We get it: life’s hectic. You’ve got meetings to attend, deadlines to make, pints to squeeze in, gym sessions to do and long, meandering introductions to skip. But thank goodness for the tech people: benevolent boffins hell-bent on designing world-class, refreshingly simple solutions to streamline your life. Here’s to those guys.
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1. The Transforming Bag
The thing with most bags is, they’re just one thing. They don’t change enough. They’re the same size at night as they are in the day, and for the busy person on the go, that just won’t cut it. Because the really busy person on the go has different NEEDS, and they don’t necessarily know when their needs will shift. Cue the Piorama, which evolves from a day bag suitable for everyday use to a hardy medium-sized bag you’ll want to take with you when you venture into The Wilderness (a three-night city break in a Bath Premier Inn).
2. The Gizmo Connector
Set up to bridge the gap between your phone, computer and tablet, Pushbullet shares notifications across all of them. Get an alert on your computer when your phone rings, get a buzz on your phone when your computer’s finished downloading that big update, and effortlessly share files and links between everything rather than going through the rigamarole of sending yourself an email and then immediately getting excited because you received an email.
3. The Contacts Manager
If you’re like most people, the address book on your phone is a complete mess. Dozens of people have the surname “Tinder”, there are multiple entries for the same person, “House” is listed as your Mum’s surname and it’s all just a bit of a shambles. Cloze brings your contacts from everywhere together and makes sense of them, along with extra features like letting you know your last point of contact and alerting you if you haven’t spoken to particular people in a while. By all means continue to let friendships die, but at least do so deliberately.
4. The Connected Keyboard
Das Keyboard takes the most unexciting part of a computer and supercharges it. It’s the first of its kind to exist connected to the cloud, and every key offers additional, customisable functions – it can tell you how far through a task you are, when you’ve received emails from certain contacts, whether it’s raining outside, if your washing machine is finished yet… the list goes on. You almost don’t need the computer it’s attached to! (You do.)
5. The Sleepy Spectacles
The silly thing with working late into the night is that it can make you unable to sleep. You end up with whatever you were working on racing back and forth through your brain, and you blast so much crazy electric light into your eyes that your melatonin levels drop, making you feel exhausted but unable to nod off. Filtering blue light using lenses like these ones from Cyxus will give you a great Clark Kent vibe and they’ll also help you catch those Zs when you get a chance.
