite sorry for them, and though it's not just the weight of the PC, they seem worn out and their productivity seems to be dropping.

It's also quite common for them to return to the office after their rounds and send emails or make documents on a desktop PC.

The wasted time of travel plus overtime is a shame too.

In that case, it would be far more efficient to handle those tasks on a smartphone or tablet and go straight home.

I think we should let go of the fixed idea that "PC = work tool".

Wouldn't it be good to use outsourcing too?

"But work really has to be on a PC..."

You may still think that. Then how about outsourcing the tasks that require a PC?

From the standpoint of focusing your management resources, that would be the smarter approach.

Conversely, I think there could also be companies that take on all such tasks.

Businesspeople's silly impression of smartphones

Well, Japanese people may feel resistance to "working on a smartphone."

"It doesn't look like they're working," "they're playing," "they're slacking off"

Considering that the essence of a smartphone is "a supercomputer you can hold in one hand", seeing it only this way is absurdly rigid thinking, but...

That said, I don't think you want to disrupt harmony unnecessarily either, so a tablet, which has a semi-formal presence, is probably the safer choice to introduce.

The iPad (tablet) fits best

It's more than enough functionally. The screen is large, you can attach a keyboard, and you can use a pencil like a handwritten notebook. And it's light.

In fact, many companies use iPads for sales.

Let's question printing everything out

Now, when I talk about replacing PCs with iPads, this kind of opinion sometimes comes up:

We often print documents, but tablets aren't suited to printing.

I'd like to dig into this at another time, but you should suspect that "trying to proceed the old way, using paper for this and that, is what's lowering productivity".

Paper costs money, leaves no data history, can't be shared, causes misreadings, and so on — it's very inflexible.

Because of that inflexibility, people sometimes go to the trouble of transcribing what they wrote in paper notebooks into digital form, but that is a complete waste of time—so wouldn't it be better to go digital from the start?

There's also the opinion that "sales materials handed to customers must be on paper." That's just old common sense too.

Video is the best presentation material. Paper sales materials are over

Display your sales materials on an iPad, borrow a monitor to project them if needed, and send the materials themselves on the spot via Bluetooth. Attaching them to a separate greeting email afterward is a waste.

If there's a question, you jump to the relevant part of the video and explain.

Turn the meeting itself into video too. Meeting minutes are over

And further, if you record the meeting itself and share it, you don't need minutes or evidence-type documents either.

If you share it not by email but through a business chat system, you don't need the extra greeting preamble.

Shifting to online meetings is even more efficient

If you can hold meetings online, you can cut the round-trip time too. You can even do them anywhere with an internet connection.

Recently in Japan, natural disasters and train accidents involving people have been frequent. With online meetings, you're no longer at the mercy of such external factors.

Summary

Not only this — going forward, there will probably be many opportunities to improve productivity by questioning the tools and methods you always use as a matter of course.

I'd be glad if these ideas for boosting productivity got across even a little.