For the past few months, I’ve been studying technological ergonomics. Not the kind of ergonomics pertaining to posture or the body but rather how we direct our attention and flow between home technologies.

It’s rare that we use a single device. Most of us working in tech usually own at least a phone and a computer. Because phones can increasingly do what computers do, and the ecosystem binding them grants either the same amount of information, there’s now a functional overlap that makes it difficult to justify having more devices, sometimes even more than one. Technologies like Samsung DeX could even, provided you own a powerful enough phone, make the computer redundant, which I wouldn’t have expected to happen, but here it is.

Functionality alone no longer justifies a lot of tech purchases now. Recently, I’ve bought an iPad for the sole purpose of having a bigger screen to watch movies when traveling without my laptop. Now that my laptop is around a decade old, I’ve been looking to upgrade, but I struggle to see a reason why I should get a laptop when my iPad, with its great M chip, can already fulfill most of what I do with a laptop. Instinctively, I think of what I would lose were I to use only an iPad, such as my filesystem management, my terminal, my photo editing…

…but all of these are not device limitations by themselves but rather workflow choices. Truly I do not need filesystem management for what I’m doing, it’s just the method that I use right now to my ends. Likewise, my photo editing isn’t necessarily incompatible with my iPad, it’s just the tools I use that aren’t straightforwardly accessible on a tablet. Were I to adjust all of these to the iPad, I could use the iPad and lose none of my productivity, aside from the time spent to adapt.

The cost to adapt of course isn’t a trivial decision. If I lose weeks adapting to a new workflow just to use a new device, what does it give me other than these lost weeks? Do I get a productivity boost? Does the hardware give better results? Most of the time, really, no, which is why I haven’t moved fully to the iPad. I just have to deal with the redundancy of owning multiple devices that do the same thing for the time being, and the guilt that comes with since it all equates to useless purchases.

However, I’ve been noticing lately a more subtle kind of advantage that comes from removing redundancy. Take, for example, listening to music. All my devices can stream music and all of my accessories to listen to music are paired to them. My phone, my iPad, my computer, and my watch can all be used to control my listening. This redundancy adds an obstacle in the form of having to move over my listening to another device; when moving from my phone to my computer, I have to pause my song, transfer my headset over in the Bluetooth menu, reopen the song, and press Play.

It isn’t a great annoyance but nevertheless one that I keep noticing. Even playing or stopping music suffers when its interfaces are redundant: I can pause my music on my phone and on my watch. When I play music, my watch’s screen is no longer an analog clock but a progress bar for the music and its associated controls. My watch therefore no longer provides me what I need it for the most, which is telling me the time.

All of these devices trying to provide me with affordances in the name of compatibility and ecosystem is, ironically, making my experience worse. I like ecosystem integration but not to the point where I have five entrypoints that achieves the same, and some are even contextual thereby requiring more cognitive effort to understand when one is appropriate over another.

Fortunately, this can be mitigated with a little craft in device configuration and a little tidying up of the devices you own. I’ve eventually tuned all of it to form an excellently productive workflow that has fully eliminated distractions and interface hinderances without necessarily just turning off notifications, which is what most people think distraction reduction amounts to. I call it System W.

First, let go of duplicates.

Before System W, I owned multiples of virtually every class of device. I owned four phones at the same time, but ascribed to each a purpose so I wouldn’t feel too bad about having so many. I had two tablets, both iPads, with one dedicated for “home use” (e.g., controlling my smart lights) and another mainly for “bed use” and travel (e.g., watching movies). I had four computers, a main one for my day-to-day work, a laptop for travel, a Linux box for self-hosting, and a “toy” laptop from two decades ago for experimentation that must occur outside of my personal devices or else all hell could break loose. I had two smart watches, one that I wore and another that I kept as backup because I use my watch to track vitals which, perhaps unhealthily, helps me cope with my hypochondria; losing any health tracking would create in me more anxiety.

I decided to condense everything to exclusively three devices: a watch, a phone, and a computer. Letting go of the extra watch was perhaps the easiest step because fundamentally I do not feel any less safe without a backup, and I know my watch (the fantastic Apple Watch Ultra) is a beast that can survive a lot. Then, it was letting go of my extra phones; this was a bit harder because having more phones allowed the satisfaction of my constant need to escape technological boredom. Indeed, my main phone is very good and I’ve no reason to switch (and when I do switch, I regret it), but because it loses novelty fast, I feel pressure to switch. I become convinced there is more to other phones that this phone isn’t providing, but I realize each time that I am wrong, and this phone is entirely sufficient.

Finally, the extra computers. Some were easy to let go because they did absolutely nothing most of the time, such as my Linux box and toy computer. My laptop and main computer, however, felt like they had to be because what if I need to travel? I can’t transport my Mac Studio, at least not without all that which is needed to power it and use it abroad. Logically, I could have sold my Mac Studio and kept my laptop, using it as my desktop machine as well, but I ultimately couldn’t as it wasn’t powerful enough to support my quite enormous 5K screen (in itself a regrettable purchase, despite the great amount of workspace it provides me).

To fix this and commit to System W, I bought a replacement laptop from Apple that fully superseded my Mac Studio and my laptop. My new MacBook Pro is more powerful than either in virtually every measure and can use my screen. Combining it with a dock (the wonderful TS5 Plus from CalDigit) effectively transformed the laptop into a beast of a desktop device, and since everything goes through a single cable, there is very little effort in transitioning from desktop use to laptop use when traveling. This solves my computer redundancy.

Then, make each device salient.

Reducing the hardware redundancy is great but the software redundancy remains. All three devices can still control, for instance, my music, and having an interface for each increases the cognitive load in selecting where and also when transitioning between.

The way to approach this first starts with attention and gaze direction. That’s to say, before any device configuration is applied, the principle of directing your gaze from one device to another when appropriate must be understood. Essentially, it boils down to how much cognitive involvement is necessary for a task; the more involvement is needed, and the more time will be taken to resolve a task, the more there is a need to transition to the next device. You always try to keep everything to the lowest possible device in the chain. Let’s take the example of the notification:

You receive a notification on your watch. Assess quickly: What is it? Is it simply a heads-up or something I need to act on? Is it simply replying to someone? Do I need to take action?
1. If it’s simply a heads-up, you don’t have to do anything.
2. If it requires action, open the notification on your phone.
You open the notification on your phone. Start doing what it needs, and start feeling how long it’s taking or the amount of effort involved.
1. If it can be done in under five minutes, keep it on your phone.
2. If it’s beginning to reach over five minutes, move it to your computer.
You move the task to your computer. You have reached the end stage of System W.

It’s simple, admittedly, but quite effective when you apply it. I first noticed its benefits in my productivity when I found myself much less distracted by notifications; seeing a notification quickly on my watch allows me to make a quick judgement on its salience and without all the other distractions that can be on a bigger screen. Too many times, I got a notification on my phone and looked at it, but then noticed another notification or something else occurring on the screen that got me distracted for unnecessarily longer.

I took the example of the notification, but it effectively extends to everything else. This is where you start configuring your devices in light of the workflow it creates. For example, I disabled music controls on my Apple Watch since my music is listened to almost exclusively from my phone. If I need to control my music, I control it exclusively from where it comes from to avoid starting my gaze too high up in System W.

The greatest benefit however was in work planning and tracking. I’ve grown to the stage of adulthood where you can no longer rely on working memory to power through your life; it has grown so complex and time-dependent that I have to use boring things like calendars (kid me had no care for school agendas) and reminders. Yet, I found myself struggling to use either because it required me to go to my computer to open up the program that configured them. In System W, I moved everything to as low as possible in the device chain; I now setup events and reminders through Siri on my Watch and I am now much more capable of keeping track of what I have to do.

In fact, I would consider the voice assistant possibly the greatest boon to System W, or really any kind of home technology ergonomics. The process of using a mouse and keyboard (or fingers on a phone) to create a calendar event or a reminder has incredible distractive potential because of everything else that occurs as you go through the motions; your voice, on the other hand, is used as you do other things and is thereby much less capable of getting you distracted. If you haven’t been using a voice assistant in your life, which is understandable as their quality has been quite poor until the arrival of modern voice recognition and LLMs, then definitely try it and connect your accounts to one. Apple’s new Siri is great and the best in my opinion, but Google’s Gemini is also excellent and well-integrated.

Appendix: Devices are accessories, not for dressing-up.

Modern devices look good. They’re sleek and smooth and you can match them to your wardrobe. However, I much prefer considering the device a subtle tool, and any self-expression should rely on everything else that constitutes you, like clothing and personality and the monthly rotation of Old Spice deodorant.

Yes, it shouldn’t look ugly when you wear it or hold it, but it shouldn’t captivate anybody’s attention either. It exists to provide you information, give others information, and that’s about it. Anything else is fundamentally extraneous to its purpose. In System W, this is reflected by how undisguised and unrevealing the devices end up being. They’re selected for their minimal and unassuming appearances. For example, my “stack” is:

A black iPhone 18 Pro Max, with a black Torras case and a privacy screen protector.
A black Apple Watch Ultra 3, with a black alpine band.
A black MacBook Pro 16-inch, with no gosh darn stickers.
A black iPad Pro 12-inch, with a Magic Keyboard.

Don’t worry, Apple is not a requirement for System W, even though the ecosystem integration makes it easier. For each there are equivalents offered by Google and Samsung. I use Apple because I have a job now and can no longer tolerate the high maintenance of Linux, even though I will still gladly recommend Linux to everybody that cares for privacy and being a nerd.